CHAPTER 12
Putting It All Together
“This new marketing model doesn’t shout; it listens and learns. And relevance, interactivity, and accountability are its essential ingredients.”
—Christopher Vollmer, Partner, Booz Allen Hamilton
If all were well in the land of marketing and media, and most particularly within the exploding digital universe, you wouldn’t need this book (and we wouldn’t need to have written it!). But marketing, or at least marketing as we have known and used it in the past, is not working so well anymore. The traditional advertising model may not be “broken,” but it is certainly less potent now that the Internet has become a primary hub for business and consumer communications. With all the empowering technologies and platforms digital has spawned, both consumers and your business customers have now gained the upper hand with their control over media, content, and advertising.
This Internet-enabled technological revolution has several implications for marketers. First, the digital consumer is more advertising resistant than ever before. Most accept advertising and marketing messages only on their own terms; through use of privacy settings, block outs, opt-outs, time-shifting, and on-demand technologies, there is more individual control over what messages are seen and when they are seen. Ads that are irrelevant, out of context, interruptive, or lacking inherent value will be ignored, clicked away, or otherwise rendered useless to the marketer. Like spent bullets ...
