Well, another year will soon draw to a close and it's time to take stock of what has passed and hope to 1) avoid making the same mistakes again, while 2) repeating and improving on all the good stuff.
2010 was a busy year here at the Bulb, and I've spent a morning reviewing the hundreds of essays with an eye to culling the brightest and dimmest ideas and themes. I've narrowed my findings to 10 (conveniently, right, in this season of lists) and I can't call them conclusions because each of them suggests a number of things worth considering.
So here goes in no particular order (links are to Dim Bulb essays):
Great Ads Are Still Great
For a dinosaur struggling for its last breath in a tar pit, advertising sure proved that it not only has some life left, but that it but plays a vital role in the marketing mix...not because of hidebound tradition, but because it allows brands to say things they can't or won't via social media, and then place that content in ways that no amount of organic or contrived sharing can match. If anything, 2010 showed us that new media change old media, and that there are perhaps new and meaningful roles for paid commercial speech going forward.
Notably great advertising from Advil, Allstate, Domino’s, and Apple was great not because of their creative or dramatic worth -- the traditional ways of reviewing ads that still distract the ad watchers during the Super Bowl -- but because they found creative ways to tell consumers things that mattered. Facts. Education. Substance that could be added to the ongoing conversation about brands.
Conversations Need Purpose
So much of the conversation about online conversation was about conversation, or at least its inherent worth as a marketing deliverable in support of something vaguely referenced as "brand engagement." I found this surprising and wrote during the year about the lack of pupose in conversational media strategies; that there had to be some outcome that had tangible meaning, relevance, and utility for both businesses and consumers. I can't explain why it didn't happen more than it did.
So I thought about the many forms in which conversational purpose could come: the way scientists make the process of discovery and analysis a deliverable as important as their findings; the ways Fox Business tries to impart a dialectic on its coverage (and fails); the challenges for investment firms to make their conversations support claims of financial reform; and the interplay between various marketing tools as part of an uber-conversation that is as important as what's discussed in it.
Marketers Need To Talk About Things Bigger Than Marketing
Those "Top 10" lists that everyone has been creating or sharing these past few weeks were actually the primary substance of marketing conversations during most of 2010. We let Twitter drive the conventional wisdom to equate brevity with clarity even though it gave us lots of content that was heavy on glib metaphor and light on repeatable insight. Maybe it was because so many marketers felt besieged that they couldn't find time to step back and contemplate what was going on around them. I think the conversation overall suffered because of it, and I wonder if 2011 will be any different.
I tried to do my part, though, writing about such things as:
- Trust
- Transparency (here too)
- Social media
- Innovation
- Politics
- Truth
- Content
- Brevity
- Apologies and Toyota in particular (here too)
Creative Isn't A Synonym For Great Marketing
I've long believed that the Creative Revolution in the ad business of the 1960s was a mixed blessing, because it both equipped and hobbled advertising with the belief that creativity was at the core of great marketing. Most of us still believe that brands are creative inventions, even though every indication from the real world tells us that brands are increasingly understood and valued (i.e. priced) based on real world differentiators. Creative can't substitute for them, yet 2010 gave us loads of really creative ad and marketing campaigns that were really, really bad:
Making creative subordinate to business strategy built, delivered, and experienced by behaviors is as heretical a thought now as it was at the start of 2010, so I'm not hopeful it’s going to change much in 2011. It just won’t contribute much in terms of sales or profits, either.
Brands Need To Get Out More
2010 was characterized as a year full of new or renewed conversations with consumers, and one of the main selling points for the use of social media was as a business intelligence tool, so it was particularly surprising how dumb some brands behaved, like Chevron, P&G, Comcast, and Pabst. It's hard to blame them, though, when the reporting on brand and marketing -- whether mainstream media or the blogosphere -- seemed all too willing to ignore their transgressions in order to celebrate old ideas and new hopes. Stories about Netflix, Tiger Woods, Newsweek & The Daily Beast, and even Facebook not only failed to discover anything new or useful, but actually regurgitated thinking that was laughably wrong.
