I had to tell someone the other day that truism that’s worth repeating: ‘marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department’. It sounded like I was trying to unduly ruffle feathers –ours, as we are the marcom department. But it’s true. What marketing does can only be as effective as the inputs we get. Client servicing has a better handle on what their customers are thinking, and what resonates with them than anyone else.

Marketing is indeed a different animal today. or I should say different ‘insect -considering this article by Tom Asacker, at marketingProfs. He says:

The marketplace of old resembled a mass of caterpillars hanging around the tree of traditional media, venturing down the branches of mass distribution, and consuming the offshoots of brand advertisers. No more. The masses have escaped their pupae, spread their distinctive wings, and are fluttering around fields blossoming with an abundance of colorful and succulent offerings. A fleeting glimpse is all one usually gets of them.

Josef Jaffe, ponders such questions on Across the Sound, his podcast that often talks about consumer generated content, and where creative ideas may come from. He has very interesting opinions about it. In his book, Life after the 30-second spot, he put it this way:

"When talking to the new age marketing zealots, I dance on the 30-second’s grave and sing hallelujah," and is very, very optimistic about the future of advertising, now that this old format has lost its grip.

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I came across a good article in Beaupre & Company’s newsletter, on why the lead paragraph of a press release should read like a journalistic piece, not an announcement. There is a fine line between crafting a press release to sound like news (which it ought to be) and a memo to all. The worst thing that can happen, the article says, is to hit the reader with abstractions, opaqueness and ponderous inward-directed claims.

They cite a typical example of press release-ese, and a version by a law firm that wriote it with the hook in the headline. So I checked some company press releases, and needless to say they all seem to come off the same template. Some examples:

"At a launch event yesterday evening at the ……….in New York City, Company X introduced the first mass appeal, talk programming format expressly for women, by women."

"Company Y today launched a spin-off communications agency called …….. that will operate as a boutique firm specializing in marketing communications and brand-building campaigns. Headquartered in…"

"The nation’s largest wireless carrier is growing its network and meeting the need for enhanced coverage in the greater Memphis area. Company Z today announced that it recently added four new cell sites in the area, ensuring West Tennessee and North Mississippi customers stay connected."

It’s almost as if direct marketers refused to send anything but 6 x 4 mailers. Or all copywriters continued to write in the stilted ad-copy style replete with puns. It’s easy to fall into the we’ve always done it this way’ mentality. But press releases should be leading the charge for change, since they aren’t simply dumped on a web site or sprayed off a nozzle of some automated PR distribution engine. They compete for attention of journalists and analysts in an on-demand world primed by –and determined by social media tools such as RSS, Del.icio.us and Digg.

A good example of how companies now compete with user-generated ‘stories’ can be seen on Digg. Apple’s press release on iTunes 7 talks of the new way to download movie and stream them via the upcoming iTV device. But on Digg, that piece of news got some 75 Diggs at the time this was written. Getting 619 Diggs was a story of ‘First impressions of buying a movie from the iTunes store." A Gizmodo story got 3109 Diggs. (Another one with some 1500 Diggs was a comment by a Digg user who posted this cover of Jobs on the phone with Gates, which to a journalist would provide an unusual perspective for a story, and this sort of thing could never come from a press release.)

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Very soon we’ll have to ditch the labels ‘old media’ and ‘new media’ as companies who grew up in the broadcast/mass media/I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony world shift gears to work in evolving media formats. Numerous studies and reports about cross-platform media are coming out to ‘prove’ this –like we need any proof– but we still see some pushback. The moment someone mentions the potential for blogs in the marketing mix, with or without examples like this, eyes still roll. For too many, it means venturing out of the comfort zone, as I wrote before.

The study by Universal Mccann and Knowledge Storm (cited in Marketing Vox) has some powerful findings. 53% of respondents (a survey of 4000 business and IT people) say they read blogs and that blogs influenced purchasing behavior. I was shocked by these findings: 46% said blogs had the same credibility as white papers. This in a B2B environment!

So I think we’ve gone past that old media/new media dichotomy. The real problem is between old marketing and new marketing types!

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Attended an IABC Phoenix workshop conducted by Shel Holtz this morning on technology communication. Brilliant stuff. Listening to Shel is like catching up with everything that’s important –and around the horizon– in marketing, media and communications. I’m sure he shocked a few people about his indulgence in Second Life, and how some businsses are getting it. This, while still fielding questions such as "are blogs web sites?"

Memorable quotes:
"People are sick of listening to sales people reading off three-ring binders with stuff that we have created."
"Employee directories need to become corporate MySpaces."
"Blogs are hi-tech wall paintings"

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