Top 5 Marketing Articles to Read This Week

Busy week! As always, I'm always reading a ton of articles on the Internets. Here are a few that caught my eye...


What You Can Learn From the Funniest P&G Marketer Ever, by Rajiv Satyal, AdAge

Good advice if you want to add some creativity to your work.


Breaking: Salesforce.com Announces the Marketing Cloud. So What is It?, by Jesse Noyes, Eloqua

Marketing, sales and technology are becoming the same process. Get it? Get it?


David Byrne on How Music and Creativity Work, by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Yet more insight into the creative process...


Are HTML5 and Hybrid App Development Strategies Ready for Primetime?, by D. P. Venkatesh, mPortal Blog

Building out your mobile platform? Wondering whether to go native, html5 or hybrid?


4 Reasons Facebook Dumped HTML5 And Went Native, by Todd Hoff,High Scalibility

Facebook has an opinion. You should probably listen...

Dog Days of August

August is always a bit of a slow month...given that, I've had some time to catch up on the neverending firehose of news, media, content and social media interactions aimed at me. :)

Here are a couple of stories that caught my eye:

Chris Brogan has an interesting post about the tension of real world friendships and "ambient connectivity" in "Is a Social Crash Coming?"

Rohit Bhargava updates his famous 2006 post on social media optimization (SMO) with lessons learned over the past four years: "The 5 NEW Rules Of Social Media Optimization"

AdAge has a very interesting story about how the Steve Slater situation is causing JetBlue problems with their social media and branding efforts, and how they are dealing with it: "How Steve Slater Is Stifling JetBlue's Social-Media Strategy"

The Social Times showcases Pete Warden, the founder of OpenHeatMap. Pretty cool stuff...

Lastly, my agency, Strategic Communications Group, is having a busy summer as we've added two new clients so far: TerraGo Technologies and Whitney, Bradley and Brown.

AdAge Likes PR Now

Sometimes being late to the party has its advantages. A grand entrance, perhaps. But arriving just as the party is wrapping up is bad timing. Traditional PR is dying alongside traditional media. A new form of earned media is being born right now- do these guys get it?

Last week, Jonah Bloom wrote an interesting article for AdAge about the new-found acceptance of PR. Apparently, there was a lot of positive comments about PR from Unilever CMO Simon Clift and Union Square Ventures honcho Fred Wilson at the recent Ad Age Digital Conference. The idea here is that social media is raising the importance of PR within the marketing mix

Fred says:

"There are still a lot of marketers out there buying their media when they could earn it, and earn it a lot less expensively," he said today at Ad Age's Digital Conference in New York.

While overall spending on marketing may go up, traditional-media outlays are declining, and spending is growing on the creative and technology necessary to implement social campaigns on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Agencies have to find a way to continue to make money in this environment.

"The total amount of money flowing out of marketers' pockets to agencies won't decline and will likely go up, but the mix is headed for important changes," Mr. Wilson said.

He goes on to point out that:

The challenge for marketers and agencies, then, is to engage with social media in an authentic way, and know they are going to be punished by its denizens for any perceived spam.

Which, I think, is missing the point. The problem is earned media in the past was that were was no solid ROI for any dollar spent on PR. Yes, everyone knew that an article in a trade mag or coverage on CNBC would yield awareness and credibility, but no one on earth could track just how that turned into sales and profits.

Simon Clift is the top marketer at one of the largest (if not the) consumer products companies in the world. One of his main points is that (emphasis added by me)

"brands are now becoming conversation factors where academics, celebrities, experts and key opinion formers discuss functional, emotional and, more interestingly, social concerns," and "of course, the conversation is no longer one way or 30 seconds. ... You may want to talk about sport and just doing it, and the consumer raises the uncomfortable question of sweatshops."

That's the whole point! Ongoing one-to-one conversations isn't marketing, it is relationship selling. Selling that has to be credibly earned. That isn't a intrusion. That can be tracked over time. That you can assign a ROI to. The transformation of the PR profession from pitching media to sitting at the intersection of sales, marketing and customer service.

I just don't think either of these three fellows quite gets where we are headed.

Media Down, Marketing Up

Today, I started off by reading the Wall Street Journal and found a link to this story in AdAge, "Media Work Force Sinks to 15-Year Low." It begins:

U.S. media employment in December fell to a 15-year low (886,900), slammed by the slumping newspaper industry. But employment in advertising/marketing-services -- agencies and other firms that provide marketing and communications services to marketers -- broke a record in November (769,000). Marketing consulting powered that growth.

Here's the reason behind the disparity: Marketers still invest in marketing, but they have options far beyond paid media: digital initiatives, direct marketing, promotions and events, just to name a few. That creates more opportunities for consultants to help define strategies.

Agencies also have adapted, expanding beyond simply creating and placing ads. Indeed, Ad Age DataCenter research has shown that U.S. marketing-communications agencies collectively in 2005 for the first time generated less than half of their revenue from traditional media and media planning/buying.

We've all been hearing about the struggles of traditional media, especially media, but I didn't have any idea that the agency world was a growth industry.