We will always need print, on-pack and in store activities communications but the digital world is fast becoming a common area to backup the print based solutions whilst giving all Marketing/PR agency clients a full all-round set of services.

From our experience we always hear Twitter, Facebook and I-phone apps commonly used on pitches which are great portals/avenues to go down but to be honest they are aimed at a certain age group or particular audience and 70% of the time they don’t always match-up to the real target audience in which the Marketing agencies are pitching their ideas to.

For Twitter, Facebook and i-phone apps they need to have extremely strong hooks otherwise they will always fall short at the first hurdle.

I always believe in sexy technology but it has to match and meet the clients requirements – especially when you have 12x agencies all pitching for the same business.

Here is my email address is below if you need any digital advice on future projects?

I hope this is of use?

grahambeard@gcreative.co.uk

Matt

I love this article too. And here’s my take:

We are witnesses to the end of the Advertising Age. That “one-size fits all” method for mass-marketing consumer products has simply come to a close. And with that death is the eventual end of an ideology that started with Henry Ford 100 years ago – create a product demand through mass appeals to a generalized ethos. Translation: make people want stuff they don’t know exists or think they needed.

Today’s demands need to accommodate the multiplicity of medium, plurality of audience, media consumption preferences and, most importantly the psychological self-determinism movement that was initiated from the Boomers and fully realized in the last 20 years with sexy technology. Serving up solutions commodity-style won’t cut the mustard with any of us anymore and so we need to consider the entire paradigm of mass marketing models as woefully outdated.

The next frontiers? Niche competitor models where value creation is targeted to increasingly smaller groups of clients and the support is lockstep. Read The Support Economy (Zubhoff and Maxmin) for more on this (and a considerably sharper recounting of the historical basis that got us here.)

We’re moving in the right direction but the casualties will be agencies, practices (just look at law firms and financial services for a view of “the end”), or other service/product businesses that won’t let go of the old ways to embrace and monetize the new ones.

With social media, the different communication vehicles are trying to decide where it belongs. Is it advertising? Is it PR? Is it marketing?

I think it’s definitely PR and marketing. We use social media to build our brands, prospect for new business, and recruit talent. We use different messaging, test campaigns daily, and use what works.

Until ad agencies figure out how to monetize the social networks, they’ll continue to become less attractive.