What this tells me is that folks are going to have to be very vigilant when it comes to the information they embrace and follow. I'm not expecting any great outbreaks of Truth in 2011.
Predicting The Future Is Mostly Looking In The Mirror
This isn't a new idea (pun intended), but experts were particularly expert this year at extrapolating their own subjective thoughts and fears into declarations they tried to pass off as trends. One of the recurrent topics was monetizing social media technology platforms which effectively said that this utterly new medium would find revenues and profits doing the same ad selling that had powered, and then failed, old media. Myspace & Twitter got far more credit for possessing the ability to come up with viable plans than any fact of their performance would suggest, and the HBR made a point of doling out wet kisses to the latest fads without any real regard to what the future might bring.
Just ask yourself if you learned anything about the immediate future that you'd consider truly unexpected yet sensible (other than the promises that things that made no sense today would make sense in the future because, well, just because)?
Successes Came From Unlikely Sources
The year was filled with really great successes, and many of them emerged from the most unlikely of sources. Walmart quietly continued to prove itself as a leader in marketing and sustainable development, contrary to what even its friends might have expected. A video game called Starcraft demonstrated many of the qualities that differentiate successful brands from failures, while GM practically went out of business and then got back into the game (catching up with Ford's head start, which it squandered on meaningless marketing campaigns that earned its CMO the "Marketer of the Year" award, so go figure). The Gulf oil spill created an opportunity for P&G/Dawn that was exploited in the most appropriate of ways.
Maybe 2011 should be the year that we all spend less time trying to make the case for our beloved marketing tactics, and open our eyes to finding great work outside of our comfort zones?
It Was A Weird Year
OK, no surprise here since every year is kinda weird, as far as I'm concerned. It was no exception in the marketing world, where Nintendo reported its gameplayers took their virtual girlfriends to real-world resorts that catered to their, er, hobby, while Ryanair did its best to alienate even its most obsessive fans by threatening to charge for in-flight bathroom use. You probably remember something that was equally strange, or more so.
"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," or so the old adage goes, and I did my part to contribute some nutty ideas into the marketing conversation. I nailed and then named two emergent trends -- Squeaky Wheel Marketing and The Somebody Else Economy -- though I'm still waiting for them to pass into common usage. Expect that 2011 will be weirder.
We Lost Our Grasp of Context & Accountability
One of the most intriguing outcomes of our shift to conversation and social tools is that the context of those conversations -- the boundaries, expectations, and reliability that "old" conversations used to promote, however imperfectly -- seemed to evaporate. It's now every individual for her or himself, and we've created a canon that celebrates this as empowerment. One of the key qualities that I worry we risk losing is that of accountability, whether for brands or individuals.
So when the angry moms decided to ignore meaningful conclusion to their worries about Pampers, there was no media context to tell them to get a glue. Much of the information intended to educate or protect consumers (consumer warnings) faded further into the background, leaving individuals to rely on one another...often anonymously...for help. Brands both exploited and suffered from this evolving environment, most notably BP (I also wrote about them here). 2011 looks like it'll bring more of the same.
I Can't Make A Prediction Worth Squat
In my last post last year I predicted that 2010 would see the triumphant return of commercial speech. I believed that there'd be a broad consumer uprising at all the blather about conversation, and that they'd demand honesty and integrity and truth from businesses (or from politicians, or any other institutional authority). Boy, I was wrong...not just sorta but completely. Most social conversation is anything but transparent or, if so, it's transparently pointless, and many brands and politicians are all too happy to talk about transparency without actually talking with it.
The Great Consumer Awakening I forecasted is still a year away. Maybe 2011 will be when it happens -- people refuse to tolerate having their time wasted and their attention exploited -- and I would be all for it.
Happy New Year!
