Peace Was Not Meant to Last, Even in the Marketing World
Can you imagine what it must have been like on that late summer day in 79 AD, living right at the foot of Mt. Vesuvius? The ground rumbling under your feet, looking over to see an ominous, dark cloud of hot gases and ash rise 33 km into the sky. Can you imagine the feeling of complete despair and helplessness as you watch that very cloud rolling over the distant plains, engulfing everything in darkness? Must have felt so minuscule; does trying to run away accomplish anything? Is there anything that you can do?
Our modern day Mt. Vesuvius comes in the form of the three tech giants: Apple, Google, Facebook; and their battle for supremacy. Slowly and persistently, these three behemoths have been jockeying for first position. What started as a simple glance over the shoulders to assess the terrain, turned into apparently innocent or even playful bumping of the elbows. We saw as neat features rolled out at a pretty rapid pace and new interfaces developed to help businesses leverage the power of data. Marketing teams and do it yourself business owners rejoiced as “inter-platform connectivity” became the norm and data was seamlessly transferred between "houses". If there are any lessons from history, it is that good times don't last.
If you were serious about outbound marketing or advertising, you were buying media; and I can bet that you were doing a good amount of that purchasing on social media, especially from Papa Facebook. What made buying media from Facebook so attractive is that you could get great results if you were using the full breadth of their data management system. The beauty of being able to follow a user across platforms, that is from facebook onto an app or a website and back to facebook, and delivering specific content based on their behavior was… well too good to last. Why? Because this depended on “open borders” across service providers and “permissions” to track users.
Businesses that have relied on targeted media delivery now find themselves under the growing cloud of eminent destruction; borders are being closed and information is being siloed.
What disrupted this era of peace and collaboration?
What brought the speeding train of progress and innovation to a halt on the digital frontier?
Power. Please reread that last sentence, but this time with the voice of Senator Palpatine once he has revealed himself as the dark Sith Lord.
One of my favorite scenes from the Tarantino film Pulp Fiction is when Vincent Vega, played by John Travolta, and Jules Winnfield, played by Sammuel L. Jackson, get shot at numerous times at very close range by a .357 (a “hand cannon”) inside Brett’s apartment, but miraculously every shot misses. A very deep conversation about divine intervention arises and is quickly cut short as Vincent tells Jules: “Do you wanna continue this theological discussion in the car, or at the jailhouse with the cops?”
I am not going to dabble into the why this is happening:
Why are we losing user tracking across platforms?
Why are the tech giants looking to dominate the internet?
Why power?
Why?
Well, I ask: “Do you want to stand here and try to figure it out or would you like to be moving along seeing how you can adapt?” Besides, it's a good topic to cover later on.
Boiled down, paid media experience will be shifting; as information is being siloed, tracking users and delivering very specific (retargeted) ads for the customer journey will most likely be phasing out. This is a great opportunity for businesses and marketing teams to breakdown their strategies and restructure their approach. At the end of the day, marketing comes down to dollars coming in the door; our challenge is to find the right mix between campaign objectives that achieve growth.
If we break down our funnel into the most basic stages we can come down with 3 parts: awareness, consideration/interest, purchase. Retargeted media worked on the latter two, feeding off of information generated in the first stage and early second stage: seeing an ad and then visiting a website or using an app. The purpose of retargeted as has been to address possible objections to a purchase: benefits, convenience, value, social proof; and “guide” the customer through the rational justification process.
Recently, I heard about an interview with Toto Wolff where he was asked about the new Formula 1 rules and regulation changes. His response revealed quite a lot about his approach to problems and obstacles; “Those are the rules, now we just have to find our way around them.” The objective is to be the fastest car on the field; if you can’t improve one element of the vehicle, you look for other areas to re-engineer.
If we find new restrictions at the middle and bottom of our funnel the Toto Wolff thing to do would be to find where else we can improve.
My recommendation is to deepen our top of the funnel and dare to blur the lines between the stages as much as possible. In a certain manner, our brand awareness content will have to start addressing more of the obligatory questions right off the bat in a discrete manner:
Who is this for?
How will it solve my problem?
Is this accepted by my peers?
Why is this for me?
We KNOW that we cannot jump straight for the jugular, I believe that the key to success will be in having these answers embedded in our visuals. This is where creative directors will thrive, given a clear plan of what our visual content should communicate. Creating content that reaches deep into the funnel is no easy task by any means; but through careful observation some diligent planning we can re-engineer anything.
The tech world is a volatile place, and it needs to be in order to deliver on its promise. It shouldn't surprise us to see it destroy the very pillars that it has constructed or to cannibalize itself for the promise of speed, convenience, precision, and even prediction.
Every catastrophic moment in history, be it a war or a natural disaster, has propelled resilience and strengthened mankind.
This is our opportunity to thrive, thanks to adversity.
