Catching Up: Notes from the “Marketing 2.0” Frontier

I’m trying to get back on track with MarketerBlog after a big client launch last week. Here are some belated notes on items of interest from the last week or so.  

Matthew Hurst has a post in DataMining today about the new deal between Paramount and Technorati to promote films using cross-links from blogs. The films included in this program are mostly independents, with Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” launching the first effort. I agree with Matt, it will be fascinating to see how this plays out, and whether it takes for more “mainstream” films. 

There was a great article in the New York Times last week about an “ad agency’s worst nightmare”  -- consumer generated advertising. Mr. Gore’s other project, CurrentTV was featured in a description of a recent ad creation contest. Sony comes out sounding like the “get it” in a serious way. According to the article, Mike Fasulo, the chief marketing officer for Sony Electronics said consumers were demanding that marketers allow them to define brands on their own terms.
 

"The trick is that you have to let go," Mr. Fasulo said. "We're used to dictating our messages and we're used to being in control."

Amen to that! 

An article in MediaPost last week profiles a new company, ViTrue, which provides a platform for marketers to solicit and acquire consumer generated ads. Reggie Bradford, CEO of ViTrue Inc, was quoted in the article as saying that what makes ViTrue's platform different is that it provides marketers with standardized tools for doing that on a larger scale. At the core of that system are "review and approve" modules that allow marketers to post specifications for ad campaigns and to enable the marketer, or its agency to quickly review ads and post them on-the-fly. He offers some great perspective of this shift.
 

"The genie is out of the bottle,"Bradford says. "Consumer-generated video is here to state. We're just trying to give marketers and agencies a way of taking advantage of it."

CNET had an interesting article about the shift to online media and some observations about the long-term sustainability of the ubiquitous ad-based business models. Despite substantive growth in online media, financial types are getting antsy about the growing dependence on this as a business model. Scott Karp put it more bluntly, labeling it a “doomsday scenario”.

 
“You can see the pattern emerging. The network effect turns everything into a media platform, while at the same time obviating the need for media as a marketing vehicle because brands can use the network itself as a marketing vehicle.

So, you have the new media/technology industry orienting its collective business model toward advertising…at the precise moment when the paid media advertising pie may be on the verge of shrinking. 

A recipe for disaster if ever I heard one.”

Ouch, Scott!

And last but not least, we can always count of Jeff Jarvis for astute, if sometimes phlegmatic, commentary on the state of the Web 2.0 state, and the attention/relevance deficit disorder we all seem to have.

 
“We still squander attention on irrelevance. But I think it is improving.”

 
That’s worthy of Oscar Wilde.

 
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CGM, Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0

Comments

[Jeff Jarvis]

I've been called many things, most deserved. But phlegmatic? Never.

[Leslie]

Jeff,

Thanks for reading my post and dropping a comment. You’re right, “phlegmatic” may not have been a fair (or even accurate characterization) of you. I pulled the term from some foggy memories of college discussions (http://www.sjca.edu/asp/home.aspx) about Western European intellects. If the Wikipedia article is to be believed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlegmatic), the German philosopher Immanuel Kant claimed the term as the temperament appropriate to freedom and virtue. That would indeed reflect many of your remarks about freedom of the press/media. In any case I surely intended the comment about Oscar Wilde to be a compliment.