In 1998, when I first dove into the new and rapidly evolving world of online marketing, the Internet was, from a marketing perspective, just another place to stick your ads and generate awareness. Banner ads were king, and CPM-based pricing prevailed.
In 1999, I started a unique (at the time) company to make branded adver-games that could be attached to email and distributed virally. The only way to make a sale was to find a progressive online ad agency willing to risk some of their credibility with their client and give it a shot.
Only 5 years later, so much has changed. Banners sold on CPM have joined by performance-based search and affiliate advertising, spyware, blogs, mobile, podcasts, and so on. But the direction this industry is moving has been driven by the same underlying motivations throughout: Advertisers want to use these new media to reach and motivate customers to buy, sell, call, download, test drive, or ask their doctor.
The availability of new media dictates that companies must engage customers in new ways or risk losing share or squandering growth opportunities. The conventional process of adjusting the marketing mix is not a new discipline. Experimentation with new concepts, messages, or media often follows a well-trod path: discovery, research, assessment, trial, measurement, optimization, repeat. But there are 3 critical factors that will challenge the prized conventional offline marketer:
1) Innovative developments are multiplying, and arrive much faster than ever before. Each week, there is a new marketing opportunity that your company probably ought to be aware of. It could be a new way to gather research, or a new avenue for reaching customers, or improved performance reporting. But there's always something new, and keeping up with rapid developments is a big challenge. Rolling prioritization of what's most relevant to your business is even tougher.
2) There is more performance data more readily available now than ever before. This is not headline news; it's been a reality since the advent of online advertising. But the sheer quantity of data, from a variety of sources (web logs, web analytics software, ad tracking, page views, conversion rates, return on ad spend, cost per page view, and so on) is staggering. The ability to identify and analyze the most relevant performance metrics is at a premium. Analysis paralysis is the likely alternative.
3) Achieving success requires a previously unnecessary depth of understanding about how customers interact with the new marketing channels. The days of simply throwing some ads out there to "see how it works" are over. High opportunity costs preclude under-informed experimentation, and often leads to wasted money. And I don't mean letting the CMO tinker with YouTube for a half-hour or showing her where to spot the dynamic ads on your racing game on Xbox. You need to understand these new media and the behaviors resident in those microcosyms. This truism holds for even the most basic marketing tactics. Did anyone see Tassimo's meaningless banner on the log-in page of Citysearch? Neither did any Citysearch users. Old-school marketers had to understand their product or service very well, and certainly they needed to understand their target customers, but never has there been such a strong imperative to know the media through which the marketing messages will be delivered.
I've gotta cut this post short... it's turning into a novella.
The best marketers will possess the ability to identify, assess, test, measure and exploit or sometimes discard the bevy of innovative marketing opportunities presented by new media. Often this means bringing on an experienced online/new media marketing pro, but old dogs can learn these tricks, too. If your marketing squadron feels intimidated by the plethora of new marketing media or methods, they can check their fears at the door and call me for help with Internet marketing. Because 1998 ain't coming back.
