Global advertising spend is predicted to exceed $700bn within 3 years. But there’s unrest among the big spenders: they know that their most valuable communications targets are decreasingly accessible to mass techniques , while increasingly concealed behind personal and tribal “firewalls” of digitally-managed preferences . The affluent modern consumer controls the game of media.
The scene is complicated further by the rapid “tribalising” of the networked consumer. Increasingly the most important cultural influencers in the lives of consumers are not state, church or any other recognised authority – they are … each other. So digital tools and media, far from being new and open channels for marketers, help active tribes of consumers form barriers – firewalls – of taste and relevance around themselves that filter and block almost all unwanted communications.
How did brand communications become “unwanted”?
Traditionally, advertisers have been concerned with eyeballs. The key metrics of Reach (number of key consumers touched by brand messaging) and Frequency (number of times per consumer such impacts have occurred) until very recently dominated marketing ROI .
And in a commercial and cultural context – The Golden Age of TV – where media were scarce (think of the Morecambe and Wise Xmas show’s legendary command of audience figures) and attention was plentiful, this performed more than adequately.
But the crucial impact of the digital revolution, in media and marketing terms, has been the dramatic reversal of this comfortable equation: while media (think YouTube and the rest) are now more than plentiful, consumer attention has become not just cripplingly scarce – it’s become arguably the single most value commodity in the world.
The result of this accelerating realisation, is that the world’s biggest advertisers are looking hard at ways to move their enormous investments out of traditional brand communications, and into places where the consumer attention is more plentiful, and genuine ROI – in the form of authentic engagement with valuable consumers – is both achievable and measurable.
In other words … how do you get “behind the line”?
This challenge is best met in the user-led tribal environments that loom so large in today’s online consumer culture: blogs, forums, wikis and social media sites.
The most advanced marcomms thinking is also waking up to the – previously heretical – realisation that intelligently-treated inbound spontaneous messaging from the consumer (and also among and between consumers in tribes) is ultimately of far more commercial value, than unwanted outbound brand messaging.
Most fundamentally, the thinking of brand advertisers must move beyond focusing on the successes or failures of the past (“retro-metrics” of previous campaigns) to the future, planning not just communications, but product and service offerings that will meet the capricious consumer where their declared and now understood intentions tell us they’re heading: the future.
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