—Don Draper, Mad Men
I owe a debt of gratitude to Don Draper. For the past few years, the stylish lead character of Mad Men (@MadMen_AMC) has starred in many of my presentations about marketing’s changing landscape. Indeed, it’s nearly impossible to watch the show about a 1960s Madison Avenue advertising agency without wondering how Don would fare in today’s world. After all, he was a fossil fuel marketer, a creature of mass media whose only job was to generate great ideas while someone managed the design, layout, media buying, and ad trafficking.
But my, how times have changed. To understand this, all we need to do is to compare the marketing tactics around in Don’s day to those available today. What the Mad Men had to contend with is shown in Table 5.1.
TABLE 5.1 The Marketing Tactics of Don Draper’s Day
Direct Media Tactics Mass Media Tactics
Events Outdoor
Direct Mail Signage
Catalogs Print
Telemarketing Radio
Television
These were stable channels that allowed Don’s creativity to flourish unhindered by the vagaries of technology. Sure, TV went from black and white to color, FM supplanted AM radio, and newspapers began printing in color, but these moves didn’t result in wholesale changes to the mechanics of advertising or how consumers interacted with each medium. That made Don Draper’s professional life pretty easy.
Now rest your eyes in wild amazement at the tactics available to marketers today (Table 5.2).
TABLE 5.2 Today’s Ever-Expanding Universe of Marketing Tactics
* OOH stands for Out-of-Home and is another way these days to refer to Outdoor. OTT stands for “Over The Top” and refers to messaging apps that circumvent carrier networks to enable free peer-to-peer messaging.
Direct Media Tactics Mass Media Tactics
Events Signage
Direct Mail OOH* (Outdoor)
Catalogs Print
Telemarketing Radio
Direct Fax Television
Email Infomercials
IM (Instant Messaging) Video Games
IM (Instant Messaging) Video Games
SMS (Short Message Service) Internet Relay Chat
MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) Websites
Automated Voice Messaging Chat Rooms
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Organic Search
Social DM (Direct Messaging) Online Display
Push Notifications (via Mobile Apps) Paid Search
OTT Messaging Apps (i.e., Snapchat) Landing Pages
Microsites
Webinars
Affiliate Marketing
Online Video
Blogs
Podcasts
Contextual Advertising
In-Game Advertising
Wikis
Social Networks
Mobile Web
DOOH (Digital Out of Home)
Behavioral Advertising
Social Advertising
Virtual Worlds
Widgets
Twitter
Mobile Apps
Location-Based Apps
SlideShare
Instagram
Pinterest
Vine
If you’re keeping score, that’s over 50 ways businesses can now connect with consumer audiences—up from just nine a few short decades ago. And we’ve barely had time to digest many of these tactics as consumers, let alone marketers. Indeed, the media landscape has changed radically—and that’s why the first mandate of The Audience Imperative is so critical.
Use your Paid, Owned, and Earned Media not only to sell in the short term but also to increase the size, engagement, and value of your Proprietary Audiences over the long term.
Paid, Owned, and Earned Media is literally such a broad topic that it is the subject of entire books today. Our interest for purposes of this book is how the different forms of media can help your Proprietary Audience Development efforts. In Don’s era, it was enough for media to just sell; but in the Hybrid Marketing Era, that’s no longer the case.
Paid Media
We’ve already discussed Paid Media (a.k.a. advertising) at great length. It is the fossil fuel of marketing and still one of the most effective ways you can make your cash register ring. The million-dollar question is whether your company is demanding enough—and receiving enough in return—from its advertising.
According to Google, 77 percent of adult U.S. television viewers watch TV with a mobile device in hand—a smartphone, tablet or laptop.2 Today’s viewers aren’t passive; they’re multitaskers waiting for some cue to take action. And yet, of the 83 paid commercial advertisements run during Super Bowl XLVII, only two asked viewers to join a brand’s proprietary audience.3
Pizza chain Papa John’s (@PapaJohns) is a brand that bucked this trend. While technically not a Super Bowl advertiser in that their spots didn’t run during the Big Game, they were Super Bowl sponsors of one of the most watched parts of the game.
The coin toss.
The Super Bowl coin toss is the most watched coin toss in the world—yet few viewers care about it save for the occasional Vegas prop bettor. But in 2012, and again in 2013, Papa John’s staked very big bets on the outcome.