Ear to the Track

I have a client who’s warming up to the idea of doing a podcast and I referred him the CommonCraft tutorial. It answered the “What’s a Podcast?” question for my client far better than I had. I remembered Lee mentioning in his presentation that they use the “It’s kind of like this….” approach to explaining things — a technique that I favor in especially when selling he merits of technology products. I used it this morning in web copy about the music, video and photo capabilities of Windows Mobile phones: “It’s like having a media center in your pocket.”

I like what I call the “simile strategy” so much, I recently based an entire web video campaign for Safeco Insurance on it. The campaign is intended to give consumers useful nuggets of insurance knowledge without directly selling Safeco. It features brief monologues by four characters who each explain their topic by comparing it to something they’re very familiar with in their work.

Here’s one example:

This is a follow-up to last week’s class discussion, and my last post, on Mitch Joel’s hypothetical question: “What If Everything We Knew About Marketing and Advertising Until Now Was An Anomaly?”

The Television Bureau of Advertising (TAB) last week released results of a survey on adult consumer media habits that support my contention that traditional media remain far more influential for marketing communications than the internet — at least with adults, who were found to spend more than half of their media-consumption hours per day watching television.

The survey of 1246 adults aged 25 to 54 was commissioned by the TBA and conducted by Nielsen Media Research in January 2008.  Among the findings:

•    53% of total daily media hours are spent with TV, more than all other mediums combined

•    90% reported watching TV in the previous 24 hours, compared to 80% for radio, 72.1% for the internet, 58.9% for newspapers and 48.3% for magazines

•    The time spent with TV in the same 24-hour period was also significantly higher (222.7 minutes) when compared with radio (106.5), the internet (99.7), newspapers (22.1) and magazines (15.1)

•    TV advertising remains the most influential with 81.4% of the 25-54 adult segment, compared with advertising on the internet (6.5%), newspapers (5.8%), radio (3.9%) and magazines (2.3%)

•    Respondents said TV had the most persuasive advertising (69.9%), compared to 9.5% for newspapers, 7.5% for radio and 8.1% for magazines.

•    Among all media, the internet scored lowest in persuasive advertising, at 5.1%.

•    55% said they were more likely to learn about products and brands they might like to try and buy on TV, trailed by the internet at 18.7%, magazines at 14.6%, newspapers at 7.1% and radio coming in last at 4.5%.

While this survey suggests that online advertising has questionable persuasive power, Advertising Age’s annual revenue survey of U.S. agencies, also released last week, attributed an overall revenue increase of 8.6% primarily to the growth of digital advertising revenue.
Granted, the survey did not include adult usage of internet social media. But the dominance of TV over the internet in total hours of consumption, influence and persuasiveness are dramatic. Clearly, anyone who thinks traditional marketing communications will be rendered anomalous anytime soon needs to turn off the computer and get some air.

In “What If Everything We Knew About Marketing and Advertising Until Now Was An Anomaly?” Mitch Joel speculates, “Maybe Web 2.0 and Social Media is ushering in not only a new way for Marketers to think about how Consumers engage with Advertising, but it is the beginning of the “real” way in which businesses will connect with their Consumers.”

I think this is a simplistic view of the current chapter in the evolution of marketing communications (marcom). Granted, consumers can now have a more prominent voice than ever in the making or breaking of a brand, but all the blogging, online customer reviews and amateur commercials on YouTube only amount to a greater volume of one type of marcom known as “word-of-mouth.”

Word-of-mouth has always been part of a successful marcom mix, and the fact that there’s now more of it, and more dialog between company and customer, doesn’t signify that traditional forms of marcom, from Super Bowl ads to junk mail, are going away anytime soon.

Ad spending is certainly shifting, but spending on “one-way” media — print, radio, TV and direct mail — is showing no signs of dropping off as Web 2.0 activity picks up. That’s because the audience is still there and traditional marcom is still far more effective than social media during two critical phases of the marketing persuasion process: getting the attention of and generating interest among the greatest numbers of prospects. This is the specific function of advertising, and why many successful campaigns are known more for their entertainment value than their factual content.

Traditional media also packs far more impact, in a “medium is the message” way. If Move-On.org’s full page “General Betray Us” ad in the NY Times (dreadful as it was) had instead been a front-page blog on the Huffington Post, it would only have received the attention of other bloggers. Ho hum.

Mitch is overly exuberant when he says: “In watching Consumers leverage real power to share their insights, voice and passions, I can’t help but feel like this is just beginning and we’re entering into - what will become - how Marketing, Advertising and Communications was truly meant to connect.”

In fact, consumers have always had the ultimate power over marketers by voting with their pocketbooks. One of the principles advertisers live by is that the most a great ad campaign can do for a bad product is to get people to try it once.

And then they tell their friends…

As mentioned in a post last week, I’ve been considering recommending to one of my clients that they produce a podcast, but have refrained from doing so until I convince myself that a podcast would be a practical and beneficial undertaking for this company. I floated the idea past the marketing consultant who directs the company’s marketing communications efforts and she was unreservedly enthusiastic. She has a general and vague idea of what a podcast is, but at least knows that its one of those Web 2.0 things that’s getting a lot of buzz these days. What’s not to like? she seemed to say. She wants to see a proposal.

Her reaction reaffirms what I believe is one of the most appealing aspects of podcasting as a marketing communications “product:” It’s one of those things, like blogging and web video, that businesses think they ought to be doing to be “cutting edge.” And since I am ultimately in the business of selling and manufacturing marketing communications products — print, broadcast and online ads, web content, video, etc.— adding podcast production to my list of services has great appeal, because:

• It seems relatively easy to get clients excited about podcasting. Even if they don’t know what podcasting is, they like the sound of it. And it sounds more affordable than video.

• Podcasts are far simpler to produce than other “cutting edge” assets, such as web video, and seem less cumbersome to business executives than doing their own blog. As a sole proprietor, I like that I could realistically produce a client’s podcast without enlisting outside resources. I can’t do that with video. I wouldn’t even attempt to create a web page for a client without a graphic designer.

• Podcasts have higher perceived value than, say, a comparable amount of content on a web page or in a brochure. And they are far less of a commodity than other marcom tools, and so potentially more profitable.

I’ve talked myself into doing the proposal.

One of the most revolutionary consequences of digital media is the shift of production and distribution capabilities from the traditional media gatekeepers to the People. We ordinary schmoes who used to exclusively sit in the audience now have new roads to publishing or entertainment success, whether that’s defined as having an audience wider than our friends and family, or actually generating income from blogging, music, video or creating an entertainment personality.

One of the more inspirational examples of the latter was recently pulled of by the son of a professional colleague of mine. I’m not at liberty to disclose the details, but this 30-something individual had been teaching science in New York city high schools for several years when he began creating vodcasts for a How To/DIY website for negligible remuneration. In the process, he developed a quirky, entertaining persona that might be described as Bill Nye the Science Guy for the YouTube attention span. His vodcasts became the most popular feature on the site, and as they say in show biz, one thing led to another, and the vodcaster landed a contract to produce a pilot series for a popular cable channel. This is the classic Cinderella story 2.0 that every band and self-proclaimed comedian on My Space and YouTube dreams of, and points to whenever parents or spouses show any impatience with their career path. And point to it they should, because it’s a great example of the democratization of opportunity that digital media is enabling.