1.3 The Technology Revolution

It wasn’t that long ago that “social network” was the term that described a group of folks who get together at church to knit quilts on Saturday mornings. Your grandparents remember when there were only three television networks, and the most technologically advanced piece of home electronics was a VCR.

Now social networks mean Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Twitch, Pinterest, Etsy, and countless affinity groups. Cable, satellite providers, and streaming services have diluted TV advertising effectiveness, bringing over 200 channels into homes specialized in everything from sports to history to home improvement.

This carving of the audience into small niches is helpful in some cases if you’re selling a very targeted product to a specific audience—like Wayfair.com promoting on home improvement shows. However, this audience fragmentation poses a problem in reaching large swaths of consumers far and wide.

YouTube and several streaming services like Hulu and Paramount+ compound the problem of targeted TV advertising by allowing users to purchase their way out of watching ads. They do this through tiered pricing. For example, you can subscribe to Paramount+ for $4.99 a month with commercials or pay $9.99 a month to watch commercial-free.

We can now access video content anywhere, anytime. In June 2017, time spent viewing video content on mobile devices was more than on television screens—the first time that had ever happened. Mobile video consumption continues to grow, currently comprising 75% of all viewing.

Smartphones are a complete entertainment device. They can stream TV and videos, hold your music library, access email, give turn-by-turn driving directions, be your alarm clock, manage your calendar, and perform many other conveniences.

Advertising to young adults and teenagers has changed radically. Generation Z and Millennials use the TV more to play games on their PlayStation, Xbox, Wii, and Switch than watch programs. They don’t listen to the radio; they get their music from streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, TIDAL, or Apple Music. They don’t read newspapers or magazines; they browse the internet to find news about the things that interest them. The traditional advertising media outlets and channels are becoming less and less effective. All of these changes have implications for the future.

How Your Brand Makes Life Better for Your Customer

Marketing isn’t about making noise to get noticed. Noise is fool’s gold. Just because you are screaming at people doesn’t mean they care or are listening. Our job as marketers is to understand how our product or service fits into the target consumer’s life in a way that will make their life better—and telling them that. It’s that simple.

The tactics that brands use to communicate how they will make a consumer’s life better needs to fit within a strategic brand plan that drives product sales. Creating a great-looking website the ad agency has made “sticky” so that consumers come and linger doesn’t necessarily translate into improved product sales or even increased brand affinity.

Taco Bell created the most amazing interactive website I’ve ever seen in conjunction with the Sports Illustrated annual swimsuit edition. It allowed you to be a virtual Sports Illustrated photographer with supermodel Daniella Sarahyba. You could virtually move around with a camera and click photos of Daniella, then print them out on your home printer. All the while, Daniella was chatting with you as if you were there. Awesome! Fun! Sticky! But did it make me go to Taco Bell to buy my lunch? No, it didn’t.

Texting and Twitter

American Idol made text-voting the vogue, and it made perfect sense for that program to use texting as their voting platform, given the show’s youthful target audience.

But does it make sense for Ford Motor Company to send you text messages to try and sell you a car? No. That would be annoying. Does it make sense for Ford to make an offshoot of the Daniella technology to create virtual test drives on the web? Absolutely!

Should a sports team offer real-time scores, team news, or injury updates via Twitter to their fans? Yes. Do you want your local grocery store sending you text messages promoting their sale on Froot Loops this week? Probably not. But would you like to go to your grocer’s website and note the products you would like to get text alerts for if they come on sale? You might!

What you can do and what you should do in a marketing campaign are different. Too often, young marketing managers get caught up in the can do—what can we do with Twitter, Facebook, texting, Snapchat, Instagram, email marketing, mobile apps, widgets, search engine optimization, targeted online ads, or micro-sites? These platforms seem so exciting, cutting edge, and innovative that young marketers want to hurl themselves into this world of evolving digital technology without considering if they should use that technology.

Doing the fundamentals—brand positioning, website design and functionality, packaging, traditional advertising, and point-of-sale materials—seems old school and boring. The truth about marketing success lies in between. Successful marketers need to keep a keen eye on all the possibilities presented by things they can do with digital technology and integrate it if it makes sense into the plan of what they should do. The fundamental strategies of marketing haven’t changed. The ways we can execute them have.