I am beginning to realise that digitally-raised 20-somethings in the marketing industry today regard its traditional core values and structure as about as meaningful as musket practice Helmand, Afghanistan. Start talking about creative integrity, or the established rules of good typesetting or of ‘above and below the line campaigns’ and, even if they’re not rude enough to say it, what they’ll all be thinking is “stupid, irrelevant old fart”. Worse, in large part, I think they might be right.
The hierarchy of ‘Big Advertising’ continues its struggle to reflect its heyday, when visually-led creatives ruled the roost, churning out massively profitable campaigns for Big TV and Big National Press. These campaigns were so high profile and their creators so amply rewarded by massive media commissions that everything else the client wanted was willingly passed over, dismissed as suitable for (hold your nose) ‘sales promotion agencies’. The very name given to this sector, whose campaigns – using special offers, coupons and gifts – more directly link expenditure with sales, reeks of our disdain for selling. In doing so, it also betrays Big Advertising’s historic real view of its work, regardless of what might have been said about wanting to shift more product: its art, darling. Did Ken Russell really care about the client’s ROI when he made TV commercials? Of course not. What he wanted was the praise of his peers, heaps of it, and the movie contracts he subsequently got.
Today, though, the visually-led days of beautiful, oh-so-clever campaigns are closing in, fast, overshadowed and overtaken by a storm of anti-creative Google Adwords, search engine optimisation-driven text, rough quality viral YouTube video clips and hyperlinked, socially networked, profile “mashed” analyses. Forget design and gloss, this is about content, speed, niche identification, multiple landing pages and, above all, conversion. Conversion of profile into visitor traffic, visitors into named contacts (“community”), contacts into leads, leads into sales. Drop what isn’t working, pump more into what is. No art, just cash in, sales out.
Which, of course, is all the client wanted in the first place.
In a business services environment, is this such a bad thing anyway? It means that marketing professionals have to focus intensely upon the meat of the offering and its relevance to the potential clients. It means more direct feedback (through search words, click through rates etc) on what people in the target markets want, are interested in and thinking about. It means marketing becoming a ‘grown up’ part of the invent/make/sell cycle that is so vital to every thriving, evolving business. In short, creative marketing becomes not some bolt-on that exists to flog pre-determined product, but an inherent part of delivering and developing ever-better services and communicating them in more efficient, interesting and relevant ways.
©Michael Taite June 2009
The invent/make/sell cycle is an intrinsic part of the methodology of Work Structuring Limited.
