Which came first? The chicken or the web?
It’s settled. The chicken definitely came long before the web, but my oh my, how things have been changing while the roosters have been crowing . . . the web now always comes first and everything else follows. Or it should, if you want to stay in business!
I spent an interesting couple of hours with a reputable marketing company recently. I won’t name them, because it might shame them, and I want to be seen to help people understand the web, not knock anyone for not knowing it all. Some say I can take the latter role mentioned there quite comfortably!
So one of our clients is paying them a handsome retainer for their services. I’ve got no problem with that if that’s the way they want to conduct their business but it struck me a bit odd that people would pay you just to be there and not have to actually DO anything much, but anyway . . . to the point. These were nice guys but they really hadn’t “got” the web thing. Without putting words into their mouths, essentially they explained that they were a “big picture company covering all advertising mediums of which the web is just one”.
Sorry guys, you’re still stuck in chicken country on this one.
The web IS IT now!
In the last couple of years, there has been a subtle but fundamental shift in the way businesses are being forced to view their web presence. In the early days of the Internet, a website was an electronic brochure that was just there as an apendix to offline marketing efforts.
A TV advertisement would trail a small website address. Business cards gave the web address and not much more. A Yellow Pages paper advert occasionally had a website listed on it. The more savvy operators may have encouraged clients or prospects to view their website on an answerphone message or message on hold.
This has now changed. The web IS IT. Forget the newspapers – they’ve been struggling for years. Forget the Yellow Pages book. My estimate is that more than half of their clients have halved their adverts in the last two years and will do so again in the next two years. Advertising drops in radio, TV, have hammered the people who have creamed it for years umm, provided those services.
There now seem to be more billboards advertising well, billboard advertising than billboards advertising something else. Am I right in that it’s getting harder to find just one of those Tui adverts in the street now, but I can get dozens of them off their website, and even post my own suggestions to them on the web, and get the latest ones emailed to me as the come off their press. word processor, computer, umm website.
When Queen Vic was informed regarding her countries “second placing” in the Americas Cup, she learned the harsh reality. “There is no second place Ma’am!” Likewise with the web. If you’re not on it you simply don’t exist. If you web presence is thin, out-of-date, ineffective or in trouble, you are an also-ran.
You get the point. We Google everything now. We buy from Ferrit and TradeMe and, well Trademe. Except for my 75 year old mother we do it all online. Even my father who is knocking 80 has what he calls his “mistress” all dressed up under covers in his backroom. (Apparently it costs a mint; it’s got a floppy something; other more experienced guys are always encouraging him to trade it in on a new one and it takes all his time and attention when turned on).
But it’s not just all web and nothing else. The art in marketing a business now is not just to throw the baby out with the bathwater and follow the crowd. The art now is to understand that the times, they are a-changing have changed, and to work with the new technology and systems creatively, as we should always do, bringing the timeless principles of marketing and applying them creatively to the new ways of doing things.
This means that instead of apportioning a certain percentage of our marketing funds to the web and apportioning the rest to traditional media, we recognise that THE WEB IS IT.
We will then find ways to use off-line and traditional marketing tools to help build our web presence.
Instead of finding ways to fight the trends and resisting the way things are, we get creative to use printed materials to achieve online purposes. We use radio to feed web-based viral marketing campaigns. We utilise TV for building and reinforcing our web-based campaigns and services.
That chicken had a good number of years head start on the web from the garden of Eden to now (or somewhere halfway between the primordial sludge to the monkey if you’re into that Evolution baloney stuff), but there’s no question of it now – in the last couple of years, the web’s been turning that old Road Runner into a burnt offering.
The web wins now.
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