Target Marketing Changed Politics
America has yet to decide whether Mr. Obama is right, but his unlikely standing in the Democratic primary would seem to indicate his message has some appeal.
So what does it mean for interactive marketers? Well, for starters, it means broadcast isn’t going to dry up and blow away anytime soon. Network shares will continue their decline, newspapers will continue to consolidate, and outdoor will remain oh-so-20th-century, but none of them will go away. Ever. People need to share experiences with other people, and brands need to engage those people when they do. Cultural events like the Super Bowl may indeed be artifacts of the broadcast age, but we need them. As marketers and as people.
I encountered further anecdotal evidence of this at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas last week, in the form of a new offering from Lycos Cinema. Amidst the tsunami of personal music and video players, Lycos has just launched a Web site that lets you stream major studio content onto the desktops of up to ten friends simultaneously, while chatting real-time in your private electronic screening room.
Watching a movie with other people. What a concept.
Another takeaway for marketers is perhaps that there’s a lot of value in online venues with anything approaching mass reach. Not GoogleClick-style mass reach, achieved through an aggregation of coffee-clutches around the Web, but Yahoo! home page-style mass reach, where thousands of people still, once in a while, all see the same message.
Finally, look for ways to make your brand a uniter, not a divider.
Consider facebook. Zuckerberg and co. found a formula at Harvard, which they first exported to other universities. Extending down to high schools wasn’t much of a leap, but your average MBA marketing VP would have counseled against what they did next, which was let the grown-ups in. You can almost hear it in your own head: “It’ll dilute the brand / compromise the community / alienate our core.” Who knows if they’ll prove right in the long run, but broadening their appeal got them to an implicit market cap $15 Billion, which is a nice neighborhood to hang out in for a while.
Sometimes it makes sense to target the mass market, even though putting that on a slide can get you canned. Try selling your food to people who eat once in a while, if only to see what happens.
Who knows? You might end up making history.
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