Regular Brands and Regular Marketers

It’s a fairly regular occurrence that I, at aged 43, am 15 years older than the rest of the room in a digital marketing meeting. 10 years older is almost a given. Mind you, I am not complaining. What strikes me about this is that digital marketing and especially digital marketing buzz are driven by some very bright and very young people.

It’s also amazing what a difference those 15 years make in your perspective of what matters. I come from a different world than many of the people who have pioneered digital. For one, I’ve spent most of my career marketing giant brands. I got into digital about 8 years ago and had to learn a whole new world. Digital has largely been driven by smaller companies, at least until about the last 18 months or so.

What you’ve done in your past affects what you do now.

I really value the perspectives of these very bright gen ys. But the flip side is that those of us who remember Brady Bunch in first run also have some perspective that the digital CW would do well to consider. Ideas like:

1. That for most brands, a marketing vehicle becomes important not when it is a gleam in the eye of the founder but rather when 3 or 30 million people are using it.
2. That if a little more than 80% of the world’s stuff is purchased BY WOMEN, it makes sense to create digital environments that aren’t solely showcases for thrasher videos or teens falling out of their tops. That violence and porn and sarcasm will not be the lifeblood of digital going forward.
3. That a marketing vehicle is worth consideration AFTER it has figured out a way to…market things in a consumer acceptable way, not BEFORE.
4. That consumer control is a critical consideration in the digital space, but so is giving marketers some real value for their money. If we care solely for what people say they want, we’ve got a bit of a problem. Because what they want is everything, for free.
5. That the long tail of the consumer tadpole is important, but so is the big blob of consumers at the front of the tail.
6. That teens and young adults are very valuable consumers and deserve our attention, but so are boomers and seniors who have more bucks to spend.
7. That brands that are concerned about the content of the pages on which their messages appear aren’t prudes or killjoys. They just care about the content that their dollars are paying for.

There are many excellent commentators telling us what the latest is in digital, and what it may mean. That is absolutely critical in a time when our environment changes so quickly and what works can evolve rather rapidly. I work with a couple of guys that are truly first rate at seeing trends before they happen. I am always amazed by what they see.

But there’s also room for others in digital. People who can focus and say, THESE are the things that can make a difference for my brand today. We’re not all innovators, either as marketers or as consumers.

Most brands are not aimed at the innovators, and wouldn't be well served by an innovator digital marketing approach. Rather its appeal is for the broad majority of people who aren’t among the 170 people who are the first to do anything digital.

For those kinds of brands, it’s critical to separate the gold from the pyrite, to identify the digital platforms, technologies, ideas, and companies that offer stuff that regular people are going to use. In this environment, it’s just as important to put things on the back burner, to wait and see at times and focus on the stuff that will make a difference.

I say this because it is so easy to get completely overwhelmed by digital. There is typically a day or two a month when I look at the 35 newsletters in my inbox and think, “oh, good Lord, when will it stop?” The answer is that it won’t for the foreseeable future. But in times like these, it’s important to figure out what is going to matter. What’s going to help you move 80,000 extra cases this quarter, or lower your CPA by 15%,. Or what’s going to really pop the awareness levels of your new product.

As always, we need to figure out what the “on” buttons are for our brands. What moves the needle in significant ways. The alternatives are to do everything digital, which is impossible and a big waste of time, to do what’s hot, which will put you in a lot of flash-in-the-pan opps, or to do nothing, which is perhaps tempting but you might as well end your career now if you go that route.

So what is going to be an “on” button for your brand? I can’t tell you, of course, because I don’t know what brand is yours. But, for most brands, I think we can agree that it will probably have something to do with most of the following:

1. Blogs: My best friend’s GRANDMOTHER has a daily blog. Nuff said
2. Social Networks: MySpace has roughly 60 million monthly users. Facebook 20 million. The average age of MySpace users is over 30. American Idol is scoring roughly 30 million a night. So MySpace is reaching more people than Idol. How’s that for relevance!
3. Video: Pew says ¾ of broadband users are consuming online video. And people seem to be pretty chill about pre-roll ads. Also, we’re seeing more and more overlay ads on YouTube, so that nut is getting cracked as well.
4. Mobile: Roughly 4 in 10 mobile subscribers use text, but the figure climbs to 8 in 10 among teens. Rates are even higher among Asians, African Americans, and Latinos. While industry observers have been heralding every year as the year that mobile will really take off in the US, some year they are going to be right. I am guessing 2009.
5. Gaming: If your target is young and male, they play console games. If middle aged and female, they play casual games on sites like Pogo. Nearly everyone games, and spends a lot of time doing it.
6. Widgets: I have seen such a broad range of stats on widget use that I hesitate to list a single figure. But leading researchers put penetration above 50% of wired users. That’s a lot of eyeballs.

My focus in this blog is going to be on stuff that matters now. It won’t be the place to read about the latest whizbangery. It’ll be a place where, if I do my job, we’ll talk about the things that are proving out and deserve the attention of brands for regular people.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to write.