Innovation and Advertising
by Fred on 23/11/06 at 1:32 pm
1 comment
A little while back I met a guy called Mark Norton, Account Director of Zoom Advertising, and he says: ‘Innovation occurs when your back is to the wall.’ He says this because advertising as we know it is in a state of crisis. The internet is the fastest growing medium in history and allows for small businesses to set up their own advertising efforts – more targeted than traditional advertising can ever be.
Norton went on to quote economic historian Alexander Field: ‘The most rapid innovation in American History occurred NOT in the booming 1990’s or even in the roaring 1920’s, but in the period between the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. This is the period we call The Great Depression.’ Norton reckons we will see a great deal of innovation in advertising as agencies struggle to remain relevant.
Zoom, a direct marketing company (and a division of Ogilvy SA), is responding to the challenge by ‘partnering’ with clients. They will only charge if their campaign is successful.
Interesting times.
Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. He runs a web marketing company called World Wide Creative and loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. View more articles by Fred.
Karin
Nov 23rd, 2006
That reminds me of yesterday: a rep from KM-group (daily and weekly newspapers, local radio-stations and website linking all) doing a presentation how they could help with our marketing.
Now, we are in the process of adapting our marketing into Permission Marketing because we know (testing and measuring) paper adds and radio commercials on local radio does either not work for us or bring in the wrong (cheap and cheerful) prospects.
So, we are already innovating; KM-group is mixing and matching the tiered and failing old marketing style into IMHO a bad forced style of ‘trying to find out’ what works for their former customers and adopting their offers to suit ‘our innovation’.
Didn’t work, send him packing after the rep discovered that the only way KM-group could promote us was by placing us in their website local directory. Too bad, we’re already in there
Hope KM-group will innovate; will definitely miss the online local radio station if the company fails.