Dinosaurs may look cool, but they don’t get much work these days
Advertising is showing its age. The forms most practiced today grew out of a communications revolution introduced roughly 57 years ago. Last year, men ages 18 to 34 started using the newest mass medium, the Internet, more than television. This year, at-home women with children did likewise. These watershed moments profoundly signaled a change that had been in the making for more than a decade and will inform and direct the model for marketing communications today. In the first quarter of 2005, Internet advertising surpassed all other forms in percentage of growth (Garfield, 2005). This is not to say traditional mass media will evaporate. Still vastly dominant today, these media are simply becoming other contact points in the ever more surgical segmentation of audiences—audiences that will be theoretically reached by one-on-one contact, from intrusive to permissive to on-demand. What’s clear is the marketing model has changed.
Preemptive adaptation rarely occurs and so it is that many marketers have not changed from the patterns and habits of the more than 50-year-old model. Integrated marketing and digital technology are at the vanguard, the new form. The marketers who succeed in adapting to the changes imposed by the marketplace will be able to take advantage. Toffler’s Third Wave of info-sphere can be accessed. What is commonly called alternative, digital, or guerrilla marketing is none of these, it’s simply marketing. Marketers must improve their understanding of total integration, evolve mediums of contact, and use the technology that created the communication barriers to overcome the communication barriers. It is from this point that marketing’s future must navigate. IMC is not a new idea, but in some ways it has been a misunderstood idea—in definition, scope, and practice. Beyond IMC and the principles of 360 degree marketing is the need to integrate and align the structural dimensions—contact management across traditional and new media, internal company structure, and the least understood, agency structure.
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