In the book I make the statement that “Apocalyptic pronouncements may make for good REM lyrics and provocative magazine leads, but they have a dismal record when it comes to business forecasting.” What reminds me of this is all the recent clamor about “chaos” in the media world triggered by industry pundit Bob Garfield (whose picture can be found beside the word “strident” in the dictionary, I believe).
But he’s not the only one. I’ve got a file stuffed with articles about “dramatic changes in the world of media.” How VOD is going to send the TV commercial to RIP. How the next great media platform is going to be the screen on my cell phone. How Nielsen is positively pulling its hair out (when it’s not being yanked out by its customers) trying to determine more accurately who is being reached by what commercial message when.
Obviously, with marketers feeling tremendous pressure to deliver measurable results (now that Sarbanes-Oxley has taken the finance department out of that game), they are responding with a vengeance as they usually do:
By completely missing the point.
The fact that there are more ways to reach people than ever before does not necessarily mean they are better ways to reach people. Nor does it alter the basic physics of effective communication. It’s funny, just this week I was reading an article about how it will soon be possible to watch movies or ads on Sony’s PSP game device. However, even the tech-forward guy quoted in the article had to admit the only time he could envision doing so was “if I’m stuck at the airport.”
The point is, the means by which advertisers deliver their messages to whomever whenever will always take a back seat to the quality of the message itself. You can take an ordinary message and beam it 24/7 to a screen laminated to the inside of a consumer’s eyelid and he or she will still find a way to ignore it. Or you can come up with something extraordinary and rest assured consumers will actively seek it out. Frankly, if more CMOs realized this maybe the average tenure in that position wouldn’t be down to 23 months.
We’ve been waiting around for 1,900 years since St. John first suggested something apocalyptic was heading our way and I have a hunch we may be waiting another millenium or two. As for the world of media and marketing communications, “plus ca change, plus la meme chose” has yet to fail me. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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