Could Marketing Clichés Just Please RIP?
Thank the stars your doctor doesn’t have the bedside manner of marketers. If she did, you’d be more likely to buy a funeral plot than an antihistamine when your allergies act up.
Marketers—and yes, the media in general—love to predict the death of, well…..everything. Print? Dead. Direct mail? Dead. Email. Dead? Radio? Dead. TV? Yep, you guessed it..dead.
But as Mark Ritson writes in a great piece for MarketingWeek.com, nothing in marketing ever really dies. The reality is that change happens slowly and often, if you just wait, to paraphrase the great Arlo Guthrie, it will come around again with four-part harmony and feeling.
While the growth of digital advertising is irrefutable, “traditional” advertising forms like TV, radio and outdoor are far from the grave.
“There is a difference, you see, between being ‘dead’ and simply being ‘a lot less powerful than you used to be’,” writes Ritson. “But that distinction is lost in a hyperbolic death cult that sees anything more than 10 years old as ready for the knacker’s yard irrespective of what the actual data might say.”
Instead of dying, many traditional forms of advertising are in a state of regeneration, becoming part of a greater cross-channel big picture. Direct mail campaigns now work in conjunction with digital, to create greater engagement. Social drives prospects to sign up for email, which in turn drives them back to social channels, websites and brick and mortar retail.
Ritson laments that marketing has become “a doom-laden profession, applying imminent death to almost everything we see, feel and touch.”
“Like a school playground, marketing has become a tedious, repetitive world in which cries of “you’re dead” and “no, you’re dead” drown out more delicate, prescient comment,” he writes.
Check out Mark Ritson’s complete column here. It’s a good read.
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