Category: marketing

Friday Five: Global Marketing Summit wrap-up

It’s Friday — huzzah! — and as good a day as any to wrap up comments from the Global Marketing Summit. Here are five more takeaways from that event:

  1. I’m not as digitally savvy as I thought I was. At the opening of her talk, Google’s Maureen Schumacher gave us a 25-question quiz to gauge how “digitally connected” her audience was. I scored a lowly 13 out of 25, because I don’t have a Slingbox, a wireless network at home or a Second Life avatar; I’ve never bought or sold on eBay or watched a mobisode; and I don’t own an iPod (although I have two other mp3 players). On the plus side, I do text, blog, buy music online, use a VoIP phone and IM at least once during a typical day. Schumacher said 20 percent of the MBAs who apply for jobs at Google routinely get 20 or more points on this question.
  2. That eye-slitting scene from Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (YouTube vid) is just as disturbing today as it was when i first saw it in a college film class. A couple of ad guys showed the eye-slit clip as part of a session on shock advertising.
  3. I can see the value of shock advertising for certain non-profits for raising awareness (.i.e., about AIDS or the dangers of smoking) but I’m having a hard time seeing how shock advertising might translate to the higher ed sector.
  4. The most fascinating session of the day was one on advances in neuroscience to predict how consumers might engage with a brand in a TV ad. This session was presented by representatives of two Boston-based companies: One to One Interactive and Innerscope, an MIT Media Lab spinoff. The presenters discussed their research on using a “smart vest” that measures a subject’s heart and breathing rates, skin conductance and motion, combining those readings with eye-tracking measurements to determine how a subject reacts to a test commercial. As an example, they showed us a test they did for Heineken and overlaid an “engagement map” to show when the audience was most engaged. This white paper offers more details on the technology behind the research. It’s fascinating work, even if it does sound a bit like something straight out of A Clockwork Orange.
  5. An executive from MTV — Todd Cunningham, the senior vice president of brand strategy and planning — talked about how that megacorp manages to think globally while marketing locally. He referenced MTV’s “Circuits of Cool” research into what role technology plays in “coolness” for young people. He ended with four suggestions for maximizing the role of technology in young people’s lives: 1.) associate with the things that matter (make sure the technology enables or supports those things); 2.) make it easy to make the right choice; 3.) help consumers manage their future occasions (a la Facebook); and 4.) make your brand experiences time well spent (people want simple experiences; avoid “feature creep”).

Let that be the end of the matter. The Global Marketing Summit is now officially a wrap.

From the Global Marketing Summit: David Houle on ‘The Shift Age’

Strategist and marketing consultant David Houle (who has a nice futuristic blog called Evolution Shift) pulled double duty at last month’s Global Marketing Summit — as the ringmaster who got to introduce speakers and make housekeeping announcements, and as a last-minute fill-in for one of the scheduled speakers who got waylaid by a snowstorm.

But Houle was up for the task and presented a broad view of the trends that are changing how we all work, play and exist in this current age (which he’s dubbed the Shift Age).

Houle’s presentation was not as focused on marketing as the other presentations, but that was fine with me. I thought his presentation helped to put in place a context for the shifts facing the marketing and communications world, and helped to set the stage for the rest of the conference. Drawing together ideas popularized by Tom Friedman (The World Is Flat), Marshall McLuhan and others, and intermixing PowerPoint graphs and charts to support his points (and a reference to the forecasts of the Mayan calendar to boot), Houle provided a broad but comprehensive overview of this new era. Personally, I’d love to sit down with the guy over a couple of beers or a cup of coffee to talk more about this stuff. But it wasn’t to be at this conference. Maybe another time.

Houle pointed out three fundamental forces of the Shift Age:

  • The flow to global. Economics have led the way to globalization, followed by politics, then culture.
  • The flow to the individual. The nation-state is becoming an anachronism, and other traditional social institutions — “the pillars of society” such as governments, religious organizations and, yes, even educational institutions — are “being diminished in terms of social impact.” People see themselves more as “global citizens.”
  • Accelerated connectedness. “For the first time in human history, we have a self-awareness of what’s going on around the world.” Expanding on Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the global village, Houle discussed the notion of the Internet as a “neurosphere” (which is also the title of a book that ponders similar ideas).

Next, Houle presented the current realities of the Shift Age as they relate to marketing communications:

  • No gatekeepers. Individuals decide when and where they watch, read, listen. The age of mobile communication, iPods, TiVo and the Slingbox have given individuals more control over when, how and where they will get their information and entertainment.
  • Faster and faster. Everything’s speeding up. Nothing is slowing down.
  • Disintermediation. This term has fallen out of vogue, but Houle would like to see it make a comeback. It means the end of the middleman. It’s happened to the insurance industry (witness the rise of Geico, Progressive, Esurance, etc.), and Houle says it’s about to happen to the residential real estate business. [In some sense, it’s happening in education, too. – ed] To thrive in the era of disintermediation, organizations must either 1.) add value or 2.) lower rates.
  • Power to the people.
  • Say goodbye to long-range planning. Given the current pace of change, who can plan three to five years into the future? Even 18 months out seems like an eternity, and so much can change between now and then.

Anyone interested in this kind of stuff should check out Houle’s blog, Evolution Shift. If you read only one post on his site (but I doubt you can read just one), I recommend it be the one titled New and Threatening Becomes Acceptable and Mainstream.