Ask Michael Becker what will happen to ad agencies struggling to serve what he calls the “connected marketer,” and he pauses for only the briefest moment.
“The answer is not all of them will survive,” said Becker, co-founder and managing partner of mCordis, a San Francisco-based advisory service company for chief marketing officers. On Tuesday, the company will launch The Connected Marketer Institute, which will provide education, an annual awards program and other offerings to help brand leaders better understand its approach for serving individual customers in real-time at scale.
“Broad-based advertising is becoming less efficient and effective,” Becker added. “The typical CMO is spending more money to get the same result because the connected individual is not in traditional media anymore. In order to deliver the comparable audience sizes, you have to go through a lot more channels.”
If that sounds self-evident, mCordis’s Connected Marketer approach (which it has trademarked), tries to provide a framework for serving customers based on four principles: understanding, connection, friction reduction and being of service. The Institute will also be urging marketers to connect physical and digital experiences, but also weave in emotional and “sensorial” elements to let consumers smell, taste and touch something that provides value to them. Becker gave the example of the Sci-Fi Channel, which offers technology to let viewers automatically dim the lights in synchronization with what’s happening on its shows so you feel more part of the action.
Becker said the most important message coming from the Connected Marketer Institute would be that CMOs need to leverage their data to better serve consumers – not just to serve their own objectives. That means making better use of data, but also recognizing the same old way of working needs to change.
“A lot of companies have heavily invested in traditional advertising and media. If they don’t adapt to a model that’s driven by real-time communication, real-time service, physical-digital integration and predictive communications, they will really struggle.”
Becker said the role of mCordis is to sit between the marketer and vendors, and in the same way the Connected Marketer Institute will host a summit and awards this November in Silicon Valley to celebrate those already demonstrating how its approach will work. Beyond getting submissions and attracting paid corporate members, Becker said a longer-term sign the institute is succeeding might be in how it influences government policy around marketing.
“We know how to message people at scale – we don’t know how to listen to them at scale,” he said. “The infrastructure and industry to provide value for them – not to just get value from them — that doesn’t exist yet.”
