The dog days are over for lazy marketeers not willing to put in real effort for their clients
If there’s one thing I really hate, it’s ‘lazy’ marketing. I’ve been involved in the marketing industry for 20 years now so I’ve seen plenty of it in my time. And yep, I’m sure I’ve been guilty of it from time to time (ain’t nobody perfect no matter what anyone says).
So what do I mean by lazy marketing? In short, anything that isn’t well thought through, original, creative, targetted or designed to actually elicit a response (you know, whisper it quietly, but we do what we do to ensure people take notice…). Examples of campaigns that don’t fulfill these criteria are numerous. Just the other day, I noticed a competing agency had launched exactly the same thought leadership ’campaign’ in the UK that we launched around 10 years ago. They’ve even entered the campaign for an award! Maybe they thought the passage of time gave them permission to use the ideas again, maybe they didn’t care. But it was lazy marketing all the same.
The genesis for this post though came from my shower this morning. Bear with me… I was listening to a commercial radio station and the adverts came on. The final advert before going back to the presenter was from a very well known insurance company and it’s main message was ’we won’t appear on price comparison sites because you’ll get the best deal by coming direct to us’. As the advert finished, the next segment was introduced as ’brought to you by XXXX price comparison site’. Now, if I were the marketing director of said price comparison site, I’d be mighty annoyed that I’d spent a fortune on sponsoring a radio show only to have a highly negative advert be placed right before my company was mentioned as the show’s sponsor. It was the direct juxtoposition of the two conflicting messages that made me sit up and take notice. What were the ad guys at the radio station or the bods at the media buying agency thinking when they allowed this to happen? Maybe they didn’t think about it or maybe they didn’t care. Lazy marketing.
The good news is that such lazy behaviour is going to die out and with it (one would hope), lazy marketeers. Why? Well, we know that the web is changing marketing for ever; chiefly because the advent of sophisticated analytics demands that we plan and justify our marketing activity in terms of traffic, click throughs and individual online engagement (and the latter is truly the holy grail for all of us, not just the pursuit of traffic). I was reminded of this at the Alterian (full disclosure – Alterian is a Bite client) Engaging Times event that I attended last week. One interesting stat came when the audience of some 500 senior marketeers was asked to rank where they would provide most budget and focus in the coming year. Online analytics was by far the number one spend. So the message about the impact, potential and importance of analytics on the way we market is clearly hitting home.
Will we still get instances in the future of shoddy planning/execution like the radio example I cited above? Probably. But make no mistake about it, increasingly sophisticated online analytics is going to force marketeers to raise their game significantly. And that can only be a good thing.
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