Over a career in marketing reaching back to the near-sepia toned world of database marketing through the birth of the digital web and into the emergent power house channels of search, social and now mobile, I’ve worked inside, outside and alongside several of the big holding company networks.
Excitedly, I bear witness - along with most of you reading this here - to the dawning of the current era, the post digital epoch, if you'll allow me the hyperbole. An era of marketing emerging from the dust settling uneasily upon the tried, true and now waning artifacts of what we all once thrillingly referred to as simply "digital".
RIP, I say. What now?...
Excitedly, I bear witness - along with most of you reading this here - to the dawning of the current era, the post digital epoch, if you'll allow me the hyperbole. An era of marketing emerging from the dust settling uneasily upon the tried, true and now waning artifacts of what we all once thrillingly referred to as simply "digital".
RIP, I say. What now?...
For the past year, at my agency on Madison Avenue, we have been working to build something fairly innovative --- an experience marketing practice. We call it experience marketing for a simple reason: it is a method for designing, developing and optimizing brand marketing with an obsessive focus on the consumer behavioral experience. The goal is to make everything else – brand, messaging, offer, touchpoint, media and channel – subservient to this optimal human experience.
What some traditional planners and creatives may view as heresy, we take as abiding first principles: refine your target, identify the need states, model the use case, engineer the desired behaviors and optimize for discreet behavioral outcomes.
I’ll be the first to admit one of our challenges is the name and the time and energy it takes to simply convey what we’re about and how we go about it. Frankly, the more we develop these new tools - composite profiles, experience architectures and touchpoint models – the more I have come to view these approaches as simply new marketing.
At the heart of this new marketing lies a central insight - one which suggests brands must rethink how they encounter and engage with consumers. It’s an insight which has lead me to the sobering conclusion that humans have seriously outrun brands and marketers when it comes to these decreasingly traditional points of intersections where human plus brand encounters and engagement occur.
The insight is best expressed as a slightly clumsy but telling single word: mobilityness.
I don’t mean “mobile” although of course the emerging importance of the mobile touchpoint and channel for our branded messages and campaigns is the most historically important change in marketing science since search. It’s rather richer than that, this mobilityness insight…
- Mobilityness describes the irrevocably altered dynamic for the how, when, where, why and what of our planned brand communications.
- Mobilityness describes the way a human feels as we shift seamlessly between research, info seeking into a discovery, referral and purchase event.
- Mobilityness describes the operating conceit we all now enjoy which says I should be able to access anything I want or need whenever and wherever I want or need it.
- Mobilityness describes the nature of branded content when it is socialized by users and recontextualized for fresh discovery.
- Mobilityness describes the core principles driving our integrated 4-screen planning and optimization of branded rich media and video content.
- Mobilityness describes the immense challenge traditional media planners have in addressing a given target with any specific certainty for a particular message or brand frequency.
- Mobilityness describes the equally immense opportunities presented to new marketing (aka experience) planners and creatives who become adept at engineering and optimizing organic brand+human experience architectures.
We will be losing the essential battle for attention, attraction, engagement and loyalty with the current and coming generation of potential consumers of our brands, products and services.
After spending the past two years developing a nascent set of tools and approaches to support a more integrated, organic, behavioral marketing I can attest to its trickiness. We don’t pretend to have figured out how to precisely test and balance the right mix of organic marketing with purchased media and messages. We certainly have cracked the code on prying loose sufficient test budgets to fully refine these new activation experiences. And we remain frustratingly far from achieving the perfect storm of strategy, creative and channel / touchpoint mix which approaches the nirvana state of efficiency for driving measurable value though and from our advertising channels.
But we know it’s achievable, we’ve commenced the project and there is progress to report. In coming posts I'll be sharing live cases from the work we are doing in our network as well as observed examples plucked from the interwebs, airwaves and tradeshow circuits from esteemed colleagues and competitors alike.
What are we trying to prove? It’s a fair and telling question. Honestly, I think the answer is quite simple, and not a little alarming --- it is becoming clear that the types of brand messages, impressions and campaigns we continue to build and support with brand dollars are increasingly invisible to humans and driving less and less real, long-term value for our brands’ franchises. The consumer has changed. The channels have changed. The behaviors have changed. Our brands have changed.
It’s time our marketing caught up. And make no mistake – it is a race: in addition to the unseen clock, each of our brand’s have one or more competitors currently angling to get there first. My strong hunch is that we're all going to need a whole lot of mobilityness to keep up.
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