By Barbara Bacci Mirque
By now you all have heard about Jim Stengel’s speech at the AAAA Media Conference in which he talked about Second Life and our own ANA CEO Bob Liodice’s avatar! But here is something you have not heard about and something which struck me as a very telling paradigm shift: There was the 40-something Global Marketing Officer of The Procter & Gamble Company, a somewhat conservative company, telling the audience of media mavens about the importance of Second Life to P&G. When Mr. Stengel asked for a show of hands from the media types to see how many had visited Second Life then how many actually had created an avatar, very few folks raised their hands! This confirms what I have heard from many advertisers in my own ANA work about "enhanced" television – more and more advertisers are leading their agencies into new media, not the other way around. When I started out in this business in the mid 80’s as an assistant product manager at The Frito-Lay Company, we expected our advertising agencies to be innovative and inform us about what was hip and cool – now it appears to be the other way around and the "clients" are the ones who are personally and professionally experimenting with new media forms and directing their agencies to look into them. What a difference in the last 20 years!
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Thanks for all of your comments. Being in the over 40 demographic myself, I just found it so interesting that the 40 something Jim Stengel was more active in Second Life than his audience. But of course, one cannot generalize and I have been very fortunate in my marketing career to work with some very forward thinking agencies and I have the advantage from the ANA perspective to meet folks from many agencies, some of which are certainly leading their clients through the digital space. Barbara
Posted by: BBMIRQUE | March 15, 2007 at 12:48 PM
If marketers are so correct about all of the new media ideas, why is it that a blog like this receives only 3 comments in a country of 300 million?
Say what you wish about TV and the death of the :30. But compare the numbers.
The focus has been on the decline of TV's ratings, but if you want to see where fragmentation truly reigns supreme, look at websites rather than TV networks.
And as for broadcast TV being hurt by the explosion of other TV choices, take a look at cable. Individual cable network ratings have been the biggest victims of the explosion in cable choices.
Posted by: Palisades Park | March 12, 2007 at 08:26 AM