Community Marketing Malpractice

My degrees were in history and political science.  I also studied law.  But my career was in marketing; or more specifically, the marketing of communities.

Fortunately, my collegiate exposure to marketing was a theoretical survey course using the provocative teachings of Harvard’s Dr. Theodore Levitt.

So I always had a much different, and many would say provocative approach to community destination marketing than my DMO peers, who over-relied on the components of traditional sales and advertising.

Results would suggest far more successful too, than those who over-relied on the components of traditional sales and advertising.

Far too many still do today, which is puzzling.  This post may help young community marketers avoid what had been termed “marketing malpractice” by the time I retired nearly six years ago.

A lot about marketing has changed during that span.  Maybe it intrigues me as to why many DMO execs aren’t keeping up because my intellectual curiosity hasn’t yet retired.

Marketing includes the elements of sales and advertising but it fundamentally differs in its overall purpose.

Myopically, to use one of Dr. Levitt favorite words, “selling” customarily has focused on the needs of the seller.

Many use the term relational “selling” today but then still pretty much focus on what “they” have to sell rather than what the customer needs.

Advertising is and has always been focused on “getting” attention.  Trying to “demand” attention is far more like it, which is why so many marketers call it a form of “yelling.”

This is confirmed in this age of waning attention spans when so many lazy practitioners desperately seem to only know how to “yell” louder and louder.

Marketing weaves these and five or so other components into a blend designed instead on creating and satisfying customers, according to Levitt, which means “un-creating” customers for your community if that means directing their attention to destinations more suited.

A longitudinal study at USC determined in 2010 that traditional advertising now has an overall negative return of investment but that its decline began three decades ago, a decade before the Internet was made available for public use.

Still, many of those who bothered to read the study theorized that the demise of advertising was due to the Internet or the fragmentation of media or even clutter, meaning a proliferation of too many ads.

But marketing historians were aware that complaints about ad “cutter” date, at least, to January 20, 1759 when a copywriter and essayist noted, “Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused.”

Dr. Thales Teixeira (Tech-Sarah,) a contemporary Harvard marketing researcher, is an expert in what he calls the “economics of attention.” 

From various studies he has graphed that attention to even  television ads had plummeted from 97% of viewers in 1990 to fewer than 2 in 10 today, even though ads are more than 75% shorter in length.

Attention to ads was plummeting long before the Internet was an alternative and had fallen by nearly half when TiVo, the first DVR device that enabled ad-skipping was introduced in 1999.

This was also long before mobile devices divided the attention of the 44% of viewers who multitask into even thinner slices.

Illustrating the desperation of advertisers, including most that are oblivious to the drop in attentiveness, is that during that span the cost per 1,000 primetime viewers has skyrocketed from $18 to nearly $200 per view, while the quality of attention has severely degraded.

Dr. Teixeira calculates that “Attention is one of our three most valuable, scarce and fungible resources.”

Now even Levitt recognized in his 1993 treatise entitled Advertising: “The Poetry of Becoming,” that ads at the very least provides “variety and changes the pace.”

It’s not unlike the rationale one my friends argues on behalf of billboards, a long-obsolete medium.  But this calculus fails to take into account the turn-of to turn-on ratio of ads.

Yup, and a few people only buy print magazines that are purposely laden with ads.  But attention today, and for several decades now, is something you earn rather than demand.

It is about “them,” not “you” and “yelling” about your product, your community, your brand is a turn-off even when you try to be cute and entertaining.

In the words of Seth Godin, “the goal of marketing interaction isn’t to close the sales, any more than the goal of a first date is to get married.  No, the opportunity is to move foreword, earn attention and trust and curiosity and conversation.”

Trust is the key to earning attention and “you must build trust before you need it,” or want it.

Godin also explains why advertisers seem clueless and only respond by increasing clutter.  “And as with pollution, because no one owns the problem, no one is working very hard to solve it.”

“Advertising” he argues, while explaining why consumers are now “using a sledgehammer to block them all” is in “a relentless race to the bottom.”

A former classmate of mine at BYU who is now renowned Harvard business professor by the name of Dr. Clay Christensen, argued several years before I retired that the paradigms of marketing itself are broken and must be reconfigured beginning with the way we segment customer prospects.

He shows how any communication under the umbrella of marketing, including advertising, must, in the end, show consumers what “job” they need to hire your product or community to do, exposing the flaw in communities that try to be appealing at everything, only to find they have sold their soul.

Christensen, who is famous for coining the concept of disruptive innovation, would not only agree with me that many of my peers, though much younger are marketing dinosaurs but that they are committing “Marketing Malpractice.”

I will continue this primer in the next post by reviewing why techniques such as advertising, not just roadside billboards, are now so obsolete.

Unfortunately, most marketing dinosaurs probably didn’t get this far (sigh.)

Small Business and The Golden Age of Geomarketing

A new survey of small and medium sized business advertisers (SMBs) across the nation by Borrell includes a list of “paid” media they favor for those who still use that element of marketing.

It helps to understand that 72% of these SMBs have fewer than 50 employees and 48% have fewer than 10.  Nearly three-out-of-four are independently owned.

The paid media they favor, in this order, are digital, newspapers, local magazines, direct mail and radio.  Mobile falls sixth.

If you throw in all outdoor advertising including buses and kiosks, only 17% still bother with billboards which along roadsides are viewed as blight by 8-out-of-10 Americans.

Taking only true small businesses into account, another report shows that only 3% of small businesses now use billboards confirming they can do the math of the turn-off-to-turn-on ratio.

More than 80% of SMBs have established their own media channels in the form of a website and social media page.

Interestingly, the analysis found that 72% are now spending far more on digital services to support their websites and social media pages than they do on basic or traditional advertising.

Borrell concludes that we are at the “end of the Golden Age of Advertising” and witnessing “the dawn of the Golden Age of Geomarketing.”

According to the report, local digital marketing is responsible now for virtually all of the growth in local advertising.  Borrell defines local ad spending as dollars spent within the market to reach people within the market.

But geomarketing is now getting far more specific than the huge, sprawling, multi-county media markets devised by traditional media to optimize what they could charge advertisers by hoodwinking them into believing that consumers would commute hours away for what they could easily buy local in the truly local sense.

That’s what makes the findings of the report even more relevant.  That’s because geomarketing puts the local back in local, meaning the local business climate.

In 2013, Borrell forecast the zoom in online advertising with traditional media rather stable.  But the company’s 2015 survey reveals an even more rapid transition to online.

In reality, longitudinal research at USC’s Marshall School of Business pinpointed that this paradigm began to shift three decades ago and by 2010 , traditional advertising for businesses overall had reached a negative return on investment.

It is clear from many who analyze this rapid decline that the advent of digital and the Internet didn’t kill advertising greedy advertisers and traditional advertising mediums did.

Advertising as an element of marketing is essentially a form of “yelling” for attention.  Yelling annoys consumers even when they are viewed as entertainment or diversion as they are by 77% of viewers during the Super Bowl.

Ads during the game have a substantial turn-off ratio among viewers.  According to post game surveys, nearly 4 people were turned off by the ads during the 2015 event for every one who was influenced to actually buy something.

FYI, turned-off includes those who were bothered or viewed them as interrupting the game or making it last too long or felt the advertisers should have saved their money and passed the savings along to consumers instead.

