One day I asked a crazy question. Why was marketing failing?
The facts that lead me to ask such an audacious question were simple:
– The average brand is only able to convert .7 of all leads they generate into revenue.
– Consumers have staged the largest boycott in the history of the world currently sitting at over 600 million strong. They are boycotting our marketing with ad blocking.
– Globally we spend over 1 Trillion dollars per year on marketing, yet the idea fails to do its job 99.3% of the time.
With failure rates almost at 100% it is safe to say our idea is failed, but why? It worked for years and built some of the worlds biggest and most profitable brands. To answer this question I went on a three-year quest digging deep into all aspects of marketing, conducted new research, along with a litany of interviews with the worlds brightest minds on the topic, and now have an answer for you; June 24th 2009.
Why June 24th, 2009? All of my research and math points to that day. No, you didn’t miss a news story on that day rather something happened behind the scenes. The media environment flipped into a new era. We left the limited media era and entered the infinite media era. The change had been coming. The Arab spring, death of newspapers, rise in social media, iPhone sales all pointed to the inevitable – a new media environment.
The reason our marketing is failing is that it was designed for a limited media environment. Meaning the marketing was designed to work in a world where media and access to it were limited. This creates specific consumer behaviors and games that marketing should play.
The truth is the world has always lived in a limited media environment because of the cost creating, distributing, and storing/accessing was too high. That is why this is such a big deal. Now that anyone can create, distribute, or access an infinite trove we don’t just have more stuff, we have a totally new media environment.
That may not seem like a big deal, but remember Jonas Gutenberg, the creator of the printing press. He created a way to print faster, and that small change took the world out of the Dark Ages and into the Age of Enlightenment. He only changed the amount of content able to be created. Still, content was only created by a few and consumed by a few. People created more media in the past year than the entire world created in its first 1900 years of existence, all of it accessible to anyone, or anything.
What most people miss is that this is a case of more isn’t just more. More is very different. June 24th, 2009 was the first day in the history of the world that individuals and their devices became the largest creators of noise, and will remain so. Taking the crown from brands and resetting the rules of how media operates, and who it operates for.
Why is this such a big deal? Because the idea we have of marketing is a by-product of its media environment and not a truth in itself. When those foundations change, all of the ideas that rest upon them must too. Ergo, a new environment means a new idea of marketing.
This podcast isn’t about social, how to better reach millennials, or how to buy ads in more efficient ways. This is a deep discussion challenging the very nature of everything we think we know about marketing. It is about a revolution in the idea, creation, and execution of marketing from all angles. A chorus of data, interviews, ideas, and stories all mixed together and put to a beat. This isn’t just a podcast. It is the soundtrack to a new marketing revolution.
As you listen please feel free to reach out to me with questions, or comments. You can always reach me on twitter @msweezey.
Good listening,
Mathew “Sweezey“
Producer & Host