AUDIENCE(35)

16. Gene Marks, “Putting a Dollar Value on a Facebook Fan,” You’re the Boss (blog), The New York Times, April 23, 2013, http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/putting-a-dollar-value-on-a-facebook-fan/.

17. Jay Baer, “A New Way to Calculate What Facebook Is Worth to Your Business,” Social Media ROI (blog), Convince & Convert, 2012, http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-roi/a-new-way-to-calculate-what-facebook-is-worth-to-your-business/.





Chapter 7


A Larger Font: Our Long-Term Responsibilities


The audience is the most revered member of the theater. Without an audience there is no theater.1

—Viola Spolin

In Improvisation for the Theater, known by actors around the world as “the bible of improvisational theater,” the late Viola Spolin imparts the above bit of knowledge to her readers. With hundreds of thousands of copies of her book now circulating around the globe, Ms. Spolin’s legacy is clear. She ensured that each new acting generation would embrace the theater as an audience-driven medium.

Can we say the same thing about marketing? Do we fully appreciate the long-term importance of the audience to our companies?

Based on my experience and without reservation, I’d say “no.” Proprietary audiences are a corporate afterthought, and nothing illustrates this more clearly than the word cloud in Figure 7.1. Created by Econsultancy (@Econsultancy) and Adobe (@Adobe) as part of their 2013 Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing, it captures responses to the question, “What do you consider to be the most important marketing opportunity today?”2 The most popular answers appear in larger, bolder fonts.

FIGURE 7.1 The Word Cloud Formed from Answers to the Question “What do you consider the most important marketing opportunity today?”



What jumps out at you first? My eye is immediately drawn to how the words content, mobile, and social are among the biggest—just as content marketing, mobile marketing, and social media garner the biggest headlines in marketing today.

Notice what’s missing from the word cloud? If you answered “audience,” you get a gold star for effort. The truth is, however, that “audience” is not technically missing from the word cloud; it’s just so darn small that you need a magnifying glass to see it. Let’s zoom in a bit—400 percent, to be exact (see Figure 7.2).

FIGURE 7.2 With the help of 400% zoom (and great eyesight), we find “Audience” in the word cloud of today’s marketing opportunities



Thar she blows! A blurry, 1-point Arial needle in a haystack, but at least “audience” made it in there somewhere—illegible though it might be.

Of course, the barely visible size of the word underscores how little marketers prioritize Proprietary Audience Development today. Instead, they are focused on content development within specific channels, which, while entirely understandable, leaves a giant hole in their marketing efforts. Why? Because the biggest practice areas in the cloud—content, social, and mobile marketing—all need that tiny word, audience, in order to succeed.

If we are to deliver on the final mandate of The Audience Imperative and embrace Proprietary Audience Development over the long term, we cannot have a quick-fix mentality. Ours is not a one-and-done job. It requires vision, commitment, and execution as long as our company is in business.

Clearly, there are a lot of forces working against us. We live in a fast-paced, youth-dominated culture where it’s often difficult to think beyond this week, let alone next quarter, next year, or the next decade. We are siloed into teams that foster “us” versus “them” battles while we keep our customers waiting. Moreover, we work in a field—marketing—with fancy awards for finite, creative campaigns, but little pomp and circumstance for those who build lasting audience assets.

If you’re going to overcome these forces, you must be prepared to:

1. Embrace change permanently.

2. Ditch any “not my job” attitude.

3. Retrain your agencies.

4. Respond to results, not headlines.

5. Never stop learning.



It’s a tall order, for sure. Let’s look at each in more detail.





Embrace Change Permanently


We’ve already seen that today’s marketer has to deal with over 50 different ways of reaching consumers versus just nine when Don Draper roamed the Earth. Adding to that complexity are the Converged Media options available within each channel. Facebook alone has over 10 different types of advertising units to offer—a number that seems tame when you consider that until recently, they had over 27.3 As mobile devices become even more ubiquitous around the globe over the next decade, even more tactics—and perhaps entirely new channels—will emerge.