Even if only awareness generated by the advertisers is measured, the turn-of-to-turn-on ratio barely reaches break even, hardly a metric worth shelling out $4.5 million for a 30-second spot.

Many “yup yup yup uh huh uh huh” marketers fail to grasp that traditional advertising can actually be counterproductive.  But savvy execs understand this is a fatal flaw, especially when the cost comes to $3 a viewer, double that when netting out those who were annoyed.

But then again, maybe stockholders should view these as an incredibly expensive way to stroke egos.

The shift to digital continues to have so much momentum that analysts at Borrell forecast that traditional media will soon begin to be used, if at all, more like “niche support mechanisms to a digital marketing plan.”

Full research reports and analyses are available from the Borrell website.

Humpty Dumpty Marketers

This post does not mark the end of my annual hiatus which will run into August.

I’ve been mulling over a future post that a business school professor-friend of mind asked me to write about what I see as the future for community destination marketing organizations, my former profession.

It will be an opportunity for me to practice what I preach about looking back to see forward for strategic insight.

It pains me to admit that many in my former profession don’t seem to be the brightest bulbs in some respects or there would be far more than 200+ of these organizations that are accredited.

Maybe I resemble that remark in some respects (smile.)

But even accreditation, which is essentially a diagnostic to identify areas for continuing improvement, isn’t a guarantee against a proclivity common among far too many DMO execs.

This is the regressive tendency of a few tenacious but well-meaning and otherwise reasonable execs to waste everyone’s time trying to put the proverbial “Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

What these folks fail to grasp is that forms of organizational structure and marketing strategy along with various tactics become obsolete because essentially the “ecosystem” of tourism has rapidly and perpetually evolved.

They could easily spot these paradigm shifts in SWOTS analysis if they were not in such a hurry to check that process of the list rather than mine it for insight.

Brian Solis, a strategic analyst, futurist and principal for Altimeter Group, now a Prophet Company, has a great line.  “The future of marketing has little to do with marketing.” He is referring to traditional marketing and especially advertising.

Some businesses and organizations in the various industries that make up travel and tourism are guilty of hypocritically keeping roadside billboards on life support.

I call their use “desecration marketing” because they underwrite no content other than the advertiser “yelling at you” while blighting the communities and scenic assets that motivate travel.

All of this to reach 2/10th of 1 percent of people who are motivated to buy something in a given year based on that form of message.

If you have read some earlier posts, you will see the irony in the message on the image captured of a billboard in this essay.  It was posted on one of the 80 or so remaining in Durham, North Carolina where I live and where billboards were banned in the early-1980s.

For those new to this blog, between smart devices and in-vehicle navigation systems, eight times the percentage of Americans who aren’t turned off by billboards in general have already shifted to navigation systems for both directions and to find points of interest such as gas stations.

The advertiser on that billboard shown above is proud of its efforts at conservation and environmental restoration but that apparently doesn’t extend to scenic preservation including eliminating sense-of-place pollution such as sign blight.

It is not the first company where company marketers apparently feel exempt from social responsibility policies when it comes to where they advertise or oblivious to metrics such as turn-off ratios.

Traditional advertising overall (in newspapers and on radio, television and billboards) began an overall decline in effectiveness three decades ago that by 2010 had reached a negative return on investment.

When adjusted for inflation, ad revenues for newspapers today have fallen below where they were in 1950.  Even when digital and other revenues are included they are essentially where they were 65 years ago.

Other traditional advertising mediums are or will be following suit.  Analysts now project that newspapers are poised to replace local television when it comes to local video content within the next ten years.

The rapid shift to online advertising instead has created what experts such as Mathew Ingram, a senior writer for Fortune, described as an “arms race” this month between advertisers who still don’t get it and viewers determined to block out ad content.

Marketers engaged in this arms race have failed to notice that even online, where ad blocking has grown 7 times just over the past five years, that the ecosystem for advertising period has changed.

If you want to reach consumers, it no longer works to yell at them which is essentially what advertising is. There is no use trying to put that obsolete “Humpty Dumpty” back together again.

It isn’t the nature of advertising that changed; it is the overall consumer ecosystem.  It is long overdue for communicators to also evolve.

But many marketers, including more than a few in my former profession of community destination marketing simply won’t.  That’s apparent by their steadfast refusal to evolve or perhaps due to stakeholders who won’t let them or peers who keep pulling them into futile schemes to reassemble old “Humpty.”

Billboards are an example.  The first one was erected in the United States in the 1830s.  They had become a pariah to consumers by the 1880s when billboard owners turned to out-of-step lawmakers to keep them on life support.

Oblivious or lacking a strategic bone in their body, many advertisers who are obviously also very bad at math still insist on using them today, even though eight consumers are turned off by their use for every one who isn’t.

Like I said, not the sharpest knives in the drawer.  But hey, neither was “Humpty Dumpty.”

The Quiet Giant - Small Businesses & Local Merchants

A survey of small and medium sized businesses by Borrell Associates shows that their use of traditional advertising declined by $58 billion since 2005.

Not counting micro businesses, the “S” in SMBs which rarely ever advertise, or SMBs whose out-of-town parent handles advertising, nearly three-quarters of this segment, which is a bellwether for economic development, has switched to online as its advertising of choice, if any at all.

This downward spiral for traditional advertising began in the late 1980s, long before the Internet, due in part to greed and over-utilization to where by 2010 researchers found it to have a negative return on investment overall.

This, according to analysts at Borrell, is clearly the end of an era.  Consumers have simply tuned out.

Some channels such as outdoor advertising, even when used on buses and kiosks and when added with billboards, is now used by only 17% of SMBs including 3% of truly small businesses, making this way of reaching consumers all but obsolete.

Now appealing to less than a fifth of one percent of consumers, billboard companies have turned instead to campaign contributions and donations as a way to ensure survival, desperately hoping to lay waste to public roadsides as a result.

Meanwhile, consumers have shifted in mass to smartphones and navigation systems as less damage-prone alternatives.

The decline in advertising doesn’t mean a decline in the need for marketing overall.  Another new survey of small businesses as part of Small Business Week shows that 66% named finding new customers as their top concern, followed by 40% who are concerned about retaining existing customers.

Nearly all now rely on a website.  A survey by Adobe shows that by the end of this year, nearly 60% of all organizations will have a website with responsive design, meaning it will reconfigure depending on the device you are using to view it.

In fact, half already generate 30% or more of their digital traffic via mobile devices but, less than a third in North America have a strategic plan for using it.

When it comes to small businesses including local merchants, only 22% are using mobile marketing although nearly half allocate a quarter or more of their ad budget to it.

According to a survey by Street Fight, more than half of local merchants cite new customer acquisition as their primary objective.

Unfortunately, many local chambers of commerce, a type of business advocacy, have now turned their backs on small businesses as too needy compared to the fees they will pay.

It makes these organizations vulnerable instead to becoming hostage to interests who pay people to attend meetings and gradually less relevant and increasingly estranged from local business climates.

Small businesses are vastly under-represented in communities because they don’t have time for meetings, committees or public hearings, even though they are the key to economic vitality.

Even though 4-in-10 rely on community destination marketing organizations to fuel visitor-customers, barely 43% even have time to take vacations themselves.

Over half worked for a large or mid-sized organization before running their own business according to the study.  Nearly 70% cite “more freedom” as the reason for going small, and half sought less bureaucracy and politics.

