Andrew Careaga

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.

Things are starting to get back to normal around here, so I can finally begin to process my notes from the Global Marketing Summit I attended at the end of February. Due to a crisis back on campus, I only got to attend the first full day of the summit, but the sessions I attended offered a wealth of information about marketing.

First up was Greg Stuart, the co-author of What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds. (We got a free copy of the book during the conference, courtesy of LSF Interactive. I’ve read the first few chapters, and plan to post a review here once I finish the book. Stuart discussed the research behind What Sticks — an “experimental design” approach to testing marketing, similar to what drug companies do. Through their research in cooperation with 30 major companies, Stuart and co-author Rex Briggs extrapolate that about 38 percent of all U.S. advertising — or $112 billion of the $295 billion in ad spending — is wasted.

That finding led Stuart to pose the obvious question: “What if we were wrong?” Wrong about our assumptions that we know what works with marketing, that is. And if his research is on the mark, we’ve been wrong for quite some time now.

So, how did this happen? Why is so much money wasted on advertising? According to Stuart, it has to do with missing the mark on the three “Ms” of motivations (why customers buy a particular brand), messaging and media.

36 percent of advertisers missed the target on their customers’ motivations.
Another 31 percent of advertisers got the message wrong. (47 percent missed one or both of the motivations and/or message.)
A whopping 83 percent of the media mix somehow missed the mark. It wasn’t necessarily wrong, but it was sub-optimal.

To turn things around, Stuart suggests that organizations:

First, get universal agreement to goals. What are the outcomes? What does the organization hope to accomplish, and what will success look like? Stuart and Briggs found that only one of the 30 companies they studied had universal agreement in place before embarking on an ad campaign.
Have a backup plan — a Plan B. Tied to that, have a way of knowing when Plan A isn’t working so you can quickly switch to Plan B.
Know the value of each and every dollar.

The amount of money higher ed spends on advertising is a mere pittance when compared to the corporate world. Still, we could benefit from this insight.