CharlieMoger.com

Marketing and advertising advice for owner-operated businesses

Convertising

Advertising is one big stew; a conglomeration of discrete conversations in different settings each with a unique set of protocols. The shift in TV only serves to drive home a bigger (often overlooked) point:

“Advertising was once a simple mass-market media buy; now it is a dialogue between a seller of soup, sneakers or cellphones and a particular media outlet’s narrow audience. That media outlet is just as likely to be a computer screen or a mobile device as a television set, media buyers say. As a result, advertisers are starting to treat TV more and more as just one conversation among many.”
—Brian Steinberg, Wall Street Journal

Like sales, advertising is a conversation between two people. Effective advertising doesn’t speak to anyone, it speaks to every ONE it reaches. When you stop advertising and start conversing about what matters to customers, you will have begun serving a tasty meal that sticks to consumers’ minds.

 

[Originally published 9 Nov 2005]

A seismic shift

A fissure opened yesterday spewing hot gas and smoke as television’s landscape changed forever. NBC and CBS followed ABC’s lead by teaming up with Comcast and DirecTV  making programming available on-demand–something the once-mighty nets steadfastly resisted far too long. Soon, viewers will have access to programs of their choice for 99-cents a show.

Denying consumer choice is akin to locking the doors of your business because you expect customers to arrive on YOUR schedule. Only the clueless would argue against the growing choice-driven marketplace.

Consider what’s about to happen in prime-time television. Will a program’s longevity one day be tied to paid viewings rather than estimated mass viewings? No doubt networks will not only know how many people are viewing, but WHO is viewing their product.

If an ad ran and no one saw it, would it still be an ad? It’s not a silly question. This is a new reality bulleting toward you: a consumer controlled marketplace means you can no longer force-feed your message to a pliant population. Like trees felled in a vast forest, advertising is increasingly falling unseen because advertisers ignore the reality of consumer choice.

Our challenge is to create marketing newly empowered consumers CHOOSE to see; compelling, relevant, genuine messages that set aside pretense and hype.

Don’t just open the doors, hand your customers the keys. Speak in their language. Give yourself over to their choices. This isn’t a fad. This is the new landscape.

 

[Originally published 8 Nov 2005]

Core thinking

Thoughts are fast moving things. Leaping about in the left and right sides of our brain, we create and discard a million possibilities in a moment. Those who can birth these fleeting ideas into tangible existence are considered creative (even though we all could, only an intrepid few DO).

The video iPod is a good example of creative thinking in application. A room full of TV execs sat down to discuss the pros and cons of the new device recently. Some thought it cool, some dismissed it like the movie studios dismissed the dawn of television. What will the role of this technology be?

Nina Tassler, President of CBS Entertainment nailed it,  “You need to find all these different ways to continue to bring viewers in.  It all has to feed back into our core business.”

Your core business. What is it? It’s not marketing–that’s MY business. Are you in retail? A service company? What is the thing you do well? What is it you want to be known for? That’s your core business and just as the video iPod may prove to be for television, your marketing should be for you: something that feeds business back to your core.

Any time you catch yourself spending time away from honing your core to meddle in your web site or newspaper ad or human resources, remember this: your core business needs to be nourished to grow and its best food is thought.

Take time to think.

 

[Originally published 27 Oct 2005]

So fifteen minutes from now

Acceptance of my kids’ advanced sense of hip reminds me, life is like those moving sidewalks in the airport: walk or stand still, you’re being carried along–walking the wrong way will only keep you in one place.

My kids call me “so fifteen minutes ago” when I share my understanding of current hipness which they’ve long since digested or spit out. It’s all moving and we’re being carried somewhere…

So, if NOW is so fifteen minutes ago, what is still fifteen minutes AHEAD? Hang on to your carry-ons and grab the Advil, passengers: here comes IPTV.

Heralded as a Trojan Horse to the media fortress, this new technology is going to shake up changes in television we’re still coming to grips with now.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Diane Mermigas says, “Ready or not, dominant gatekeepers — from cable and satellite operators to telephone companies and television networks — are about to confront a new competitor: open-sourced, real-time, stored digital video on handy Internet-connected devices that play by a different set of rules.”

IPTV could do to TV what the Walkman and iPod did for/to music retailing: personalize and decentralize it. As they learned in Troy, walls of a city are more easily torn down from within. When consumers take control of content without regard to what will soon seem a narrow-band channel of distribution, choice will indeed go critical mass.

This end-run will put enormous pressure on your messaging: it has to be relevant, real and compelling. If you think the effectiveness of broadcasting is declining due to fragmentation now—wait fifteen minutes.

 

[Originally published 11 Oct 2005]

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