The things you hear politicians claim they are doing on behalf of small businesses such as the economy, taxes and healthcare, are top concerns for only 25%, 22% and 18% of small business owners.

Most small businesses are not whiners as special interests would have you believe.  Unfortunately, politicians spend far too much time listening to these special interests and become hyper-reactive to complaints or so desensitized they dismiss them.

Like the vast number of voters, small businesses can often be heard by the silence they make, not the fuss.

Culture, Mindset, Analytics and Nonprofits

A recent article heralded the halo effect of advertising, but the almost impossible task of measuring the effectiveness of traditional advertising means any probable halo effect is more attributable to marketing.

This is because marketing is a blend of various communication activities, only one of which is advertising, and less and less of that is traditional advertising which experts now find has an overall negative return on investment.

It is this blend, when customized to each organization, that creates a synergy transcendent of any of its elements.

Unfortunately, a survey released this month shows that less than a third of marketers (32%) put data and metrics “at the heart of their strategic decision-making.

What is disturbing about that finding is that data-driven marketing is nothing new.  By the early 1980s, it had found its way to the core of a small nonprofit community marketing organization I led.

Granted, I was an “early adopter,” as I still was in 1989 with similar startup with which I was involved.

But seeing how quickly this approach enabled early adopters to leapfrog more established competitors, one would expect it to be more mainstream by now.

Studies pinpoint that the reason so many marketers remain mired so far in the past is because of they lack a strategic mindset even though recruiters for top marketing positions now find that attribute, along with analytic skills, more important for marketing leadership than creativity.

A study conducted in 2012, long after I retired from four decades in the field of community marketing, showed that the nonprofit sector in the U.S. had grown 3.5 times the rate of the for-profit sector.

Fast Company magazine surveyed their ten most innovative companies in not-for-profit recently to ascertain what talents and skills will be in most demand in this sector over the next five years.

Top are data-savvy skills.  Next come design skills.

Those, along with technology were at the core of my last non-profit startup 26 years ago.  I don’t say that to gloat but out of puzzlement. We couldn’t have been three decades ahead.  Really!

If I stumbled into those competitive advantages so long ago, how is it that so many of my former peers across the country apparently still don’t get it or is it?  Or maybe its that their governing boards don’t get it?

Survey results show that 96% of marketers today know that data is important or very important including 9-out-of-10 in senior management but as the authors point out, that is very different than knowing how to collect, manage, analyze and utilize it.

Telling is that fewer than half of marketing organizations give more than half of their own employees access to their data.

This is why so many go to the trouble of contracting analysis to show how effective their marketing strategies are, known as the “turn-on” ratio.

However, they nearly always fail to measure the equally significant “turn-off” ratio such as when their ads are merely a form of yelling or placed in the wrong context such as on billboards where they are associated with desecration.

Even Super Bowl ads have a 5-to-1 turn-off to turn-on ratio, further illustrating that less than a third of marketers have data and analytics at the heart of strategic decisions.

Marketers will be in high demand if they have a strategic mindset, understand analytics and design and recognize that marketing is not only about “turning-on” consumers but minimizing “turn-off.”

The president of the Rockefeller Foundation is quoted as saying that nonprofits in general are projected to continue to hire more talent than the for-profit sector over at least the next five years.

Silverpop, an IBM company, has just published an ebook entitled, The New CMO Guide – A Handbook for Marketing Leaders.  This is also an example of content marketing, a form of advertising that has replaced traditional advertising.

The authors note research showing that 82% of marketers feel unprepared to deal with the data explosion.  In part, this is why the average tenure for chief marketing officers is now only 48 months.

Even more so, this may also explain why, according to Spencer Stuart, this tenure was less than 24 months just a decade ago when the importance of data belatedly began to dawn on marketers.

But especially in the field of community marketing, hiring a chief executive with a strategic mindset who understands analytics isn’t enough.

It is an organization’s culture that makes all the difference and sets the tone for “innovation, growth, market leadership, ethical behavior and customer satisfaction,” according to a new white paper published by Spencer Stuart, also a form of content marketing.

It was management guru Peter Drucker who originally discussed that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” later modified by others as “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”

But Drucker wasn’t referring to a document as much as the strategic mindset.

Culture in the organizational sense is what Dr. Kelly Page of NativeHQ refers to as “an iterative process over time that we enact, guided by vision and values forged through conversation and collaboration…our individual and collective voice over time.”

Shawn Parr, head of Bulldog Drummond, encourages us to view an organization’s culture as a “nurturing habitat for success.”

He continues that “Cultural cannot be manufactured;  It has to be genuinely nurtured by everyone from the CEO down.  Ignoring the health of your culture is like letting aquarium water get dirty.

A shared culture creates critical alignment.  And that alignment must also include each and every member of an organization’s governing board.

The 400% Increase In Workplace Skills

Destination marketing a community is more complicated than marketing a specific business or organization.

Community destination marketing organizations (DMOs) such as those I managed are intermediaries.  They have no control over the communities they market requiring that a lot of time be spent cajoling stakeholder businesses, strategic partners and officials to align.

Few, if any, of these stakeholders have any clue about marketing let alone sense of place, but usually they think they do, making alignment far more complicated than it may sound and a never-ending process.

And you thought herding cats was difficult.

Residents are the ultimate internal stakeholders for a DMO, especially those who are passionate about their community, but if they only knew that the greatest obstacles to marketing a community comes from those they assume would be the first to get on board.

Workplace skills needed for community marketing range far beyond what people think of as marketing including analytics, project management, technology, strategy-making, critical thinking and organizational behavior, to name a handful.

Also required is a working knowledge of areas such as archeology, history, physiography, consumer psychology, geology, financing, culture, ecosystems and authenticity.

Just in the first 18 months after I retired more than five years ago in late 2009, skills needed in the workplace increased more than 400% from 178 to 924.

This is also why experts see the future of higher education including periods of intensive competency-based education and re-education while in the workforce, something my last organization began to provide to staff with an online program in 2005.

Each employee was able to take up to 20 courses annually selecting from over 3,000 titles, each followed by an online test to demonstrate competency.  But supervisors and direct reports selected some courses in support of specific roles that could be taken during the workday.

The inability to adapt to this need for competency-based workplace education is what led disruptive innovation guru Dr. Clayton Christensen a few years ago to predict that within 15 years, half of the universities and colleges in America could be in bankruptcy.

He didn’t mean that the need for traditional higher education will decline but that the way it will be accessed is rapidly shifting in a way that may leave thousands of smaller colleges as well as many state institution behind.

A leader in this movement to competency-based education for students already in the workforce is Westminster College, a few blocks from where my daughter and grandsons live.

Another is Southern New Hampshire University which redesigned its entire business administration program into modules that provide an innovative, competency-based, three year bachelor’s degree  but  this is all a topic for another essay.

A litmus test I often used to quickly detect how much someone really knew about marketing a community is if they still lobbied for mass marketing such as traditional print, radio and television, dating them by at least three decades.

That’s when, as research shows, marketing shifted away from how many eyeballs you reached to reaching the right eyeballs, not by “shouting” to get attention with traditional ads but earning attention through astute “content marketing.”

Long ago, reaching just the right consumers right at the time when they wanted the information through tools such as search engine optimization and Google adwords transcended traditional advertising.

Savvy marketers today understand that 20% of their efforts produce 80% of their results and similarly 20% of their customers or prospects represent 80% of their success.

