It’s Not Your Mother’s Marketing; Can you say Marketing Revolution?

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With over 1.6 billion people online marketing has forever changed. Can you say Revolution?

Over the course of the next 15 weeks I will be teaching an Integrated Marketing Communications class at Northwest College. I’ve decided to post my class curriculum or most of it here on my blog every Friday through December. Comment, add information, correct me. Let’s stay curious and learn together.

So the course begins with a basic primer on the current reality of Marketing and Communications….

What is marketing anyways?

Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association (AMA) as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” [3] The term developed from the original meaning which referred literally to going to a market to buy or sell goods or services.

So how has Marketing Changed?

No, Marketing is not solely advertising/promotion and it has not become social media. And no, social media is not integrated marketing communications.

Marketing has gone integrated it’s now a holistic practice utilizing all available strategies and tools to create and connect products and services with consumers. The marketing mix includes product/service innovation/creation, distribution; connecting buyers and sellers and pricing; value. Integrated Marketing Communications is not Marketing. It’s the communication element within the marketing discipline. And integrated marketing communications is a multi channel approach at communicating which involves traditional communication channels and new digital channels.

In this new connected 24/7 world sales and marketing are becoming more and more similar. And everything is becoming measurable…both offline and online strategies and tactics.

so yeah, it’s not your mothers marketing since back when your mother was marketing there weren’t 2.4 billion people (34.3% of the population) online . For more information check out these two posts; Advertising is dead meet reviewral or Promotion it’s now; engaged, tribal storytelling.

The verbage is a tad confusing as everything continues to evolve- but the key thing to remember is there’s a revolution afoot! And with it an entirely new sales/marketing eco-system is evolving. The revolution currently looks like this:

Can you say Revolution? The Beatles type. Only bigger.

Consumers are the Marketing Department.

They are the media. Sure, they use to be the audience..that was then! Understanding consumers, consumer insights drive effective social integrated marketing. Because as always everything begins and ends with the client, consumer. Who are they, where are they, what are their preferences, pain points, questions, problems?

Jay Rosen’s We Are The People written in JUNE 27, 2006 identifies the shift that underlies the current online/digital social business revolution. Here’s his article in it’s entirety

The People Formerly Known as the Audience. That’s what I call them. Recently I received this statement.

The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about.

Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak— to the world, as it were.

Now we understand that met with ringing statements like these many media people want to cry out in the name of reason herself: If all would speak who shall be left to listen? Can you at least tell us that?

The people formerly known as the audience do not believe this problem—too many speakers!—is our problem. Now for anyone in your circle still wondering who we are, a formal definition might go like this:

The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

  • Once they were your printing presses; now that humble device, the blog, has given the press to us. That’s why blogs have been called little First Amendment machines. They extend freedom of the press to more actors.
  • Once it was your radio station, broadcasting on your frequency. Now that brilliant invention, podcasting , gives radio to us. And we have found more uses for it than you did.
  • Shooting, editing and distributing video once belonged to you, Big Media. Only you could afford to reach a TV audience built in your own image. Now video is coming into the user’s hands, and audience-building by former members of the audience is alive and well on the Web.
  • You were once (exclusively) the editors of the news, choosing what ran on the front page. Now we can edit the news, and our choices send items to our own front pages.
  • A highly centralized media system had connected people “up” to big social agencies and centers of power but not “across” to each other. Now the horizontal flow, citizen-to-citizen, is as real and consequential as the vertical one.

The “former audience” is Dan Gillmor’s term for us. (He’s one of our discoverers and champions .) It refers to the owners and operators of tools that were one exclusively used by media people to capture and hold their attention.

Jeff Jarvis, a former media executive, has written a law about us. “Give the people control of media, they will use it. The corollary: Don’t give the people control of media, and you will lose. Whenever citizens can exercise control, they will.”

Look, media people. We are still perfectly content to listen to our radios while driving, sit passively in the darkness of the local multiplex, watch TV while motionless and glassy-eyed in bed, and read silently to ourselves as we always have.

Should we attend the theatre, we are unlikely to storm the stage for purposes of putting on our own production. We feel there is nothing wrong with old style, one-way, top-down media consumption. Big Media pleasures will not be denied us. You provide them, we’ll consume them and you can have yourselves a nice little business.

But we’re not on your clock any more. Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press, has explained this to his people. “The users are deciding what the point of their engagement will be — what application, what device, what time, what place.”

We graduate from wanting media when we want it, to wanting it without the filler, to wanting media to be way better than it is, to publishing and broadcasting ourselves when it meets a need or sounds like fun.

Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, has a term for us: The Active Audience (“who doesn’t want to just sit there but to take part, debate, create, communicate, share.”)

Another of your big shots, Rupert Murdoch, told American newspaper editors about us: “They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.”

Dave Winer, one of the founders of blogging, said it back in 1994: “Once the users take control, they never give it back.”

Online, we tend to form user communities around our favorite spaces. Tom Glocer, head of your Reuters, recognized it: “If you want to attract a community around you, you must offer them something original and of a quality that they can react to and incorporate in their creative work.”

We think you’re getting the idea, media people. If not from us, then from your own kind describing the same shifts.

The people formerly known as the audience would like to say a special word to those working in the media who, in the intensity of their commercial vision, had taken to calling us “eyeballs,” as in: “There is always a new challenge coming along for the eyeballs of our customers.” ( John Fithian , president of the National Association of Theater Owners in the U.S.)

Or: “We already own the eyeballs on the television screen. We want to make sure we own the eyeballs on the computer screen.” ( Ann Kirschner , vice president for programming and media development for the National Football League.)

Fithian, Kirschner and company should know that such fantastic delusions (“we own the eyeballs…”) were the historical products of a media system that gave its operators an exaggerated sense of their own power and mastery over others. New media is undoing all that, which makes us smile.

You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us.

The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we’re here.

In case you’re still not sure about all this let me repeat. The internet has democratized publishing. It has armed every person with a computer with the tools to create, edit, publish, engage, share and influence. If you missed the Clue Train Manifesto it was written in 1999. Here is a link and an excerpt of the 95 theses the Clue Train Manifesto outlines for businesses operating in the new connected marketplace. The manifesto was written by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. click here to go to the entire document.

Online Markets…

Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations.

…People of Earth

The sky is open to the stars. Clouds roll over us night and day. Oceans rise and fall. Whatever you may have heard, this is our world, our place to be. Whatever you’ve been told, our flags fly free. Our heart goes on forever. People of Earth, remember.
95 Theses
Signers & Comments

  1. Markets are conversations.
  2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
  3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
  4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
  5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice

People are the Media. Digital Marketer extraordinaire, Eric Weaver captures the current Integrated Marketing Communications REALITY in this presentation.

People are the Media (DDB Edmonton Edition)

View more presentations from Eric Weaver.

So what does integrated marketing communications look like? More like what does it smell like. Take a look at this brilliant integrated communications campaign designed for Old Spice. And to get more details take a look at The Man Your Man Could Smell Like; Harnessing Reviewal, Engagement, Tribal Storytelling….

Now let’s wrap this integrated marketing communications primer up with a few tunes. Beatles anyone? Think revolution. Think outside the box. It’s not your mother’s marketing….

Pam Hoelzle

Marketer. Teacher. Curious One!

Seattle Business Consultant

425 218 5864

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