SOUTH BAY DIGS | Digital Edition Online

30 DIGS.NET | 9.20.2019 Distribution and access. Central to the challenges we face in this new digital marketing ecosystem is the ease of distribution and access. For brands and marketers, it's always been about distribution and access, and now we have too much of both. We don't need to look back too far in history to see what disruption to the distribution channel did to the record business, bookstore, travel agency, and so on. Easy access and distribution at scale has created short-term thinking and an over reliance on tactics versus long-term strategy. Today, marketing is like a public company on the NYSE where the long-term vitality of brands come at the expense of hitting quarterly numbers to appease shareholders. It's a vicious cycle of marketing waste and destruction. To make matters worse, this era of "short-termism" has given birth to a whole new breed of marketers, marketing blather, and tacticians who fail to understand the magnitude of this paradigm shift. The inmates are running the asylum. Content at scale. Today, every brand and individual is a media company. To activate engagement and consumer attention you need content, so now we have every person in the World with online access creating content at scale. What the record store used to be to the record label, social media is to brands. They control the distribution of content and monetize the access to your personal data. A marketing label that sticks. Blatherskite is the perfect word to describe the state of marketing and marketing speak today. It means – a person who talks at great length without making much sense, foolish talk; nonsense. Listen closely and it's all around. A good place to start is examining the word itself – marketing. The marketing buzzards have created new terminology to keep the blather nice and frothy. Terms like – online marketing, traditional marketing, digital marketing, content marketing, SEO marketing, SEM marketing, direct marketing, and on and on. Can't we just call it marketing? Enough with the endless marketing blather already, we have bigger and more important matters to attend to. We're on a fast track to marketing oblivion. The online advertising ecosystem has forever damaged the marketing sanctity known as trust. Consider the flood of scandals and corruption uncovered in the last few years alone: ◊ Up to 40% of the Internet is fraudulent traffic ◊ The Justice Department found two recent "Methbot & 3ve" fraud schemes which infected 1.7 million computers with malware that directed computers to spoofed websites designed "to fool advertisers into thinking that an impression of their ad was served on a premium publisher site." ◊ According to cybersecurity firm Cheq, global ad fraud could reach $30 billion, including indirect economic and social costs in 2019 ◊ Hyper inflated "metrics" from Facebook ◊ Criminal federal investigation of Facebook data sharing ◊ Highly paid social media influencers have millions of fake followers which will cost brands $1.3 billion this year (source Cheq) ◊ Click farms running 24-hours per day and growing ◊ Personal data sharing and hacking continue to grow unabated The marketing world has surely changed for the worse, and confusion has set in. Obscurantist blatherskites. P U B L I S H E R ' S M U S E Brilliant! Now imagine in this golden age of content surplus, you had only one dominate gatekeeper to curate it all and suggest where to go next on your journey. That's Google. So here we are - the marketing power grid has been seized, distribution and access has resulted in content at scale, and consumers (and brands) are wondering who to trust and what to do next. And, of course, the marketing vultures are circling above. Marketing, brands, and consumers are in for a wild ride in the coming years as we all try to figure this mess out. Back to brands. What can brands do today? For starters, don't buy in to a short-termism response mechanism that the marketing buzzards will preach. Go back to the beginning, building and nurturing your brand – it's the only way out if you're going to sustain, grow, and prosper in the long-term. But you also must strike a balance between short- term activation tactics and long-term strategy. The same is true for your marketing budget. For a great read on this, check out the findings from noted British researchers Les Binet and Peter Field who wrote a popular book back in 2013 titled "The Long and The Short of It." Ben and Field's research advocated a general best practice of allocating, on average, 60% of marketing spend on long-term brand building and 40% towards short-term activation. The bottom line here is you need to spend the majority of your marketing time and money on your brand. Until next time ~ Warren J Dow | Publisher wdow@Southbaydigs.com | 310.373.0142

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