The fact that I came early to this awareness in my forty year career is due to listening to astute elders in destination marketing who understood how fast things were changing.

The challenge in marketing is to cast more and more narrowly in order to zero in on the most likely and highly engaged prospects - without interrupting them - until they are seeking information to make a decision and it is clear your destination or product is what they want.

Now, according to studies, marketers are investing in “retargeting” or re-engaging users who have already accessed content about a destination or product via an app or mobile website.  Research shows that for every $1 invested in retargeting there is an incremental increase of $4 in sales.

It works best when focused on prospects who are already engaged.  A mistake many marketers make is viewing it as “missionary” work when at its very essence; it is more like gardening than hunting, more cultivating engagement than casting nets.

For retargeting to work, you need engagement and that begins with great content that zeroes in on what marketing intelligence (research) has identified as traits of greatest appeal to a specific audience.  Even more importantly, you must be willing to accept that your product isn’t for everyone and stop “yelling” to get attention such as with billboards.

The key objective to content marketing, which began its transcendence three decades ago, is to provide something of value focused around differentiation.

A form of retargeting can be seen in action when you leave a website to search another related to the same objective and an ad pops up with the opportunity to return to a deeper link on the earlier site.

The percentage of marketers overall that spend up to 50% on retargeting has doubled in the last year.  Nearly three-quarters (71%) of marketers spend between 10 to 50% of their digital marketing budgets on retargeting.

As marketing has been for more than three decades now, segmentation of those who access marketing content is at the core of retargeting.

Retargeting will be more of a challenge for community marketing organizations (DMOs) because they are intermediaries.  The actual transactions take place with stakeholder businesses and organizations but it can be done.

As one chief marketing officer, Adam Berke, noted recently, marketing placement has evolved from “guess and check” to real-time programmatic campaigns that leverage engagement to ROI.

So the next time you pass by a community still using traditional media such as outdoor billboards, wave hello to a real live “dinosaur.”

Also certain is that as much as I appear to keep up with destination marketing since retirement, I became a “dinosaur” the day I walked out the door.

The same can be said for today’s college graduates.  A degree is just the beginning of a lifetime of learning.

Self-Gifting Delusion

In late 2011 television news outlets signaled that paid newspaper circulation (total weekday and Sunday) was close to slipping below 40 million, a decline of 32% over two decades.

But less than 24 months later, those same outlets gave little notice when cable TV, now known as “legacy television subscription” slipped below that same threshold, having dropped more than 10% in less than three years alone.

When we cut the cord entirely in our house in 2010, television executives were arguing that the phenomenon was economic in nature, not the result of disruptive technology.

But by the end of 2011, 11% were considering doing so and a study in 2012 showed that 25% of legacy television subscribers planned to drop that service over the next five years.  Taking cord-shavers into account, the drop is becoming more precipitous than what hit newspapers.

Newspaper executives were astonished at the speed with which their business model was undercut by the Internet in the 1990s but not nearly in as much denial as landline telephone services were when the smartphone did the same to that technology less than a decade later.

It took less than a year after Netflix began streaming in 2007 for cord-cutting to move from fad to an accelerating trend.

Having good data is not an antidote for being delusional, nor is television the only industry in such gross denial.

In my former profession of community marketing, there are still far too many obsessed with visitor segments that have long been in decline such as conventions, pushing or enabling cities to build mega-facilities and then spending huge subsides on out of town groups that typically displace more tourism than they could ever create.

Evidence that this is a form of insanity has been available since the 1980s.  Similarly, community marketers and television executives often collude to subsidize huge sports events which also displace more economic impact than they create.

Corruption is rarely involved, unless it is lobbying, a form of legal corruption.  Just denial.

New media is at its worst when covering news media.  Listen in the build up to the Super Bowl as an example.  No it isn’t more popular than ever.

No the ads aren’t a turn on.  They turn off 1.2 viewers for every one viewer motivated to search for more info or buy something or feels made more aware.

The hugely expensive ads have a negative return.  So who is in denial?  Denial is a cooperative enabler and in this case, it includes the news media, advertising agencies, advertisers and about half of viewers.

One of the above is being ripped off,  But television may be the one being ripped off by convoluted data regarding the huge disruption now underway.  Instead of forewarning executives and stockholders to take significant action, it is full of mixed signals, in part, to desperately cling to the status quo.

All of this came to mind recently as I watched a presentation by arborists working for one of the nation’s largest utilities.  The presentation was quick to assign the costs of outages to trees but not to the fact that the utility lines should have been undergrounded decades ago.

The presentation was also clear that the lower lines running from pole to pole desecrating neighborhoods, home values and community scenic stature did not belong to the utility.

They belong to cable and land-line telephone companies and other utilities that are as obsolete as running the lines above ground.

It is the free market at its most irresponsible, unless you also factor in the obsolete use of coal to generate the power.

Free or freeloading?

These businesses are trapped in antiquated and unsustainable business models.  But waiting for them to adopt full-cost accounting or to write off stranded infrastructure is about as feasible as expecting lawmakers to see past the obfuscation created by billboard lobbyists, on behalf of another dead business model.

A new study indicates that nearly 6-in-10 shoppers in the US are self-gifters.  Maybe our only hope is to gift our communities the infrastructure to put these obsolete technologies underground.

We’re paying through the nose anyway.

Finding Myself Going In Opposite Directions

As devices go, I find myself going in opposite directions.

For different reasons, my cell phone just got a lot bigger and my tablet smaller.  The iPhone 6+ is a lot easier to read and the mini-tablet is a lot easier to handle.

Research I will get to suggests I will soon be shedding some devices.

For me, the size of the keys on the keyboard of the 6+ is more important than making or receiving phone calls, partly because when I do, I am in the Jeep where it happens via the sound system or on speaker mode.

Very rarely do I raise the phone to my ear anymore and the larger size works just fine when I do.

Even for people north of age 65, such as me, only 18% use their cell phones a lot for phone calls compared to 38% of the general population, according to Gallup.

Among Americans overall, 18% rarely use cellphones a lot to make or receive phone calls, compared to 27% who rarely use them for text messages and 29% who don’t use them to read or send emails.

More telling though, is that more than half of Americans now rarely, if ever, use a landline.  More than 64% rarely, if ever, use a landline at work now.

Even among those in my age group, only 17% still frequently use a landline from home.  Of course, all but 7% of those under age 30 are probably looking up to find out what a landline is.

By the way, for anyone who wears a leather belt-loop holster to carry their phone when not in use, I have a recommendation for where to get one, especially for an iPhone 6 or 6+, and even more so if you use a protective case.

Alyssa Nott, an artist up in Fort Wayne, Indiana makes these to your specification and she does wonderful work.

In 2012, friends who learned I had read several books on my cellphone during one of my annual cross-country trips since retiring five years ago, thought I was crazy.

I didn’t realize I was among only 8% of people my age who read e-books, available from numerous apps including one from local bookstores, and even as loaners from some public libraries now.

But that same study showed that by 2012, a quarter of Americans who read e-books did so on a cellphone, including 41% of those ages 16-29.

I always read a bit before going to sleep, often just reversing the screen from white with black type to black with only the type backlit.  I have found myself, without realizing it, using the iPhone 6+ instead of the tablet.

It isn’t inconceivable that I won’t buy another television either.  I am one of the nearly 8 million Americans who only stream when it comes to television and I have to say, watching on an iPhone 6+ is pretty impressive.

