Authenticity is the currency of marketing today: be real or, don’t bother.

When I was a pup, growing up in radio, Larry King was lord of the talk universe; doing interviews with little or no prep, asking the questions we would ask. It worked when King was dialed into what was going on around him. That was then…

Time has marched on and Larry has become increasingly out of touch. What once came across as sincere curiosity is now seen as inauthentic faking. Today’s increasingly connected consumer can spot a fake just like Jerry Seinfeld does here:

The days of faking it are dead. Authenticity requires homework; know to whom you’re talking. Cut this corner and it’s only a matter of time till you appear as out of touch as Larry King.

My DVR’s skip button is the guilt button. Anytime I catch myself hitting it, I get a pang of guilt. It begs the question: how much do we “get” while fast forwarding through the ads? Maybe more than you think.

NBC recently had Boston-based Innerscope Research hook up sensors to people and measure everything from heart rate and eye movement, to palm sweat and eye movement. The goal: determine what effect  television viewing has on viewers. While still preliminary, The New York Times reports that results indicate viewers are just as engaged while fast forwarding as while watching.

“People don’t turn off their emotional responses while they’re fast-forwarding,” said Carl Marci, the chief science officer of Innerscope. “People are obviously getting the information.”

“Whether people watch or not is not a useful measure of anything,” said Joe Plummer, chief research officer for the Advertising Research Foundation. “Exposure has very, very weak correlation with purchase intent and actual sales, whereas an engagement measure has high correlation and are closer to what really matters, which is brand growth and creating brand demand.”

Engagement is the beginning of the magnetic force in Attraction Marketing. It’s that moment you leap the divide from advertisement to relevance. You’re granted a conditional audience to build upon.

Remember that next time a media rep comes in beating the “exposure” drum. Exposure boils down to old-time promotion. Engagement is the manifestation of salient messaging:  the road to long-term consumer conversion.

Shingles and nails are the stock and trade of a roofing company. Or, so I thought till Carl Boyer at Ideal Roofing opened me up to a different way to thinking about 15 years ago. Carl said he was really running a marketing company generating phone inquiries; he sub-contracted the work, had suppliers deliver directly to jobs, and had only to close the agreement and inspect the finished work. He’s a marketer, not a roofer.

Radio is in the portable entertainment business. It shouldn’t be in the broadcasting business anymore because that model is sliding toward obsolescence. You can hear it in every promo directing listeners to a station’s streaming website.

Already Arbitron and Edison Media Research report that while radio
ratings remain flat to down, internet radio listenership has climbed to
29 million a week, up from 20 million three years ago.

Technology is the dam holding back a flood of change. And, the dam is leaking. When the internet is able to deliver radio to cars effectively, broadcasting as we know it will be lost in the flood.

SanDisk’s Sansa Connect picks up Yahoo online stations in wireless areas. Sprint Nextel is working with Pandora Media to bring a personalized music service to its phones; Pandora is developing their own portable player too.

Most promising of all is Dallas-based Slacker, which will have an in-car player in the market by the end of this Summer, according to The Wall Street Journal. (Subscription Required) Even though their player receives via satellite and stores to a hard-drive, the source material comes from the internet.

While Internet radio remains a nascent industry populated by small players and zealots, they’re the same kind of people who pioneered broadcasting. Maybe radio today could learn a lot from a roofer named Carl.

Saturday morning cartoons and sugary cereal are a tradition dating back to the dark ages of our childhood. It is a perfect example of advertiser needs trumping customer concern; they want to sell cereal to your kids without regard to your dietary standards. Till now.

Kellogg’s is now increasing the nutritional value of their kids cereal and snacks–products which represent 27% of Kellogg’s product line. And, if they can’t be fixed, Kellogg’s will stop marketing them. They’re also making immediate changes to online promotion of all products in conjunction with this initiative.

Score another win for the age of alignment. Parents and advocacy groups have argued for years about concern for child obesity. So, why now? David Mackay, Kellogg’s president and CEO, says increasing concerns about marketing to children prompted the action. But, haven’t those protests been going on for years?

A company’s ability to push product is declining as consumer messaging control increases.  Kellogg’s read the corn flakes and realized they had to align with consumer concern or risk losing it all. Getting a durable bond from alignment demands an authentic shift. The authenticity of Kellogg’s alignment will determine its success.

Now, if we could only get the TV people to fall in line with Saturday morning programming with higher nutritional value for young minds.