EschermanOne observation I would make is that many of the main hype merchants today in this sector are Gen Y, but maybe Generation Y are also just better inured against their own hype, as they apparently are with all other forms of advertising, and its the older generation that don’t have the antihype antibodies?
The online world is the best friction reducing agent known to man. Implications are fairly “interesting”:
– The more your industry can go online, the lower the overall margins
– The lower the margins, the more it resolves to players who have massive scale and/or those operating at subsistence costs (did someone say User Generated Content)
– In a global market, those with the least friction lose – anyone with true “free trade” will be hollowed out by those with a few barriers. This has some implications on ‘Net policy for countries, as it is clear that being a bit more frictitious than your trading partners may help – and it looks like we may have to build the Internet with a bit of friction included, if it is actually going to create rather than continually destroy value. One to watch…..
Also has implications for PR and journalism…..
While there were some very clear and some subtle differences between all of the agencies, most of them scored well in criteria such as strategy development, audience insight, execution & development, emerging & social media and analytics. However, though most of these agencies have built sophisticated analytics teams, they still have work to do in this area as the average score for that criterion by client references was approximately 5% lower than the scores for other criteria.
Dirk Shaw on social media: “It’s not the job of one person. For large brands simply assigning a single person to “own” social media is not scalable. This is akin to saying one person can sell, market, support and build new products. Social media cuts across the organization and in many cases interactions started on social networks may require internal collaboration to act on. Brands need to formalize processes for responding, collecting insights and measuring.”
“Is there a scientific measurement for the evolving market we’re in? No, that doesn’t exist yet,” Machado says. “But we have to play in that sandbox if we’re going to do the right thing for our client.”
Not many, apparently from a consumer perspective – but let’s not rule out its place in B2B marketing.
Despite all the bad news about the media industry, it is expected to be the third-fastest-growing economic sector over the next five years, after mining and construction. Almost none of that growth is forecast to come from shrinking traditional media, however. Instead, it will be drawn from areas like word-of-mouth marketing and public relations (with a 9.2 percent compound annual growth rate from 2008 through 2013), branded entertainment (9.3 percent) and the Internet and mobile devices (10.2 percent).