Those who measure television viewership are scrambling right now to do a much better job of capturing metrics across all screens as well as digging deeper into things like engagement.

A report this month showed that mobile apps are surpassing television in minutes per day.  In part, this is because television viewership is “graying,” and nowhere more than cable.

Click on the infographic shown in this post to see an illustration.  Click on the chart at this link to see the growth in “app events” (action completed inside apps, not just opening and closing them) just since I retired at the end of 2009.

Time spent on mobile devices in the US grew 9.3% over the last nine months to an average of almost three hours a day, while time spent on television was flat at 2 hours and 48 minutes per day.

But a Nielsen executive last month noted that the drop in prime-time television ratings is the result of people watching on other devices.  It just hasn’t reached agreement on how that will be counted.

This sounds a little like newspaper executives a decade ago who were arguing that circulation has been level since 1991, just as advertising revenues, which translate more to the bottom line, were going into a free fall that continues today.

Millennials still watch television, just not traditional television and especially not television news.

By location, 98% view video at home on a smartphone as do 58% at a friend or significant others home.  Half view it on a smartphone while on vacation, more than a third while commuting, and a fourth will at a restaurant or bar.

They are watching television, just not on a television set, and just not live.  My career in community marketing reaches back to a time when it was important to note whether hotel rooms had a television, a color television.

I can now see the time when having an in-room television will be as obsolete as that landline telephone they still have.

Why Advertising Remains Effective In One Area

Published in 2008, a study of the effectiveness of traditional advertising (TV, radio, and print) found it began to lose steam three decades earlier, long before the Internet became viable for the general public.

Using updated research tools, the study reanalyzed scores of studies going back well into the 1960s and found that traditional advertising began to lose steam long before the Internet provided an excuse.

Today, even durable goods such as automobiles and appliances, which were lonely exceptions in the 2008 study, have now shifted more than half of any advertising to digital forms.

But despite the fact that there is now a negative return from traditional advertising, there is one area where it excels: political attack ads.

Having been recognized myself in the early 1980s for advertising innovation and excellence, I can see a few reasons why:

One is that political races are winner-take-all in this country so a candidate only has to influence one or two percent more voters than his or her opponent, as Thom Tillis did over Kay Hagen in the North Carolina race for U.S. Senate.

After $79 million was spent on attack ads by independent groups of anonymous donors on this one race alone, it isn’t likely the narrow outcome in the state where I live was influenced much by the $30+ million spent by the candidates.

Two: no other type of advertising would be considered successful because it alienated 2% fewer people than it influenced.  Especially since, persuasion of other products and services must influence public opinion every day, not just every four to six years.

Three: people are more responsive to negative information than positive.  This is why frustrated voters often reward the perpetrators of dysfunction while laying blame on those who tried to do something positive.

The question is not how I made it through this election season untainted by this influence but how I came to see three campaign spots, one of them three times.

A total of $16.25 was spent per vote, obviously much higher if taking into account only those who didn’t or couldn’t escape the onslaught.

It is no secret that I have long been one of the now 7 million Americans who stream all video content including television.

During the campaign my radio consumption was only while driving, making coffee or feeding the pups, and it was restricted to satellite radio and NPR.

What may be more telling is how those three ads made it through.

One was a billboard paid for a group on behalf of Kay Hagen, not an attack ad, but the medium a turn off because it is obviously incongruent with her values.

The other two, including one I was forced to wait through two more times was on behalf of Thom Tillis with whom I have worked on state legislation, were only to attack Hagen.

I use the word “forced” because whoever paid for these attack ads on You Tube, where I was gleaning content for two personal history essays, apparently paid Google a little extra to turn off the ability to skip these particular ads after a few seconds.

Sensitive otherwise to annoying users, Google otherwise enables the “skip ad” feature.  It is also because advertisers there are not charged for impressions that are skipped.

But the choice of six seconds before skipping an ad may be because Google analysts are familiar with cognitive research finding that 6.5 seconds is all the attention paid to ads, even on-screens such as television.

If the message isn’t clear in that window of time, advertisers are wasting their money.

In fact, studies show that Americans now pay attention to anything an average of just 8 seconds, down by a third since 2000.  That may seem like an eternity if riding a bull or bronc but it is less than the attention span of a gold fish.

And the average “memory span” is half as long.

It gets worse.  Attention span breaks down into five types and only “continuous attention” makes it to 8 seconds.

Tempted to dismiss averages?  Run it through an 80/20 computation and it will be clear that while a tiny fraction will watch an ad over and over, the vast majority of those the ad is intended to read never register it at all.

Traditional adverting is further complicated now not only because consumers, bombarded with an average of 10,000 a day have learned to tune them out, but because the window of attention when given is incredibly brief.

Political attack ads work because the advertisers really don’t have to worry about turning off half of those who watch them while reinforcing previously held misinformation in the other half.

All they need to do in North Carolina is reach enough Independent (unaffiliated voters) in certain counties to generate an extremely narrow win and they pray the vast numbers it annoyed have short memories.

Sound like a good strategy for marketing any other product?  Nope, it would be suicide by commercial.

Skip alert – readers who don’t know me will not grasp the irony in what I write next.

Nearly all of my adult life, I’ve been encouraged to run for office, something I’ve never been inclined to do.  This is because I have fared well in surveys of residents about job performance.

So to cut off any possibility of retreat on that stance, as a fun exercise, I have noted below how a hypothetical opponents regardless of leanings could trash me with attack ads:

• he’s an independent, therefore wishy-washy and indecisive.
• he’s too chummy with developers and business types
• he’s too chummy with neighborhood leaders and other guardians of sense of place
• he impatient with meetings and is too introverted
• he is too logical, cold and relies too much on data
• he’s been married too many times
• he doesn’t attend church, at least in buildings
• he’s uncompromising ( won’t go along just to get along)
• he rides a Harley so he must have gang ties
• he’s one of those environmentalists, a tree-hugger
• he drives a Jeep so he obviously doesn’t care about the planet
• he has an English Bulldog so he must not like kitties
• he’s too Durham oriented and parochial
• he believes in social justice so must be lenient on criminals and welfare cheats
• he doesn’t let special interests bend his ear
• he’s not a team player
• he’s a northerner (or a westerner) when it comes to old Dixie
• he volunteers for tax increases
• he’s against tax breaks and loopholes
• he’s too intense

Hell, I probably wouldn’t vote for me either.   But my reasons for not being interested in elected office have nothing to do with preserving my reputation.

There are just good people far better suited.

Ironic First Step to Reclaiming Durham’s Story

It took a few months to figure it out. But 25 years ago as we jumpstarted Durham, North Carolina’s first community branding and marketing arm, one of our first challenges had little to do with Durham.

Back then Raleigh, a community south and east of the airport co-owned with Durham, was desperately over-reaching including expropriation of the assets and identities of other communities.

It was obnoxious but as with most place-related desperation it was fueled by insecurity, an observation made to me as we departed a meeting by the scion of a family that had owned the newspaper there for nearly 100 years.

It became clear to me that one of our challenges, if we were ever going to reclaim Durham’s story and give its brand some much needed oxygen and sunlight, it would be doing something that had nothing to do with marketing Durham.

Ironically, if Durham was ever going to get its due, we had to make the case to Raleigh that it could stand on its own.

As a friend who had worked for the New York Times told me when I accepted the challenge of my fourth destination marketing start-up, “one of those places may just as well be Tulsa and the other Kuala Lumpur.”

