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Is Marketing = Interruption?

Guest post by: Satyam Gambhir

Article Overview: The underlying premise of Prodigy was that advertisers would play a key role in the business success. On a typical prodigy page the lower one third of the page was devoted to advertisements. These adds more or less, un-targetted by today's standards - were nonetheless a significant advancement in potential of a marketer to reach masses and convey the message. This continues even today! Look out how consumers revolted against various marketing campaigns and are we learning any lessons?

Is Marketing = Interruption?

The underlying premise of Prodigy was that advertisers would play a key role in the business success. On a typical prodigy page the lower one third of the page was devoted to advertisements. These adds more or less, un-targetted by today's standards - were nonetheless a significant advancement in potential of a marketer to reach masses and convey the message. This continues even today! Bulls eye: Computer, unlike a TV, has a unique physical address. It was a question among marketers of 90's and a serious concern as many potential customers were now spending their time looking at computer screens (and not a TV) where it was hard to reach and interrupt.

Advertising was then considered to be Interruption, which was fine. Therefore marketers were masters in interrupting consumers. However, a sorry state of affairs is when marketers, even today, are following the same tradition. They still want consumers to listen to their advertisement in between two songs on radio. They want consumers to see their advertisements before they finish their favorite movie, or read their newspapers, or magazines. They want a dangerous/funny/abnormal headline for their news, no matter what the content is.

Consider this: Out of these irritating interruptions, our world today is finer and better than what it would have been without them. Lets see how.

The PUSHBACK Begins

During the early years of television, ads made up less than ten minutes of each one hour show. The time devoted to commercials has now increased to more than doubled since then. We now see programs with equal time distribution between content and commercials. With much time being devoted to commercials to what has become "content" in its own right, there was generation which grew with commercials and we see many surfing channels for commercials only! However, with time, showing a commercial of a bathing soap in between two breaking news forced people to get up and change the news channel. This "getting-up-and-changing-the-channel" along with advancement in electronics gave birth to a highly powerful cannon against marketers called "remote control" which made them sweat as with one cheap instrument like this one, made all their efforts go in vain. People now had the power to switch between channels. Advertisements since then have become highly involving and they now do not have more than 3-5 seconds to capture your attention.

Till 1992, were large number of people switching to email as a mode of communication and marketers could prophesize about reduced time on TV with years to come. Clever marketers then started buying email IDs and started bombarding consumers with advertisements. Again, the same blunder of telling people of whats not important for them (well, majority of them) gave birth to another problem for marketers.... SPAM. Well, technology works in favor of all, and we had a spam folders which saved (and is saving) us from a lot of unimportant messages of marketers! "If you want to deliver a message to me, it better be for me"

With information being shared online which made people visit different websites for knowledge, made marketers think of pop-ups. Amazing the next version of browser had a pop-up blocker and with new versions you could decide which sites we allow to show us a popup.

Do Not Disturb (DND) or Do Not Call (DNC) list is another example to run away from interruptions over phone calls. There was a time when an American recieved (not more than 3 years ago) eleven calls in a day asking them to buy something. Another invention was a voicemail service.

On Social Web, interruptions do not result in sustainable conversations. In their purest form, all conversations are participative and engaged in by choice. The relevance of events that are listed here showcase that social media is THIS TIME MADE BY THE NEEDS OF CONSUMERS and not by marketers, however marketers have done good job here as well. But its high time, marketers should learn to respect consumers and not interrupt them.

To be continued... lookout for further reading at my blog.

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Article Tags: gambhir, interruption, interruption marketing, marketing, marketing pushback, satyam, satyam gambhir, social media



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