The Contagious Commandments by Paul Kemp-Robertson

The Contagious Commandments by Paul Kemp-Robertson

Author:Paul Kemp-Robertson [Kemp-Robertson, Paul and Barth, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241328989
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-08-25T00:00:00+00:00


THE MARKETING LAG

While consumer adoption has tended to match the briskness of freshly created tech, brands have largely struggled to keep pace. For decades, most consumers could be reached by spending advertising dollars on a combination of television, radio, print, and billboards. Marketing departments, therefore, built themselves around these proven media channels and tactical processes, with little need to optimize for adaptability. After all, nothing much was likely to change. This status quo (and its healthy margins) sustained a culture of Mad Men-esque Martini lunches for nearly half a century. In Contagious’s lifespan, however, the need to adapt to change has exploded into an absolute imperative, as new platforms and devices manage to launch and scale seemingly overnight. The ad industry now has to run at full pelt just to keep up.

Take Vine, for example. The short-form video tool was founded in 2012, bought four months later by Twitter for a reported $30 million, and by June 2013 boasted 40 million users – 1 million more than the combined ratings of the United States’ two most popular TV broadcasts: Sunday Night Football and The Big Bang Theory. User numbers rose to 200 million within three years, but Instagram and Snapchat soon usurped Vine, leading to Twitter shutting the platform down in early 2017. This decision no doubt provoked despairing sighs from brands such as Gap, Sephora, Target and VW, which had devoted significant creative energy to honing a smorgasbord of six-second wonders under the false assumption that this new channel would last longer than a military pizza. (Thirty-six months, if you’re wondering.)

This is why we advocated aligning with behaviours in commandment four, to insulate your brand from overreliance on a given platform. Brands and their agencies chase consumer attention as it shifts en masse, quickly and often randomly, like atoms in a jar, to nascent platforms and the latest devices. New precedents are being set all the time, which means marketers generally lack the immediate expertise or time to evaluate how appropriate a match these shiny new things may be for the company’s commercial objectives.

But at the same time, a decision to ‘wait to see what gains traction’ can feel like deciding to concede first-mover advantage or, worse still, arriving at the party with your expensive booze just as everyone else is leaving. Given that figuring out where to bet your marketing resources presents a huge strategic and creative challenge, how do you know if you’re backing the next Facebook or foolishly chucking cash at another Second Life, the place where avatars go to die? Carving out a slice of budget to experiment without overinvesting can be the difference between being prepped to pounce and scrambling to learn new skills once a behaviour or platform hits the mainstream.



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