Her point was that while they each co-anchor a polycentric “family of communities,” they have very distinct cultures, and as I suspected at the time of her comment, distinct brands, primarily obfuscated only by misuse of the name of the jointly-owned airport located midway between.

Part of my challenge in those early news interviews was to first persuade Raleigh-based media that there was a “there” there in Raleigh while setting the record straight about Durham.

It is hard to believe now but in meetings with counterparts there at the time, I repeatedly had to make Raleigh’s case to Raleigh promoters, officials and residents.

In marketing, this is called lowering barriers.

The work of any holistic community marketing organization is 1/3rd promotion and 2/3rds lowering or eliminating barriers.  All too often ignored, the latter is the “heavy lifting” of successful place marketing.

No amount of promotional energy alone is enough to overcome barriers.

Eventually, new Raleigh allies emerged who understood that if Raleigh learned to stand on its own, not only would it produce better results for each community, but the vast poly-centric region encompassing Raleigh and Durham, now two distinct metropolitan designations, would be better served.

Marketing Durham presented many other challenges but research quickly confirmed that it had one of the strongest identities and senses of place anywhere in the nation, an asset no amount of marketing can create.

Among residents, the sense of community pride and passion here was off the charts.  Far too many communities settle for residents being “pleased” if they measure resident awareness at all, but this is the weakest sign of a connection with place.

As a whole, we didn’t have to worry about Durham residents being able to deliver on our marketing promise.

We also didn’t have to dig down very far to uncover three of Durham’s most enduring values and personality traits as a community, elements that may not be unique, but clearly distinctive in the way they were manifest here.

A little more than a decade later, a two year process facilitated by place brand recovery expert Bill Baker drilled down much further into every part of Durham, which helped us excavate and confirm with research a full range of overarching community traits.

But grasping that Durham’s intrinsic traits included being “genuine, authentic and textured” (now elusive aspirations for many brands) that gave us enough to anchor those first marketing efforts at the dawn of the 1990s (one of the first brand marks shown in this blog.)

Unfortunately for Raleigh, it has never dug down to understand its true brand.  Like so many communities that get the “cart in front of the horse,” the focus there even now is on a logo, a superficial and disposable ingredient that is only valuable when created on deeper, community-wide self-refection.

Impatience with what it takes to reveal a community’s inherent brand is reflected in use of the term “rebrand.”  You don’t rebrand a community because its true brand is intrinsic.  You might “rebadge” it from time to time with a new logo or tagline but that isn’t branding, just a quick change of clothes.

I hope Raleigh does uncover its true brand personality one day.  It may not live up to hype or official expectations or titillate the local media there but it would be far more enduring and effective all around, a beacon for community self-preservation as well as appeal.

Recovering a community’s truly intrinsic brand or personality is a diagnostic process.  Not every trait will be viewed as positive but when accurately distilled, will resonate to “stickers” and “boomers who became “stickers” alike.

If Raleigh is honest with itself it may find that being “over-reaching” has some deeper roots there.  The introspection that comes from a true place brand excavation helps a community rediscover and become comfortable in its own skin.

Raleigh is a great place and worthy of knowing why.

No Time for Lag at the Speed of Culture

There are two things that few, if any, business schools teach college students about advertising in courses on marketing.  One is that it has a down side, what I call whenever I guest lecture, a “turnoff ratio.”

Roadside billboards are the obvious example of this with an 8-to-1 turnoff ratio which grows to 9-to-1 if passerbys spot nearby trees have been cut. Surprisingly, surveys show that ads running during the Super Bowl have a 5-to-1 turn off ratio.

Turnoff ratio is easy to compute from public opinion surveys when you dig down through the obfuscation the advertising industrial complex creates by slicing turnoff results into very thin slices.

The other thing that is sometimes ignored, although more and more business schools are teaching, is that traditional advertising is dead, if not on life support, partly due to negligible return on investment, partly due to massive over exposure and partly because, well, it is just so slow.

In a chapter he penned for the intriguing new book entitled, The Disruption Revolution, Terry Young notes that change is so rapid now, it requires that marketers move at the “speed of culture.”

He divides culture into fast and slow culture, one “bursting in the here- and-now” and the other, those trends that are expected to have impact in 36-48 months.  Marketing must be “fast, lean, and about making decisions in real time.”

Young compares marketing today as more like a CNN newsroom.  He confirms what the community marketing agency in Durham, North Carolina anticipated in 1997.  While still a start up, it formed the Durham New Service (DNS.)

The move was an extension of the organization’s pioneering success years earlier with what we now call content marketing, before most other community marketing organizations had even established marketing divisions.

Five years later, ad veteran Al Reis and his daughter Laura penned The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, the tipping point of which researchers have now pegged as 1984. But now even PR has been supplanted by marketing as publishing.

Young’s background in everything from start ups to McKinsey & Company to volunteering in Kazakhstan in support of micro credit initiatives to founding trend-spotter “sparks & honey” give him a unique perspective on marketing at the “speed of culture.”

Marketing today, according to Young, requires the urgency and pace of a CNN newsroom.  In fact, marketing is now a form of publishing, something Durham’s marketing organization anticipated five years ago when it gave its Durham News Service its own real time dashboard.

Initiatives such as that rely on whether marketers can learn to have zero tolerance for lag time.  Lag time—even more than disruption—has spelled the doom of traditional advertising.  For those unwilling to shift gears, it will do the same for PR as well.

Lag time is the marker that signals the obsolescence of so many marketers today, including a great many institutions that teach marketing.  Even gleaning marketing intelligence is moving closer to real time.

But marketing, like a newsroom, also relies on the ability to be accurate, authentic and able to create value, context and depth in real time.  Especially for anyone in community destination marketing, it is becoming more intense and demanding than ever, which is why so many have fallen into irrelevance.

Those who can keep pace are already recognizing a wave of change that Young believes is transforming PR as we know it.  Just as successful marketing is now publishing, media companies, including the newspaper in Durham, have begun to evolve a model that in part will amplify that content.

Marketing now is about creating relevant, genuine and valuable content in real time.  There is little or no room anymore for those stuck in first or second gear or those so attention deficit that they fail to fully leverage content.

Some marketing organizations such as Durham’s have what it takes going forward in their DNA, and still, they will only be as effective as the people they hire who must continue to be relentless about continuous and never-ending change and improvement.

Key today is a team intolerant of lag time.  As author and disruption analyst Brian Solis wrote a few months ago, marketers today are “at the forefront of a new era and marketing communications and its future is in your hands.”

“The future of marketing has little to do with marketing.”

Creating Contentment

While standing behind a lady waiting to check in at the doctors office, I kidded her about the time it was taking.

“I hate Durham,” she volunteered.  I moved here a year ago and I came here to change my address.  I’m moving.

Without telling her I had once been in the business of helping visitors, including more than 85% of newcomers who come here as visitors first, I apologized that she had ended up making a decision that was not best for her.

I finished our exchange by mentioning that her sentiment was shared by 1-in-50 Durham residents compared to the nearly 20-to-1 Durham residents who have just the opposite impression of living here.

She was visibly stunned as we all are when we find ourselves feeling so strongly about something that we assume is a broadly held notion.  It isn’t just the Tea Party political movement that labors so.

