It is really very simple. Instead of Madison Avenue trying to figure out how
Advertisers target video iPod users they should figure out how to let
consumers target products.
After all that graffiti-like, drive-by style, in-your-face, marketing is what they used the
last century on:
- newspapers
- radio (audio spraying)
- television
- DVDs
- billboards
- streets - something advertisers do get fined for, by the way
- sides of buildings - something people get arrested for
Well, spraying ads on iPods is
not very effective - nor very appreciated. Nor
necessary. Really, it's not.
After all, when you pick up the phone, would
you tolerate hearing an ad out of the blue when you call a relative or call in during an emergency? No, not at all.
Nevertheless, the telephone is one of the most effective sales tools around. People use phones every day to:
- buy products
- compare products
- request information about a product they might want to buy
- let vendors know how they feel about a new product or change to an existing product
- report broken/defective product
- get technical support for a product they own
- thank manufacturer for product or vendor for service
People get the number of a company from packaging, directory assistance, an ad in a magazine (bet fewer people are reading anything in print these days), or their phone book - and they call it. Then they interact.
These days people can find a company's contact information online. In many though surely not all cases they can even contact them right then.
What advertisers should be figuring out is
not how to use a shotgun (or spray can) approach to marketing. They should be figuring out how to centralize, organize, catalog, index, and promote products at a central facility. Someplace virtual.
Someplace that people can get to in seconds, make their desires known, and if they want get assistance from a human or automated agent. Things that are of special interest because they are new products, or novel products that fit what that person often likes to buy, could be located quickly too.
In a sense, that is exactly what Amazon is doing. And they monetize their efforts at building that site buy actually selling the products right then.
But Amazon does not sell everything. They do not have information on every product made. There are lots of
services Amazon does not sell. I cannot think of any at the moment they sell to consumers, in fact.
Probably the money companies pay on hit-or-miss ads that actually take a way from the time consumers have to spend buying and using up products and services could be better spent in a lot of cases.
Say "what if?". What if someone created a repository of all that product and service information, funded by whatever amount of everyone's advertising budget was more cost effectively spent that way than on scattershot ads? What if people
decided to go there when they "wanted something"?
I may be wrong.
Fifteen years ago, in 1990 I started the humorous convention of adding -age to different words to mean "more than a lot of, or more than enough of". I got the idea from the English word "tonnage" and a few others that similarly used that suffix. A couple years later, in the early 1990s, I used it in a sentence on AOL. They asked me what I meant, and I explained it to them and the general use of the idiom I had made up; my intentional corruption of the language.
Also, one of my friends who used to be in the movie business met the two Corys (Haim and Feldman) while they were shooting a movie somewhere in the early 1990s. I think it was in North Carolina. He probably mentioned it to one or both of them.
A couple years later, I was watching a movie on TV and I saw Cory Feldman say a line in a movie that was something like "Hey, babages - how is it going." I was like, "Hey, that's my word!". I always pronounced it "babage" though, because putting an S on the end was redundant, but yeah, "babage" was the word I made up I used all the time with my friends years earlier back in 1990 and 1991.
The point is: if an idea is good and it fits the world then it sticks and it
propagates. There was a need for a more looser, more expressive slang and it fit - so it
spread.
It was more efficient and carried more impact than the two sentences of expression/explanation it expressed. I used the word, and if someone did not know what it meant, they asked - after that, they did not need to ask again. Not only that, more of them started using it themselves.
Thus a word, a convention, an idiom, or perhaps even a useful corruption of the language is born. A better form of communication begins. Probably that thought is as horrifying to a professional linguist as what I am suggesting about advertising is to a professional marketeer.
A few years after I started using various "-age" words I had coined, you started hearing the word "slayage" and a lot of other "-age" words on Buffy: The Vampire Slayer TV series.
Did the etymology of that word trace back to me? Was I its parent in the popular culture? I dunno. The timing and the coincidences fit enough to make it possible. Could someone else have come up with the same thing? Sure, but the word "tonnage" has been on the English for a long time. Coining words and inventing new idioms is done all the time.
Personally, I think I am that word's daddy but there is no way to say for sure. One thing that can be said for sure is, it is out there and so are the rules I made up for inventing more like that word. It popped into culture and it is enshrined in a lot of TV shows and a movie or two.
Almost fifteen years ago I said on AOL that someone should sell music on the Internet. I wasn't wrong then.
Maybe it is time for a new idiom in western marketing. Maybe you don't make it impossible to avoid your ads.
Maybe you just make it very, very easy for them to get all the information about the product when they are looking for something to satisfy a need it satisfies. It sounds like it is practically the same thing as the saturation advertising we have today but it is not. It sounds like it lacks perceived benefits of coating the environment and media with ads but maybe they are not as beneficial as making the product/service information much more accessible than it is now.
Look at it this way. Every day, people go to Apple's QuickTime movie trailer site and they spend 30-60 seconds or even more watching a trailer to a movie because they wanted to see that ad. They tracked that ad down, not by going through an ad link but knowing they could probably see it at Apple's movie (or game) trailer site - and they watched it They watched it willingly and, in most cases, gratefully.
Every day, people choose to leave the Library screen of their music collection in Apple's iTunes, and they go to the Apple Store. Why?
To find out what songs are out by their favorite artist, what 99 cent tune fits their current mood or would make the perfect gift for a friend - and they buy it, on the spot.
Those songs are not produced by Apple. And the point is not that Apple sells them. The point is that they can be put some place that is easy to get to and makes them easy to search and browse through swiftly and effortlessly. When you look at the iTunes store - don't see a retailer or a brand. Just see it for what it is - a convenience, an organized collection, something as streamlined as it could be.
That is the next marketing paradigm. And it is so, so obvious.
Damn spam. Do it right, man.
The guy who does it right it going to make ten billion dollars.
It an ad is that compelling, useful, informative or innovative - let the consumer pull it (the show, the documentation, the specs, the nutrition information, the ingredients, the images from the packaging, the product announcement, the speeches, the testimonials).
Do not push any of it on them. Make it easy, legal, fast, and convenient for him to take it with him on his iPod. And the same for giving it to his friends - let marketing be viral - just like the babage/slayage meme. And let reviewers and product evangelists and user group members and anyone else who is enthusiastic or even critical of it point to the same place.
Because that is what the point is - direct attention of interested people toward your product information and the "connection" with the consumer that results when they come to it of their own free will and desire. Not because they were coerced or forced. Because they were encouraged and they mostly already felt like it before it was pointed out to them.
At the end of the day, it is not how much advertising you push on people. It is how much product and service they pull from you.
Nothing else matters.Technorati Tags:
advertising, ipod
