Are CMO's Stuck In The Past? Or Are Online Marketers

A post by Knowledge@wharton asks the question

"If online marketing is the future, why are some CMO's stuck in the past?"

To help build their argument, they use the statistics that we see flying around the Web regarding the disproportionate spend of traditional TV advertising in relationship to online advertising. According to Wharton:

"Americans spend an average of 14 hours a week online and 14 hours watching TV. But marketers spend 22% of their advertising dollars on TV and only 6% online, according to data compiled and analyzed by Google."

Here's the issue. We continue to have these discussions in relationship to traditional marketing and advertising and traditional advertising buys. We still haven't changed our thinking to look at the media mind set of the customer as they interact with the various types of media.

What am I talking about? Peter (Munck) had a model (created almost ten years ago now) where he looked at all media from the customer's media mind set...



If we start to look at media this way, instead of offline vs. online, it changes the dynamic of how we utilize various media to engage our customers and how they in turn, utilize media to engage with us.

For instance, invasive media would include not only traditional mass advertising such as print, radio, TV and billboards but as well, include certain types of direct mail and online banner ads.

If you look at the Wharton article (and others), they are referring to PAID ad placement - what is invasive media.

However, the shift in the market place isn't from offline to online, it's really about a continuous shift away from solely invasive media to other media types. There are enough articles/books/individuals talking about the Participation Age to sink a ship. And YET...we seem to keep talking about this "new" age of marketing in "old" terms. Until we change OUR conversation, the Age of Conversation will end up comparing apples to oranges in a way that will be difficult for traditional marketers to understand. Not because as some articles suggest "they don't get it" but because half the time, I think WE don't.

Building new mental models (like the one Peter likes to use) help break us out of our collective old thinking and start to build the foundation to both create new networked marketing architectures as well as basis for new conversations with our clients. As the network becomes more pervasive, its usage as a differentiator becomes less and less relevant.

And while you're thinking about that, now start to look at all the various structures and business models traditional agencies have set up for their "online" business and why they continue to have so much trouble within the Agency construct seeing any wide spread success.

:)