Even when less strongly held negative feelings are included, more than 9-in-10 Durham residents are pleased with it as a place to live.  Ideally though, we would have helped the 5% who aren’t make a better decision for themselves.

Advertising is just one element of community marketing but as a form of “yelling” it is the most blunt, and as such, fundamentally differs from marketing overall in a critical way.

Advertising was invented as a means to create discontent.  Marketing is a way to help people make decisions that are best for themselves, even when it does not go your way as a marketer.  Especially when it doesn’t go your way.

That’s why marketing is supposed to be a conversation as opposed to advertising, which as someone once said is like “that guy” at a party who goes on and on about himself not letting anyone else get a word in edgewise.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s why people who are that way in conversation tend to think of marketing only in terms of big ad campaigns which fail to influence or create interest and result in a negative return on investment.

Adverting is dead by its own hand.  Inundated on average now by 10,000 ads a day, consumers have finally just tuned out.

The first ad in America was run in 1704.  Dr. Freddie Parker at NCCU here in Durham has conducted studies of ads used to recapture slave runaways in North Carolina between 1775 and 1840.

Advertising became institutionalized in the decades after the Civil War.  Near the turn of the century modern advertising was shaped to create discontent in order to push the use of products such as soap, deodorant and mouth wash.

By the early 1900s, psychologists were being hired by ad agencies to create messages of discontent.

In their new book to be released next month entitled, Smart Money Smart Kids, talk-radio financial guru Dave Ramsey and his daughter Rachel Cruze write about how hard it is to teach contentment and to teach kids how to see through advertising designed to create discontent.

By 1984, adverting began to decline in effectiveness until now, it is effectively worthless if not a negative.

Unfortunately, many marketers have difficulty with the notion of conversations with consumers or the idea that the objective is to help them find contentment.

Scientific studies show that at the heart of meditation’s effectiveness is contentment in the here and now.  Even in my former field of community marketing to generate visitor-centric economic and cultural development, studies have shown that the biggest boost from a vacation is planning it.

Only very relaxing vacations such as those I take with my grandsons and daughter to a lake in the northern Rockies each summer boost happiness after the return.  Travel overall these days is more likely to result in anxiety.

It may vary for individuals, but proof still that marketing should be most about helping people.

Doomed by A Craving For Long Narratives

“One of the most dramatic and consequential cultural and business developments of our time…”

That’s how columnist Michael Wolff, the former editor of the trade publication, Adweek, described the significance earlier this month of a Disney decision to formally permit ad-skipping technology.

By revenue, Disney is the largest media company in the world, owning more than a dozen cable networks and the ABC network, which owns the TV station in Durham, North Carolina where I live.

Disney is the first of the traditional television networks to make this move.  For some time, television overall has been weaning off advertising and toward revenues from licensing fees, just as savvy marketers have been moving away from advertising as a means of reaching consumers.

A similar calculation was made by the new owners of Newsweek magazine when they decided to resurrect the print version based on a subscription model, something many other publications are doing with both digital and print versions.

The son of a former advertising agency executive at the dawn of the Mad Men era, Wolff is forgiven an anachronism when he proclaims that “brands must advertise.”

Of course, they don’t, not any longer.

He may be harkening back to the day of “bang the drum” marketing when advertising, which is just one element, was confused with marketing overall.  There are now many more fruitful and authentic ways than advertising (which is a form of yelling) to reach consumers.

“Great works deserve a great spotlight” is a rationale for marketing that I first heard used by Chip Bell, author of The 9 1/2 Principles of Innovative Service.

But marketing for all but the laziest, zombie-like marketers, long ago ceased to be about reaching the most eyeballs but reaching the right eyeballs with genuine, credible and valuable content.

Advertising’s decline began in the mid-1980s.  Within a decade it had been surpassed in effectiveness by other elements of marketing including earned media and content marketing.

Today, advertising is measured as having a negative return on investment.

Retail consumers rate it last in influence with a negative-to-positive ratio of 7-to-1.  Studies also show that 60% of consumer and business-to-business purchasing decisions are made before ever making contact with a human being or seeing an ad.

Even ads place during the Super Bowl have a 5-to-1 turn off ratio compared to the 8.4% of viewers who buy the products or services advertised.  The days of “yelling” are over.

Online advertising, too, is struggling to avoid what happened long ago to outdoor billboards.  They continue in obsolescence to blight communities and roadsides by seeking favors from government even though research shows they are now rarely viewed and used by only one-fifth of one percent of consumers to inform actually buying something.

Experts estimate that nearly 2 trillion online display ads were paid for by advertisers in 2012 but not seen, not unlike the nation’s more than one million billboards have become invisible.

The problem with advertising is not just that ads are notoriously difficult to measure, but that inundated now by nearly 10,000 a day, Americans have just tuned out.

As one marketer recently said to describe advertising:

“Some brands are like that guy at the party who has had too much to drink and won’t shut up and never lets anyone get a word in edgewise and just goes on and on.”

Disney hasn’t spelled the end of advertising.  The advertising industry’s greed and “more, more, more” mentality has, a lesson hopefully learned as mobile devices take everything hyper-local and makes relevance supreme.

Wolff also points to studies showing that viewing advertising is a learned and habituated activity.  And the rate at which Americans are “unlearning” this habit is growing far more rapidly than even the most ambitious analysts have projected.

In an ironic way, the television audience is rapidly bifurcating.

First aired by MTV, which in 1991 was looking for something to supplant music videos, which had lost their hypnotic appeal, the now ubiquitous reality television shows appeal to 75% of Americans who are poor but to only 5% of those who are very well off.

More than half of Americans now record live video content so they can skip ads through a number of technologies, the fastest growing of which is streaming television services where for a very small monthly fee, viewers can watch what they want, when they want.

Ad-free streaming television subscriptions, including nearly 50 million now on Netflix alone, (click here for an article in The Atlantic on how Netflix reverse engineered Hollywood) are now running neck and neck with those subscribing to premium cable channels.  One consumer behavior driving the shift is binge watching.

More than 7-in-10 streaming subscribers describe binge watching as watching 2-6 episodes of the same TV show in one sitting, something done by more than 6-in-10 who stream TV at least once a week.

Binge watching emerged about five years ago.  A friend and I happened to try it by viewing all 121 episodes of Lost, an acclaimed ABC televisions series neither of us had watched during its initial 5 season run, over a period of a few months.

Netflix recently sent Dr. Grant McCracken, an MIT cultural anthropologist, into the homes of TV streamers to learn why they binge watch.

The source of the quote above about “that guy at the party,” he describes his interest as “where culture meets commerce and economics.”

It turns out, according to his analysis, that even in the age of micro-blogging 140 character tweets, human beings crave long narratives.  Binge watching provides that.

I certainly agree that watching a season of a good series, even over the course of a week or two is enjoyable and far more preferable to watching advertising-laden versions.

Penn State neuroscientists Dr. Jordan Gaines Lewis notes on her blog that the term “empathy” was coined in 1909 by British psychologist Dr. Edward B. Titchener.  “Cognitive empathy,” she notes, “examines how humans can adopt others’ psychological perspectives, including those of fictional characters.”

According to McCracken, who blogs at Cultureby.com, binge watchers are a new breed, consumers Netflix calls the “new normal.”

Free to choose content and the time when they will watch it means they become more engrossed in narratives, usually with at least one other person, rather than zoning out and mindlessly flipping from channel to channel.

