How - Dov Seidman [75]
Today’s leading-edge companies know this, and are putting their marketing money where other people’s mouths are. They spend less and less each year on big television ad campaigns and more and more on direct approaches enabled by new media. In 2005, advertisers spent about $47.4 billion on newspaper advertising, according to the Newspaper Association of America. That is comparable to $46.2 billion for broadcast television and $52.2 billion for direct-mail advertising. These mass media outlets are seeing meager year-over-year growth of about 5 percent. By comparison, year-over-year spending on targeted interactive advertising—dialogic marketing—is projected to be up nearly 30 percent, from $9.7 billion to over $12.5 billion, according to industry estimates.20 Smart companies are targeting more and more marketing dollars to efforts to connect more intimately with their markets—efforts like word-of-mouth marketing, defined by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) as “Giving people a reason to talk about your products and services, and making it easier for that conversation to take place.” WOMMA joins together cutting-edge efforts to perfect “the art and science of building active, mutually beneficial consumer-to-consumer and consumer-to-marketer communications.”21
New and innovative strategies for reaching the market seem to pop up each day. Viral marketing focuses on creating entertaining or informative messages designed for customers to pass along in an exponential fashion, often electronically or by e-mail. Evangelist marketing cultivates advocates or volunteers and encourages them to take a leadership role in actively spreading the word on a company’s behalf. Cause marketing involves supporting social causes to earn respect and support from people who feel strongly about the causes. Mobile marketers use cell phones to achieve a huge range of objectives—from text-to-win competitions to direct-response handling, customer service management, and brand building—to build a two-way conversation with new or existing customers, “extending the brand into the pocket.”22 Interestingly, these more direct, personal approaches are in many ways a throwback to the early days of media, when people got their messages from people they trusted, like Ronald Reagan.
Mass media advertising is losing its effectiveness because people don’t believe it (the information age has given them ample access to objective facts that disprove advertising claims), and, more important, they just don’t need it as much anymore to make buying decisions. Gallup’s 2005 annual governance survey reported that “[Only] half of Americans say they trust the mass media when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly,” down substantially from the peak in 1976, when nearly three-quarters felt that way.23 A recent study by Intelliseek reported that 88 percent of consumers trust advertising via word of mouth, but only 56 percent said newspaper ads were trustworthy, and 47 percent said the same for television and radio (27 percent trust “experts” and 8 percent trust celebrities, for what it’s worth).24 “The shift is happening because consumers and customers are rather cynical,” Linda Wolf, former chairman and CEO of advertising giant Leo Burnett Worldwide, told me recently over breakfast in Chicago. During her tenure at Burnett, Wolf oversaw global operations that spanned more than 80 countries and more than 200 units. She is widely considered one of the most influential executives in the world of advertising. “They’re more sophisticated in their interactions with brands and with products. Based on that sophistication they can see through the phoniness of what is going