New Business Week (December 3, 2007) has an interesting article about big changes in the advertising business. The article focuses especially on Saatchi & Saatchi’s challenges to keep their revenue and find a new growth. They have won new customers (like J. C. Penney) and marketing professionals love many of their campaigns. But their clients have not got concrete commercial results from the campaigns. As Business Week says: “Yes, most clients still believe in creating an emotional bond with consumers. But Roberts had come to the conclusion that many companies are desperate for an über-consultant-a ‘brand navigator’-who, in a fragmented media universe, can help them to make that connection across multiple media.”
Business Week continues: “For most of the 20th century the so-called creatives ruled the industy. They didn’t worry about where and how an ad run. They didn’t analyze market niches. They were about Big Ideas what would connect a brand, emotionally, with millions of consumers. Today, you might say, the Small Idea is ascendant. Ads are targeted at individuals or communities of consumers. That’s because the media universe is so fragmented - into blogs, social networks, television, magazines, and so on - that finding the right medium is fast becoming more important than the message itself.”
Some other interesting quotes from the article: “This data-driven approach is a natural fit for Web advertising, one reason direct agencies have become a dominant force online.” and “It was the need to fill this gap (from TV, print, and radio to multiple media) that prompted Roberts to try and buy a digital agency. Last year he hired an investment banker to find one.”
But it is exactly the following comment that explains Xtract’s fast growing business: “Marketers are stampeding online, where Saatchi lacks the tools and talent to compete. Digital boutiques are proliferating, staffed with ’90s tech vets and Gen Y video artists dedicated to making ads for social networks and whatever comes after them. Meanwhile, chief marketing officers are looking for data to justify their ad budgets to the bean counters”.
I really liked this article, it really summarizes the change in marketing and advertising. And it is a concrete example, why marketers and advertisers want Xtract’s solutions to utilize real digital media customer data for profiling, targeting, and consumer understading.
