The client no longer owns the brand. Due to the proliferation of social media including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, customers must give permission to clients to enter their world, said Sasha Savic, chief commercial officer of Havas Media North America, on June 21.
During a morning session at the Direct Marketing Association‘s All For One Marketing Summit on June 21, five media executives discussed the importance of channel and data integration across digital, catalog, mobile, social, video and broadcast. Stuart Elliott, advertising columnist at The New York Times moderated the discussion.
David Penski, president of Zenith Media, noted that the “average consumer looks at 5,000 messages a week.”
In order to integrate the various communications and channels, marketers and agencies must develop a media strategy before a messaging strategy.
Elliott helped shed more light on the subject by paraphrasing the complexity of the discussion and explaining that “the ability to target consumers and aim messages more precisely at aimed recipients is much more in grasp.” Consequently, a trade-off develops where “the end result is going to be a lot better potentially for the client, but bear down more on agencies to get the desired result.”
“There’s a race to get new secret sauce,” said Savic. “Ten to 15 years ago, everyone wanted to invent TV optimizing.”
Penski cautioned that there is a need for constant optimization and revisions on a daily basis. “As we drive optimization, how do we make sure we don’t hurt the core business,” said Penski, which typically leads to a high turnover of client accounts.
Social media and real-time marketing have “made the Internet a branding medium,” said Anthony Young, CEO of Optimedia US. “It’s a more organic medium. It’s about getting people to respond to brands differently. We can’t silo it.”
The consumer’s purchase cycle drives marketing architecture, said Philip Cowdell, CEO of Mindshare North America. Cowdell added the importance of understanding attribution by channel and last click attribution, which leads to a quantification of the sale.
“When you look at some of the technologies now, I think we almost missed the point,” said Cowdell. “We’ve been focused on getting a number, we should focus on the gap in between.
