Doc writes
At some point, mass market advertisers will start conversing with, and relating to, customers. Inevitably, they’ll discover how much more leveraged that is than spraying "messages" at "consumers" through "channels" between "content" that viewers would rather watch without messages.
There are many analyses of big media advertising (will dig up the proper references one day) that have a valuable perspective on this. Here’s how they go, roughly:
Consider the case when you’re watching on TV, and on comes an advertisement for ‘Toothpaste Y’.
Old school thinking:
- Vendor = the company that makes the toothpaste
- Customer = audience watching TV
- Product = Toothpaste Y
- Channel ‘goal’ = entertain the customer, i.e. the audience
New school thinking:
- Vendor = TV station
- Customer = the company that makes the toothpaste
- Product = audience watching TV
- Channel ‘goal’ = maintain the product (the audience!) in a state of readiness
(i.e. the TV station sells ‘advertising eyeballs’ to the toothpaste company, since that’s directly linked to their ‘rate band’ or charge-per-minute advertising costs).
A quick Google search for the quoted string “customer is the product” yields a depressingly large number of hits, but none of the ones I located quickly had the type of analysis I’m referring to.
For better or worse, this thinking forever blots the landscape of how advertisers will coummunicate with customers. Doc is right that they ought to engage in a conversation with us in order to get it right, but first they need to stop thinking of themselves as customers and consumers of ‘eyeball data’.
Technorati Tags: advertising, customer, relationship, CRM, mass.market
