Traditional direct marketers who believe a campaign’s success depends 80% on the offer and the people it reaches would have been hard pressed to find a point with which they could relate in the afternoon keynote at the Ad:Tech conference in New York yesterday.
According to Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, marketing’s future is on screens — television screens, mobile phone screens, computer screens — and it is imperative that companies establish an emotional connection with its customers using site, sound and emotion.
“People are 80% emotional and 20% rational,” he said. “Human emotion is the principle currency of the attraction economy. Consumers make their choices based on emotion. Even neurologists agree: Reason leads to conclusions. Emotion leads to action. We’re in the business of generating action, of turning ideas thoughts and dreams into action.”
Robert’s has also coined a new word for marketing in the screen age, sisomo, and written a book about it entitled “The Future On Screen. Sisomo. Creating Emotional Connections in the Market wit Sight, Sound and Emotion.”
A free copy of the book was on everyone’s seat.
“We’ve lived through the Stone Age, the Industrial Age, the Manufacturing Age, the Information Age, and–unless you live in Australia, then you’re in the early part of that development–most of us have moved though those phases. Canada will soon begin the journey,” He quipped. “Now we live in the age of the idea. These five ages are being supplanted and brought together by sisomo. We live in the screen age.”
Roberts offered the well-filled room or conference attendees a seemingly never-ending diet of polished-sounding phrases naming a new type of economy or age we live in.
“Welcome to the attraction economy,” he said at one point. “The winners in the attraction economy will be those who get to that emotional future first and fast.
“We have imagine that we live now in the land of and/and,” he said later with giant graphics of two ampersands to his left and right. “We’re an and/and world: entertainment and media, telecommunications and marketing everywhere and all the time.”
Later, he said that the days of making products “irreplaceable” are over. “You’ve got to make them irresistible,” Roberts said.
He also said companies must move from “permission” to “attraction.” “With permission you’ve got to ask the customer, with attraction, they come to you.”
Throughout his speech, Roberts paused to show the audience examples of work he believes illustrate his point. A commercial for Pampers diapers showed a series of peacefully sleeping babies as the voice over sang “Silent Night,” for example.
Roberts closed his address by urging executives in the room to go back to their companies and set up a “sisomo division.”
