The Ages of Marketing
Having spent the better part of my career as a marketer, I recently took a long look at the history of marketing, its evolution and its future. Where is all of this going?
I simplified the discussion into three distinct ages illustrated above: The Mad Men Age, The Digital Age and the future as I see it, The Immersion Age.
The Mad Men Age (to borrow from the wildly popular television program) was the age of creative persuasion. Ad agencies and marketing teams devised campaigns that pushed a message to a consumer, all consumers. As David Ogilvy put it, “Advertising is the business of words”. The media was print and broadcast. But it was a one-way method, you only knew the results much later when sales either moved…or not. During the Mad Men Age, public relations, media relations and publicity took the form of story pitches to well defined media. Theoretically you could reach a specific demographic by the selection of that media but by and large much of the media was fairly mainstream, including multiple demographics. The metrics that were available to marketers were sometimes vague, sometimes nonexistent. Terms like brand awareness, CPM became part of our vocabulary for discussing the effectiveness of marketing in the board room. Marketing in this era was a shotgun approach, we fired the metaphorical shotgun in the air and hoped that the bird flew through the shot.
Its an oversimplification to say that The Digital Age followed but for the purposes of my post I am. The Digital Age began as the Internet evolved for everyone. Websites were first; they were designed and built with limited technological features and worked much the same was a tv ad or billboard. They pushed words and later pictures and video information to a customer, now referred to as a user. As the age advanced other tools such as CRM/email marketing, search and display advertising, SEO, and then social media continued to change the landscape. Public relations while still important began to be supplanted by social media…the consumer had a voice and they began to speak. With the connectedness of things came data. That data was big and it began to shape strategy. Suddenly we were speaking more about conversion than brand awareness. Advertising lingo was augmented by geek speak. With technology came very precise measures, more than anyone could ever use. Laser targeting became the adopted buzzword since it was measurably more precise than the advertising models of the earlier age.
So what is next? From my perspective it is the Immersion Age. The age that will mark the convergence of everything prior. In the Immersion Age, smart brands connect directly in a two-way dialogue with their consumers without intermediaries. But its not around the simple product or service, it is truly dialogue about topics that are simultaneously relevant and interesting to both of them. Smart brands will become their own networks ~ creating and distributing their own high quality content. Content that is both engaging and interesting to their customers. By the same token the customer will engage the brand ~ contributing, consuming and engaging with the brands content. Social media becomes a conduit rather than a like or follow button. It becomes part of the network within which the brand and the consumer speak to each other. It is the air wave. As with the Digital Age, the measures are precise, the brand knows instantly what is popular and important with its engaged consumers, it knows what they know, what they like, what they share. It provides more of that as it deepens that relationship. They genuinely like each other. Two-way laser targeting between the brand and the individual consumer, actively pointing at each other.
The platforms and strategies that will define the Immersion Age are yet to be fully deployed but we are not that far away. Convergence is already happening. Brands are thinking about content while consumers seek it. Consumers understand online media while brands are beginning to understand how to harness it. David Ogilvy may have predicted this future, “What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising”.
