Marketing...floundering Around in the Shallows!

There is a crisis at the very heart of marketing.   There have been some very interesting studies on the wisdom of the crowds.   It turns out that they are almost intuitively right.
More and more evidence emerges that Marketing flounders around seeking opportunities for their increasingly irrelevant advertisements. However and despite all these efforts broadcast TV ads are increasingly DVR-ed into irrelevance, advertisers are scrambling to find the most effective, form of media/advertising
Weekend destination
It now appears that advertising at the movies makes sense when you consider 70% of all box office tickets are sold on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, when retailers' biggest weekend sales are being held.
But cinema has also emerged as a scalable place for marketers to supplement their TV buys or, in some cases, replaces them entirely.
Frankly they are really just playing with other vehicles, That's not to say they'll never do TV again, they're really just experimenting. They believe that the brand needs to be represented by sight, sound and motion, and we're trying out different ways to put that in front of the consumer."
Watch till you shop
Advertisers are particularly drawn to cinema's ability to combine TV-esque video advertising with a coupon give-away offering customers 15% or 20% off their next purchase, all in one place.   Many theatres reside in the same malls where major retailers exist.
It's a great way to bring the two together, as opposed to doing separate promotional offers. When you're watching a commercial on TV you don't necessarily have that immediate opportunity to drive sales. This is a way of combining two things we believe in: the call to action to get people in stores and the experience of what the brand represents."
Cinema advertising increased 18.5% in 2007 to $539.5 million, fuelled by categories like retail, travel, package goods and automotive. Cinema has become especially appealing to retailers in recent years because of its proximity to their stores, making brand recall generally three to four times higher than that of TV. ."
Supplement, not replacement
Media buyers are also starting to buy cinema more diagnostically, as evidenced by MediaVest's attempt to shift as much as $100 million in TV dollars for clients like Procter & Gamble, Kraft and Coca-Cola into cinema last January. MediaVest was only able to commit $20 million to $30 million by June, but vowed to increase that in 2009. Now, beginning with fourth-quarter 2008, the Group M agencies -- Mediaedge:cia, MediaCom and Mindshare -- have become the first to move their cinema buying groups from out-of-home into TV, to better help clients identify national video distribution opportunities on TV, in digital out-of-home and in web video.
In these days of floundering around Marketing Clients need someone that can look broadly at  other options, as opposed to sitting in these specialty units wondering who's going to integrate them.
Meanwhile whilst Advertising flounders around trying to persuade advertisers to waste even more money on the Internet yet more evidence emerges to the fact that the Internet isn't really a suitable advertising medium at all.
A new study from Yahoo Europe claims that British surfers are suffering from a surfeit of information, so much so, that they deliberately screen-out irrelevant messages.
Eighty per cent of respondents consciously disregard the tsunami of irrelevance that bombards them via their computer screens, avers the search portal – an unhappy situation it implies it can overcome by better targeting. With pressures increasing both at work and home, respondents say they have less free time. So when online they want to be as efficient at possible.
A large majority of web-users (79%) demand something of value in return for heeding ads, whether that 'something' is pure entertainment, a relevant message or access to learning something new.
Says  Yahoo Europe's vp of marketing  Kristof Fahy: "Consumers are overwhelmed with the constant flow of information they receive on a daily basis.
"So businesses need to convince them of the relevance of their messages in order to gain their attention. This means that on line marketers need to think hard how to better target and engage with their time-poor audiences."
Forget the current Banking crisis…The biggest scam is  still to be exposed!
As you will already have ascertained, it is our view that current, conventional advertising has been beset with problems from the very beginnings. Probably the principal problem advertising has is  …accountability. Or rather the lack of it! As we have said before, the real differences that exist between competing products is frequently perceived as no longer significant.
The result is that it is not self evident just what an advertiser has to sell that is so different and worthy of consideration.
Therefore, if no significant point of difference is apparent, why is that product more deserving of the customer’s money than any other?
It was partially because of this that we have seen a dramatic rise in the acceptance of own-label products and now services, in this country as elsewhere.
Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda and so on, all developed their own-label offerings and the manufacturers, along with their agencies observing on the sidelines, sat back and let them do it.
In some cases they were complicit in doing so.
Now own-label has become so acceptable to consumers that they not only cover grocery products and with a differentiation between value and premium, the brand extensions encompass, motor insurance, home insurance, life cover and a multitude of offers that did not exist only a few years ago.
And it is unlikely to stop there. Sainsbury’s have at the time of writing, announced plans to enter the scratch card market as a rival to Camelot, despite being an outlet for the purchase of the latter’s own scratch cards.
It is also interesting to note that we are now subjected to messages that not only extol the virtues of branded products, they even go so far as to make a point that certain companies do not make own-label, to justify their premium pricing.
You have to take your hat off to the ad man who came up with that little gem of building a campaign out of that one.
The human desire for interaction.
If interactive communication had been put into everyday practice then billions of pounds and dollars would never have been poured down the black hole of television advertising!
So let’s review that desire in terms of the marketing of products and, at the same time, hope that those people working in or with advertising agencies read this simple lesson and learn a little of what they should have already known and been doing on behalf of their clients.
All advertising is a form of learning whereby the advertiser is asking people to change their behavior after learning the benefits of the products or services on offer. However, we all tend to filter out information, which we do not want to hear. This clearly alters the effectiveness of conventional advertising in quite a dramatic way.
The final purchase decision is invariably a compromise and this leads to a certain amount of anxiety; the worry that perhaps the decision was not the best or the right one.  In order to minimize this anxiety the purchaser seeks to reinforce their choice and begins to take more notice of their chosen product’s marketing communications.
Due to a lack of understanding of the communication process we have created a media society during the past 40 or 50 years, where the whole process has been de-humanized.
In the past there was an extraordinary reduction in interaction because conventional advertising and marketing have become a one-way practice whereby information is disseminated in a passive form. But, people still have this desire to be taken account of. To affect change, to learn and personalize their relationship with their environment.   There are a phenomenal number of reasons that cause people to interact, going far beyond just giving them things.When people agree to participate in truly interactive marketing programmes they are told that their efforts and feedback are of positive help to the advertisers.
And most important to the advertisers, by participating and becoming involved, they then learn and understand the advertising message and do so at their own pace and to fit in with their schedule.
Consequently, because they are being involved in the process of developing the product or service, it starts to re- personalize their relationship with the advertiser and their products.
This takes the consumer through the barrier of not wanting to address change and takes that compromise, the anxiety and worry that perhaps the decision was not the best or the right one, out of the equation. In other words, there is no reason why they should not change from their usual brand in favor of this alternative that they have now learned, fulfils their needs better.