They used similes and analogies to make their points, but the opening keynote speakers at Toronto’s Art of Marketing conference yesterday had a clear message for marketers: According to Mitch Joel and Seth Godin, there is no obvious path when it comes to dealing with a socially connected marketplace, and only the brave will survive.
Joel, president of Montreal agency Twist Image and author of Six Pixels of Separation, addressed the crowd of 1,600 attendees first by urging them to change how they view consumers. Just as explorer Hernan Cortes burned his boats upon reaching the new world in the sixteenth century, so too should marketers leave behind the habits bred by traditional media. According to Joel, there’s no going back.
“As marketers, I want you to think about how you’re going to burn the ships,” he said to open the conference. “I’ll modernize that. I want you to control-alt-delete.”
Much of Joel’s speech explained the extreme connectivity of modern lives. Instead of social media being dominated by idle teens and tech junkies, he asserts that nearly everyone uses its tools daily, whether it’s reading online product reviews, performing a mobile search or visiting Facebook.
To show this ubiquity, Joel referenced Facebook data that showed grandparents and those over 55 as the fastest-growing demographic on the site, while growth among teens and students is either stagnating or declining.
“You have grandma on Facebook to make sure [the grandkids] aren’t putting too many drunk pictures of themselves online,” he said. “Then she gets one invite from a third cousin from Europe she hasn’t seen in 15 years and right down the social media marketing rabbit hole she goes.”
Joel went on to say constant connectivity circumvents traditional marketing, using the example of SnapTell, a mobile tool that lists product and purchase information of items photographed by smartphone cameras.
“What [SnapTell] tells you is how physically close you are to purchasing [that item],” he said. “This is an application that’s been downloaded millions of times. This, my dear marketers, is a game changer. When somebody can walk into a Best Buy, take a picture of a Blu Ray player, walk over to a manager and say ‘This is $35 cheaper five feet away,’ what does that do to your world?”
Joel recommended marketers facilitate transparency and interaction in such a marketplace, allowing users to review and comment on products. It’s advice that many companies ignore, he said, because they fear bad comments and reviews.
“I want integrity back in the art of marketing,” he said. “It forces us to think differently. The traditional model from our world is based on ‘how many?’ [as in] ‘If I put my ad in front of millions of Canadians, a small percentage of them will buy my product or service’ and that’s where we’ve made our money… The online world doesn’t care about how many people you get your message in front of. It cares about ‘who?’ “
Without a one-to-one connection of some kind, he said, consumers won’t care about a brand. The perceived loss of brand control, he adds, is an illusion.
“You still control products and services, you still control pricing, distribution, advertising et cetera. Consumers still control what they’ve always controlled: whether or not they buy from you and whether or not they tell someone how great you are.”
Joel was followed on stage by Seth Godin, author of Tribes and All Marketers are Liars.
Godin’s keynote drew from several of his books including his latest, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? He urged marketers to “be brave” and “be genius” in addressing the problems of the new, social media age.
“No big brand in North America in the last 10 years has been built on the back of interrupting strangers,” he said, describing the reported decline of the television ad. “That day is over… Marketing has become leadership.”
North American consumers have everything they need, Godin continued, and instead they’re now searching for what they want, and “what they want is something to believe in.” Brands that can find a community of consumers to represent will succeed, he said, similar to how “Nike invented the idea of people who run on the weekend, and that tribe of people recognize each other.”
Godin believes creating those communities will require massive changes to the “factory” mentality that steers most corporations to produce “average products for average people.”
