Social networking is an amazing tool…and the marketing is catching up. The more research I do the more fascinated and horrified I become.
I have tried being a fairly private person but I’ve also found that the more I try to be a recluse the further from the mark the advertisements I see are. For the most part I’ve given up; I ‘Like’ the products I actually use and ignore the ones I find useless. One thing I have started doing is paying very close attention to HOW companies are marketing to me.
As far as the actual marketing goes, I don’t mind ads on pages (that don’t have audio), I don’t mind an ad I can skip through on YouTube, I don’t even mind television commercials as long as they aren’t in the middle of a soccer game and I can use the ‘mute’ button on my remote. But, like certain soccer games, when the advertisements become obtrusive not only will I leave the media I’m paying attention to, I try to actively denigrate the product/company advertising that product.
With companies like Radian6 (you can google them if you want to but I won’t link to them) watching everything that we say and the way we say it on our social networks, you’d think that more companies would be sensitive to our responses to HOW they do their marketing, not just the message. My understanding is that the ‘Old Guard’ of marketing still believe that complete inundation is the best way to get a product noticed. The benefit of social networks and the fact that more and more companies are paying attention could be that we can actually control a fair amount of how new campaigns are developed and how intrusive they become.
My fear is that the best we can do is let companies single us out from the heard, completely isolate us and then force feed us THEIR message. But I don’t think that will happen with the larger industries. Dos Equis, with their “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign and Doritos, with their crowd-sourced Super Bowl commercial are perfect examples of INCLUDING their target market in forming their message instead of trying to make us memorize one they make up.
Iffy at Best will never MAKE you read it. Liking it on FaceTube won’t change the way we market the strip. I give this away for free!
Hope you’re having a good Wednesday!
–The Artist
