There's a wonderful scene in Wall-E. All humans are aboard a ship, where computers and robots take care of every need. It's made the humans lazy, apathetic and blob-like. Then, after Wall-e has helped to discover that there is actually plant life growing on Earth, the Captain of the ship decides that it's time to go back. He argues with the Computerized Ship Autopilot - an unpersonal red "eye" computer.
The Captain: "Nothing. That's all anyone on this blasted ship has ever done. Nothing!"
Autopilot: "on the Axiom.. you will survive."
Captain: "I don't want to just survive. I want to live."
Now, don't get me wrong. I love technology and I love Computer Science engineers. I've worked with them almost my entire career. In another life I wanted to be a developer - with a focused passion for reducing things down to their most simplistic and most efficient state. Where everything can be simplified down to an algorithmic state. There's a "law" for everything. I actually really do get excited when an engineer shows off how he's accomplished something in one line of code that used to take ten.
But two things struck me last week...
The first was this article in MediaPost - a summary of Google's Eric Schmidt's take of the "big challenges" of marketing and advertising. The net of the article was a summary of Schmidt's talk at ANA - and commenting how Schmidt had extolled the virtue of marketing as a "mathematical discipline".
Now, in all fairness, I wasn't there, but I did spend the roughly half hour to watch Schmidt's presentation (an excellent way to spend 30 minutes by the way). Schmidt has a number of wonderful points, and what he actually says is this:
"Advertising is one of the most fundamental ways in which people sort out information and what they care about. The gift of advertising - the ability to connect to people in a human way - as opposed to a mechanical or computerized way (my department if you will). Making those social or emotional connections which are at the core of advertising and storytelling is not only important, but becomes more important in sorting all the information out - and it also becomes more possible because the technology is more sophisticated not less."
So, we're all good right? Well, the MediaPost article, goes on to present this doozy - which actually made me laugh out loud:
"Schmidt feels that Google will soon crack the code of massive multivariate modeling of both online and offline marketing mix influences by incorporating "management judgement" into the models where data is lacking. This will enable advertisers to parse out the relative contribution of every element of the marketing mix to optimize both the spend level and allocation - even taking into account countless competitive and macro-environmental variables"
As Seth and Amy might say... Really? Really? Am I reading that correctly? It seems they're talking about inserting some kind of model of human judgement into an algorithm...
And then there was this article.....
from Josh Chasin of comScore - talking about the recent IAB study that showed while online ad spending was understandably down this year, Internet advertising continues to gain share. However, the observation that Josh made that stood out to me was where he was commenting on Internet display advertising:
"there is still a lot of potential upside in attracting brand advertising, which generally comes under display. Indeed, as Brand.net has noted, the Internet only commands about 5% of total brand advertising spend in the U.S, but 30% of direct response advertising. And two, that the prevalence of performance-based pricing is impeding our ability to attract that branding money."
In my view that's right on the money. Basically, there's a lot more opportunity in trying to figure out how to make brand and storytelling advertising work on the Internet, than the direct marketing model that is becoming more and more saturated.
In Short - it's Content!
We've got to get out of this myopic focus. Marketing is not a math problem that can be solved with a few lines of code and a statistician. There's a reason that I've taken to calling Analytics WMD - or Weapons of Mass Delusion.
I've seen too many clients, venturing only down the direct marketing model of the online marketing path, and losing themselves in an avalanche of numbers and statistics. If we continue down this road of trying to reduce the practice of marketing down to an algorithm, then we are going to lose sight of the most important thing - which is connecting with our prospects.
This isn't to say that measurement isn't valuable, and/or should be sidelined. But it's an equal balance of the right brain and the left brain. As Schmidt rightly points out in his talk at ANA, measurement is about iteration, and improving the connection with the story.
If all this sounds familiar (and it just has to me) it's because I've written this before. Here and Here. It's definitely something I'm passionate about, and my only point is that as we put together our 2010 plans - let's not forget to put as much effort into the process and strategy for our content - as we do in all the fancy ways we're going to measure our performance.
Otherwise, your creative thinking might just end up as a "modeled behavior" in a new online marketing app.
CMO 2.0 - Now with creative behavioral feedback loops and artificial intelligence ego.
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