Television is no longer linear, a lot less irritating and finally weaning itself from advertising.  Indeed, “One of the most dramatic and consequential cultural and business developments of our time.”

Now about reclaiming those roadsides!

Millennials Are Transforming Marketing Itself

I was feeling pretty impressed with myself after reading a new report detailing the digital platform habits of various age cohorts.  I am closer to Millennials (ages 18-34) than I am to Baby Boomers, my age group.

Then I looked at a map of the recording artists who are most popular in each state and realized that I was only familiar with a dozen or so.

From the song at this link, an R&B throwback, I can see why Miguel is most popular in North Carolina where I live.  I can also see why Tegan and Sara are popular in my native Idaho, but I obviously need to get out from behind this blog more.

It is among the 77 million Millennials, which, with 24% of population are already generating $1.3 trillion in direct spending each year, that you can most clearly see the death knell for advertising, an element of marketing.

In fact, according to the formidable Boston Consulting Group, Millennials are transforming marketing as much as they are altering consumer behavior.

They have expectations of reciprocity.  They are repulsed by desecration marketing such as roadside billboards as well as thinly veiled retro Jim Crow laws promoted in some states against Gays, people of color and young people.

According to Nielsen, nearly 4-in-10 Millennials are not US-born.  The same proportion have become bilingual.  Only half as many are married as Baby Boomers were by that point, but nearly twice that percentage of Millennial women have children.

Millennials now make up 1-in-5 same-sex couples and a greater percentage have graduated from college than other generations.

A Pew report shows that a greater share Millennials live both in suburbs and central cities than either Boomers or the Silent generation did at that point.

This may also mean the suburbs aren’t dead and that rejuvenated downtowns across the country may eventually see another bust cycle as this generation ages.

A new report by comScore shows just how much more likely Millennials are to skips ads altogether on television including 90% while watching recorded TV.  Their shift to online news is driving a dramatic decline in audience for local television news, where ad revenues have typically made up 48% station revenue.

They lean heavily toward digital channels and marketers simply have to take another approach to reach this generation.

Nielson reports that those still advertising on television are rapidly shifting from 30-second spots to 15-second spots.  Partially, the thinking is that because Millennials have a strong preference for video that the challenge is mastering ads as short-form video.

Even that isn’t likely to be enough but they could go a lot shorter.  Research shows that even for those who watch television ads, the typical viewer pays attention for only 6.5 seconds.

The problem isn’t the length of the ads or how compelling they may or may not be.  The inherent problem with advertising is that even in story form, it is a form of yelling, the advertiser yelling about themselves.

Because this especially turns them off, Millennials prefer to seek information on other platforms but it is just with this generation that an overall shift is most apparent.

Businesses that rely on advertising in any form have so inundated the marketplace that the average person is bombarded with 10,000 messages a day.  People have just tuned out, thank you.

Worse, advertising has become so ubiquitous that not only do studies show it with a negative return on investment but that it also dulls our sense of empathy.

Millennials, in particular, have discovered many more effective ways to glean information including content marketing and old-fashioned earned media, otherwise known as news stories.

Of course, advertising is a huge industrial complex that knows only one behavior: more, more, more.  The reports I’ve cited in this blog are meant to be reassuring about the future of advertising but the sense of desperation is clear.

Even if things do come full circle as this paper suggests by showing us how the Internet could eventually make media physical again, it isn’t clear that the advertising industry can ever learn restraint.

More convincing are webinars and related downloads regarding the massive shift to content marketing, such as the one at this link by Adobe with six steps to building a content marketing strategy.  The speaker makes it clear “that it is no longer about more.”

Nearly 9-in-10 marketers have shifted to branded content for marketing to consumers, slightly more use it for business to business marketing and more than 7-in-10 think it is more effective than advertising.

Content marketing can involve as many as 16 different tactics with 12 being the average.  Content marketing isn’t new, but just referred to now by an overarching terminology.

The organizations I previously led were utilizing ten or more of these tactics throughout much of my now concluded, four-decade career in community marketing.

The prominence of content marketing began as early as 1984 as the effectiveness of advertising slipped into its long slow decline.  It accelerated as advertising fell to a negative return on investment overall a few years ago.

Unfortunately, many marketers were slow to make the shift, as noted in the white paper entitled, “Turbulent Times for the CMO.”  Content marketing, according to analyst Robert Rose, is no longer about acting like a media company but becoming a media company.

It is also about not yelling.  It’s not about more.  It’s about authenticity.

A Form Of Ignorance, I Suppose

A lead-in on NPR prior to the Super Bowl proclaimed that devotion to football just keeps growing.

Actually, public opinion polls show that the percentage of Americans who are football fans peaked eight years ago and has been slipping ever since. Yes, the numbers may have grown, but the percentages haven’t.

Even among the percentage watching the Super Bowl, which peaked two decades ago, only about 35% cite watching the game as a priority.

The average number of fans attending regular season games over the last two or more decades also peaked in 2007.  It’s a very popular sport but “devotion” has definitely not gotten stronger.

The news media may be far more fragmented today than it was in 1990 but that means it has become even more a victim of its own hyperbole.  I am a lifelong football fan, but I idealistically refuse to believe this has anything to do with selling advertising.

A form of ignorance, I suppose.

A nationwide poll of shoppers last October showed that the effectiveness of advertising in general has taken another hit.  Already a negative return on investment since the 1980s, only 4% of consumers rated it most important out of five different influences on the image of a brand.

Nearly 2-in-3 rated it fourth or fifth in importance and 1-in-3 as the least important.  By far, personal experience is the most important influence, 16 times more powerful than advertising.

Another survey last year by Harris found that irrelevant pop-up ads, the oldest form being roadside spam popping up on sticks in roadside forests and the newest of which now pop up on the Internet, are the most annoying to Americans.

More than 7-in-10 are just annoyed.  More significantly for advertisers, 9-in-10 of those who are annoyed take action against the advertiser or medium.  Advertising in general not only has a negative return on investment now but it involves significant reputational downside.

Advertising is plagued by several systemic drawbacks:

• It is you “yelling” about yourself so it lacks credibility
• Subjected to 10,000 ads or messages each day, audiences have tuned out
• The industry is powerless to eliminate obsolete mediums such as roadside billboards
• Advertisers fail to grasp turn-off ratios and not just for desecration mediums such as billboards
• In-house marketers seem detached from the sustainability goals of their organizations

This failure of self-control or self-governance exacts a heavy price on society.  Except for billboards, advertising is the model that has supported the creation of a vast amounts of news, sports and entertainment.

It is kept on life-support now by ignorance such as a community recently that spent its entire budget on roadside billboards as a perversion of the concept of wayfinding, enabled, I suspect, by someone crossing the line ethically.

Entrusted with safeguarding their community’s brand, destination marketing organizations that use this form of advertising are instead scarring first and last impressions.  This is the epitome of what has destroyed advertising.

It is a perfect example of the difference between being ignorant and being uninformed as blogged by Seth Godwin yesterday:

“Uninformed is a temporary condition, fixed more easily than ever.

Ignorant, on the other hand, is the dangerous situation where someone making a decision is uninformed and either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about his lack of knowledge…

‘Ignorant’ used to be a fairly vague epithet…Today, because it represents a choice, the intentional act of not knowing, I think it carries more weight…”

We must all be on guard against our own ignorance.  For advertisers deploying what once was a useful marketing tool, it is unfortunately much too late.