Anne Bologna, who had been strategy head of the brilliant Fallon agency for eighteen years, observes that marketing is void of course without a replacement model for the old push model. Today the consumer has turned things around and curates the content consumed. We are operating without a model for what marketing is supposed to be. "As a default, marketing has become stalking," she concludes.
Advertisers will be the most sensitive to reading this article, which calls out the smart TV as Public Enemy Number One -- for stalking reasons.
Although naive and appearing to be a marketing ploy by a number of cyber protection companies looking to expand into BTC, the article is only the first of what is likely to become a sea of similar statements about other media that do the same thing, and ultimately, it will come down to, "Is this creepy? And if so, why?"
It would indeed be creepy if your camera and/or microphone were being used to record what you look like or are saying. No one that I know of in marketing is doing that.
The article of course makes no distinction between knowing who you are vs. not knowing who you are. But in fact, that is the key distinction.
Marketers, unless you are already subscribed to them directly, are trying to reach people like you -- not necessarily you -- and they are accepting a media deal where they will only find out it's you if you respond to their ad online and agree to identify yourself to that advertiser.
Without your explicit agreement in advance, no one is going to be looking at a video of you or listening to what you say. Except criminals, but they are not marketers.
No one is going to turn on your mic unless you have given permission, and then, it is only permission to listen to detect whatever media you are hearing. Not what you are saying.
Even the article despite its sophomoric stage of development admits that you don't want to turn off all these trackabilities because some of them give you value. Like Netflix figuring out what programs to offer you. That’s analogous to what all marketers are trying to do: learn how to please you. They are mature enough to realize if they overstep common decency they will have a negative effect on you, and that is the last thing they want to do.
We are all marketers. You are a marketer. You market yourself every moment of your life, like everyone else, including countries and companies et al.
We're all trying to convince others that they should want what we are offering.
That's all that marketing is.
For a person or a brand (a brand is an artificial person), the objective in any interaction (when sanity reigns) is expressing your supreme self, your gift to the world, without braggadocio.
Don't let anyone paint broad tar strokes on a whole segment of the population. Look into what they have to gain.
Pity the poor marketer being painted as a cad because he/she has defaulted -- without a beacon model of what the new marketing is -- to grabbing at a straw and as a result winding up being perceived as a stalker.
So, what is the new model of marketing?
To Wharton's Dr. Americus Reed, people choose brands to express their own aspirational selves. This suggests that a brand ought not just tell its own story, it should enhance the customer's story, says John Zweig, CEO of Neuro-Insight, and former top executive in the WPP empire.
Happily, I've been spending more time recently with Dr. Richard Silberstein, the founder of Neuro-Insight. Richard invented a measurement system (SST) for the brain that excels at reading and adding meaning to subconscious responses which earlier measurement systems, EEG and fMRI, had missed.
For example, Conceptual Closure. SST has detected a tendency to become inattentive the moment after the resolution of a story arc. Which is exactly where many current commercials first show the brand name -- right in the place where it is least likely to be encoded into long-term memory.
The new model of marketing encloses into its space what had previously been rejected -- the mystery of life. The new model accepts the unknown subconscious as the actual audience. People as they truly are themselves under the layers of masks.
The most successful marketers today are small businesses who authentically communicate to audiences who are starved for authenticity from marketers.
The larger marketers are coming around to understanding that in stages. First with token steps and ultimately with full comprehension and embodiment. They have adopted purpose, diversity, empathy and social causes. The latter have become divisive and so there has been learning to avoid causes that are not unifying. There has been learning that whatever pro-social statement one makes must ring true to the pre-existing brand image. Learning about how to be authentic is starting to become a possible conversation.
Idealism is the reason why social causes are popularly supported with deep commitment. There are 15 human motivations that are ideals that drive all behavior at deep self-level. Without playing Russian Roulette with social causes, one can go direct to the ideals that make social causes strong, and Ideals are not all divisive -- most people agree on 14 being positive -- some people argue strenuously that power is not an ideal, and many people argue the other way with at least equal passion.
When you authentically evoke idealism in your ads, you will draw more sustained attention, and drive more brand equity and sales effect. You will be communicating to the whole human being -- his or her soul, mind and body all at the same time -- the conscious and all-important subconscious all at the same time.
You can then find ideal program and website environments in which to place those ads. For example, this ad would be at its supreme effectiveness if placed in the programs listed below, according to RMT.
You can watch "The Talk" here.
The motivations found in "The Talk" are as follows: