BIG Marketers

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of listening to interviews of the best interactive marketers in the industry over podcast, courtesy The Bay Area Interactive Group ( they call themselves BIG ). The list of interviewees comprising of the very best in the industry including Glen Sheehan, Joanne Bradford, Mark Stewart, Matt Freeman PJ Perreira, Toby Gabriner and Joseph Jaffe ( the "Life After the 30 Second Spot" author ).

All these marketing guys belong to different walks of life, but I was amazed at the synergy they had when it came to interactive marketing. There was a common theme across all the problems they talked about, the biggest one being the fragmentation of the media. Now that I think of it, it is very much true and it must be a big headache for any marketing guy. In the good old days, when you just had print media, allocating budget for advertisment would be so easy. Then came the radio, but the conditions were not tougher because economic growth surpassed the growth in media by a huge margin. With the advent of TV, marketing took a different dimension and the proverbial 30 second slot came into vogue. Marketers had to be efficient about communicating their message and be creative as well to grab the attention of the user. Creation of creative advertisments became a big business and huge media houses came up whose sole purpose in life would be to create attractive advertisments.

And, then along came internet and seasoned marketers were not going to discount its important. Infact, they were the first ones to jump the bandwagon and sponsor big businesses on the internet ( the businesses sadly did not have a business story to back them up and most of them failed miserably ) and try a variety of way to grab people's attention. Banners could be seen on all the websites and companies started pumping in millions of dollars to get their ads in front of every possible eyeball on the internet. Well, if you are thinking that was the beginning of the problem - it was not. Infact, marketers were pleased with the fact that they had so much to do, so many avenues to seek and the grass was green all around.

The problem really started kicking in when the user community became fragmented. In the good old days, a marketer could show his commercial at a prime slot and expect all his potential customers to watch it. With the proliferation of media, a marketer has too many options, and worse his target audience has too many options. That means marketing is not as easy as choosing the prime time slot anymore - you gotta have a creative mind to make sure that you get your commercial in front of the eyeballs that deserve it. To top it, you also want to make sure that you are passing consistent messages to your audience through all the media and that there is a common recognition for your brand across these diverse media. To make things worse, you don't have a good way to track how many eyeballs you are reaching. Ofcourse, internet provides you thousands of ways to track your audience, but do you have the technology to track the users between the time they spend on the internet and the time they spend with the other media ?

Does this mean it is the end of traditional marketing ? Are the 30 second slots dead ? No sir, the convergence of marketing messages across various media is the prime concern of all the companies and marketers are sweating to figure out a solution to bring them together. What I can say for sure is that Interactive marketing is the sweet spot today and every company is looking to dominate this medium.