McLuhan’s cell phone
19th August 2006 by Sam Smith
Recently, ad:tech 2006 was held in Chicago. The organization, which also holds events in New York, San Francisco, London, Shanghai and Sydney, bills itself like this:
ad:tech is an interactive advertising and technology conference dedicated to connecting all sides of today’s brand marketing landscape. Worldwide shows blend keynote speakers, topic driven panels and interactive workshops to provide attendees with the tools and techniques they need to compete in a changing world. We’re committed to bringing you the now and the next of modern marketing.Who should attend? CEOs, CMOs, Marketing Execs, Brand Managers, Ad Execs, Media Directors, Buyers, Planners, Product Managers, Solution Providers, Creative Directors.
Issues to be addressed: Email marketing, Podcast, Consumer Insights Blocking and Tackling: Data Details Strategic Roadmaps, Plans, Case Studies of Integrated Programs.
If you read all this and conclude that ad:tech is cutting edge, that it’s where marketing is going, then they have successfully projected the intended message.
But there’s something missing. Something huge. ad:tech is ignoring the most important technological channel in the lives of the most significant demographic market perhaps in the history of the world. The medium is mobility and the market is the Millennial generation.
Millennials currently range in age from about 6-26, and they represent buying power that’s unprecedented for a group so young. Teenage Research Unlimited estimates that young adults spent nearly $160 billion in 2005. Ketchum estimates their financial stroke at $172 billion, and everybody watching the gen expects that number to rise dramatically in the coming years. From a marketing and branding standpoint, they’re a massive force to be reckoned with.
Anybody who’s ever paid the slightest attention to this group knows that their mobile phones are oxygen to them. In fact, mobility is the medium the defines this generation. It’s how they connect to each other and to the content that matters to them. It’s a critically important tool in helping them shape their personal identities and forge communal bonds. It’s the most intensely personalized communications medium ever developed - you can customize its look and functionality, and it’s linked to the individual, not a location.
Millennials are turning away from television and other forms of traditional media, and while they still spend plenty of time with the Internet, some marketers will probably be surprised to learn that they’re abandoning the use cases we take for granted. While they love social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook), and YouTube is simply exploding, they’re moving away from e-mail. It’s not immediate enough for them.
These factors should be exerting a tremendous influence on every marketer who targets customers under 30. But I almost never see campaigns that are integrating mobile plays, and this personal perspective was validated in spades by ad:tech. Best we can tell, there were precisely two mobile vendors in attendance. No mobility panels, no major sessions, nada (which is evident from their own promotional verbiage noted above). And the general awareness level of mobility and its importance to the Mill market was almost nonexistent.
How is it possible that an org dedicated to tech in an industry is failing to notice the most dominant technological trend affecting its members? Imagine that it’s 1997 and you go to a conference on technology in advertising, marketing and branding, and only a couple people are talking about the Internet. That’s where we seem to be.
Well, it’s easy enough to flog people for being behind the curve, but it’s not especially productive. The point here is that a veritable tsunami of opportunity is cresting for those positioned to take advantage. Think-forward brand pros need to understand the power of mobility and begin integrating it into their activities now. We have to speak to our audiences in their own language, and it does us no good to grok the language if we aren’t seeding the channels they’re tuned into.
Medium = Message.
August 19th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
The marketplace in mobile (commonly the cell) is a physical reality. Yes. But it’s a dead zone in terms of the Millennial acceptance of messages over their “private” communication format.
Marketers are to be give some serious credit (in this one instance) for treading lightly. The “space” of the mobile environment is perceived by the Millennials to belong to them. Intrustion into that space with a marketing message would be taken to be invasion, and would not be tolerated. There is no telling to what extent a computer-savvy generation could do to those who walk in their private garden without invitation.
Please advise me if I’m wrong, but I simply do not believe youth social sanction to use the “space” of mobile for marketing yet exists.
greg stene
August 19th, 2006 at 4:06 pm
Good question, and thanks for the opportunity to clarify.
Any marketing message needs sanction, and I’m as violently opposed to unwanted commercial intrusions into m-space as I am to spam.
What I’m talking about are opt-in elements that are driven by the audience’s ability to obtain meaningful content. Manufacturers have lost a lot of ground to retailers in determining the look and feel of the in-store environments where their products are sold. If I make jeans, X Mart might make it just about impossible for me to use packaging elements to build connections with customers.
Now, say the label on the jeans has an option to text in for more info, for special offers, for value-adds, for whatever. Their participation is voluntary and mutually beneficial, so long as there’s a there there.
In order for this to REALLY click, though, marketers are going to have to evolve their sense of what a brand relationship looks like. In my view, they need to let go of the idea that everything has to have a sell message and trust the power of their supplemental content to do the work for them. But hey, that’s another story, I guess.
Again, though, thanks for raising the issue. Your sense of the principle here is important.
August 21st, 2006 at 1:46 pm
Sam and Greg,
I fall somewhere between you because:
1. My four grandsons (ages 9-13) are glued to their cells — and their Ipods.
2. While they’re not yet sophisticated to always know when somebody’s “marketing at” them, they do know when something is temporarily stopping them from whatever it is they want to do next — and they resent it.
3. But, yes, they can be “marketed at” eventually. But only after cell bandwidth improves and user devices have a little larger screens.
In short, I’d say hold the messages until the medium grows up a little.