(Photo courtesy of @gapingvoid)
By Tony Hynes
For those of you unfamiliar with MediaPost I recommend you check it out – it is a great community for anyone working in the marketing field. Joe Marchese’s recent post on how the growth of social media will affect the marketing industry, and which discipline is best placed to build services around this evolution of the media landscape, was particularly interesting. It eloquently poses the question that most marketing organizations and agencies are asking themselves – what is the impact and opportunity presented by social media and its many manifestations?
However, I think it does miss the broader point, that the traditional model of advertising revenue paying for objective journalists and broadcasters to report on social, political economic and business issues is rapidly becoming redundant. The underlying economic structure of the media industry is in turmoil and the ultimate model is still relatively opaque. This is game changing for every marketing discipline outlined in this post. The rise of social media is simply a function of the changing business model.
What is certain is that there is still going to be a need to market products and to manage companies’ perceptions and there will still be a societal need for citizens to be informed. However, how this information will be disseminated and by who is still unclear. What will shape it is how people want to consume information and their taste for varying types of content. Legitimacy and creativity will be the critical components. Knowing your audience will continue to be the DNA of a successful campaign, which in turn will set the messaging and positioning. What medium is chosen to disseminate the message will become increasingly tactical. It’s way too simplistic to think about which marketing discipline can adapt to become a social media agency of record, or whether this should be done in-house.
What we can be certain of is the whole value proposition of marketing agencies is changing, and being a CMO is getting an awful lot harder.
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