From An Endless Stack of Trade Rags to Read
Here are a couple of excerpts from articles that The Marketing Consigliere read over the holiday weekend.
“Marketing as a whole must get smarter – not only search. Mass marketing has long fallen from favor, yet we are inundated no less than ever with masses of irrelevant marketing. Personal empowerment can be built only with tools that deliver offers and information of high personal relevance. It’s not the amount but the relevance of what we know that drives success – so marketing, search especially, must smarten up.”
J. Walker Smith, President, Yankelovich Monitor
From “Smart Search – Marketing needs to smarten up,”Marketing Management, March/April 2008, p. 52
Yes and thank you, Mr. Smith, for pointing out what needs to be POUNDED into the heads of corporate leadership. We are now on entering an era of true Network Centric Marketing and there are companies that have to be dragged kicking and screaming into it.
Marketers can get smarter, but like most solid education, it takes money. CEOs, make the investment in your marketing IT infrastructure, not only in keywords. Give your CMOs and VPs the money they need to align with sales and produce key, measurable results. And don’t pull the plug on marketing when the going gets tough. Unless marketing hasn’t smarted up…
“The basic point about the web is that it is not an advertising medium. The web is not a selling medium. It is user controlled, so the user controls, the user experiences.”
Jakob Nielsen, Web Designer, The Art Bin
From “Think different: The web’s not a place to stick your ads” Advertising Age, March 17, 2008 p. 3
No, no, Jakob. You were quoted saying that ten years ago and someone foolishly thought to exhume that statement again.
The web is a medium for information processing – and it is a two-way medium. And marketers have every right to use the web as part of a Network Centric strategy that allows them to gather, clean, store, share and act upon data through that medium. The web is not user-controlled in the absolute sense…thank heaven. That is so because one can say that the web is “marketing influenced.”Think about it.