I’m feeling a bit prickly today and it’s to do with common sense. Really it should underpin all our decisions, yet I see it being totally abandoned all the time. The fascination with formulas, expert-opinion, what the neighbours are doing, trends and hype just seems to muddy people’s brains.
I was talking to a real estate agent yesterday who has a badly designed and fitted shoe-box apartment for sale near here for $1.1 million (or for rent for $4,500pm). It was basically 1000sqft of living space with two bedrooms barely the size of beds and a “kitchenette” that would only be suitable for making coffee and unpacking takeaway foods that formed part of a loungeroom that would put you about 5ft away from your television set.
The price, apparently, is based on the over-inflated price the owner paid for it 8 months or so ago, when there was a great deal of real-estate hysteria going on. At the time there was a deferred payment scheme in place, but now for a lot of people the keys are being handed over and that deferment is coming to an end. The prices of the entire surrounding neighbourhood make it pretty obvious that the apartment is massively overpriced (you can buy or rent something 3 times the size for less), but the logic of the real estate agent is that the price is (logically) based on the owner’s buying price. She didn’t see the leap in common sense in that at all.
I see it happening in my industry as well. Last week I was catching up on Marketing Magazine’s January issue, which tells you how far behind I am in my reading, and I came across an article by James Scanlon, ex CD of Eleven and now relocated to Korea, titled “But It’s Not An Ad”.
Now, I’ve met James. He’s extremely sharp, has a great lateral creative mind and is a really nice, warm, funny person. So I don’t want to flame him, but the whole thing just reeked of taking your “expert reading” too seriously.
He told the story of how he fronted up to a client with his proposal for their next quarter campaign and gave them a totally interactive proposal using 4 online mediums. Then he was totally shocked that the client demanded some traditional advertising in the mix.
How old fashioned and out of touch is this client? According to James, “The old way of reaching customers through ‘advertising’ is on its deathbed, if not dead already. Every single urban person under 40 lives a completely interactive, digital lifestyle. And a great many older than that do too.”
OK, we all work long hours in our wired, theory-charged offices, but you’ve got to get out for a walk James. Take a look around, visit a coffee shop that’s not Starbucks, stroll through a shopping district or your local residential area. Dude, your average under-40 is hardly “completely interactive” and there are so many holes in that theory that you could drain pasta in it.
I think we’ve all read the same trend reports and advertising theory you’re basing your argument on, but common sense dictates otherwise:
- As our “digital lifestyle” has increased, so too has our need to escape it. We like to get out on the weekends, catch a film, check out a gallery. No-one wants to be a slave to youtube.
- We’ve become online snackers of extraordinary speed and discernment. The amount of “input” we receive is now far more than we can realistically handle, and still get 7 hours sleep in the evenings. If someone sends me a link and it doesn’t immediately interest me, I don’t click on it. I breeze over tons of probably perfectly good (and interesting) information every day because it doesn’t directly contribute to what I’m thinking about at that moment. The number of emails I get in the day means I can sum them up and hit the delete or file button in mere seconds. The number of banners I see in a day means I’m pretty much banner-blind. You might think because I’m online a lot that it’s the ideal way to reach me, but unless you’ve got laser accuracy and some pretty exceptional content, you’ve got substantially less chance than a bus-shelter ad, believe me. When I’m online I’m very, very busy.
- Because you want me to “interact” doesn’t mean that I will. If I tried to keep up a blog, myspace profile, facebook profile, friendster profile, contribute to Stomp, live a Second Life, enter “make your own ad” competitions, put all my photos in a Flickr stream, take part in a dozen peer forums for my dozen interests, keep up with my RSS… etc etc, when would I have the time to work, go to the gym, shop for groceries or meet a friend for dinner? Web 2.0 is stunning, we all love it, but again, we’re all very, very busy people. Interacting with your brand could be filed anywhere in that extremely long queue of things I might (or might not) get to.
- We’re all still living First Lives. I commute, I read the newspaper and a few magazines, once in a blue moon I catch a movie on television, occassionally I get OOH (out-of-house). The assumption that all these mediums have ceased to be effective ways to reach me basically ignores the real-world. I’m not alone here. 1.35 million people read the Straits Times every day.
All these points don’t need some kind of esoteric research to realise. Just step out into the real world and apply a bit of common sense. The whole romance of the “totally interactive, digital lifestyle” might come across as some kind of cool trend-leader pitch, and there’s no doubt that the internet is a great medium, opening up all kinds of possibilities for reach and brand interaction. But the truth is, the analog part of our lives are what makes us human, and it’d be a foolish marketer who ignores that.
2 Comments
March 3, 2008 at 6:23 pm
I do love a dose of good old common sense.
Well said Marc.
Sis
April 16, 2008 at 10:08 pm
Hi Marc,
Came across your blog today and was surprised to find an entry all about my Marketing article.
Thank you for the kind words (i.e. “nice, warm, funny person” etc.). Indeed, you may be the first person to claim I was funny. Likewise, I think you are a rakishly charming chap. Pity we never hung out more.
Since you took the time to analyse the article I wrote (and to gently point out what you thought was my lack of common sense), I thought I should explain myself.
Your comments about most people leading hybrid analog/digital lives was quite true. Some people even live totally analog lives. It seems from your analysis that I didn’t make my point very clearly in the article. This is what I meant to say.
In a nutshell, clients can sell things faster, cheaper and make stronger brand connections when they use interactive forms of communication (digital or otherwise).
My client didn’t actually demand a traditional ad solution (print, TV, radio etc). He simply didn’t even understand what a interactive solution was.
Once it was explained to him, he finally bought an interactive idea (that just happened to be digital) and it has been very successful for him. Cheaper too, than any traditional medium could have been. His ROI has been the best he has ever achieved.
The point I was making (perhaps inelegantly, with a poor choice of non-specific words and full of typical advertising exaggeration) is that interactive advertising has now become the most powerful medium available. This can be on a computer, on a mobile phone or on an outdoor digital billboard. It can be done through a website, activation in public spaces or by snail-mail if necessary.
In the past, advertising was a one-way street. The marketer would use a clever idea to say “here’s my product, now buy it”. Great strategy in the days of limited, monolithic mediums. But due to media fragmentation, this way is not effective (i.e. profitable) anymore. Customers respond more powerfully when you have a two-way conversation with them. Some done via a computer, some via a installation in a shopping centre and others in a myriad of interesting ways.
My job involves showing global clients the best way to sell stuff. What I wrote about wasn’t a trend I’d heard of, it was the way I’ve been working for about seven years now. Since the internet is already 15 years old, I was just a bit peeved my client hadn’t availed himself of the latest forms of marketing.
In my defense, I will also add that I only had a day to write that article and I didn’t scrutinise it too closely before I emailed it to Marketing mag. Next time, I will think a bit more before I write.
If I have the sense too, that is.
Suitably chastised,
James
PS: Cool blog.