Print. Internet. Mobile applications. Digital signage. Television. Radio. The evolution of media channels in recent years has separated the Mad Men from the Mad Boys of advertising.
But Pasquale Trozzolo thinks the marketing sector has digested that digital smorgasbord and may even be coming home to its mission: A focus on message.
“I think what’s happened is, and we’re seeing a shift toward, a move back to strategic focus and away from tactical approaches,” said the CEO of Trozzolo Communications Group. “Things got a little too technological for a while—people were saying, ‘We can post things now, we can blog, or do this or that’ and it really became about how many things we can do as opposed to what we should do.”
Balance is being restored, he said, with advertising and marketing firms circling back to the reason they exist. “I think we’re
making sure we’re taking advantage of the opportunity to transmit the message, but not just because we can,” Trozzolo said.
Still, the increase in digitally-delivered messaging—both in the computational power to process ever-larger file sizes and
in the hardware to view it almost anywhere—is having a profound influence.
The speed of message to the market “is now so immediate that it has compelled us to re-imagine the way we think about campaigns,” said Jon Cook, president and CEO of digital marketing giant VML.That has also forced advertisers and marketers to reframe the way they optimize a message within a campaign, he said.
“Now, you can go into campaign development knowing that you can start one in one place and have the flexibility to evolve the message with how the market reacts, how sales react, how environmental factors influence the process.”
A decade ago, an ad campaign might be weeks, even months in the planning, with long lead times for ad buys in specific media built into the strategy. Now, the time frame has been compressed, Cook said, and marketing professionals must embrace a mind-set of launching a campaign, then making almost real-time changes in both creative product and strategy.
“It allows you to take more risks,” he said, “but you also know more quickly when you can pull back and when you can accelerate.”
Not long after VML made the commitment to digital marketing in the mid-1990s, Gregory Gragg saw that same light. Today, Gragg Advertising is riding a wave of rapid growth after training its guns on new targets. The advertising sector, Gragg said, “has changed dramatically.”
“We knew that traditional agencies, as we understood them, probably didn’t hold much of a future for themselves,” he said. “We became more a marketing-technology company than an advertising company. We held onto legacy media like TV, billboards, print and radio, but the avenues for opportunities in delivering your message are much bigger now.”
What was once a 20-vehicle delivery system for messaging, he said, “is now 10 times that with the advent of resource sites that are out there—blog sites, e-mail marketing, mobile marketing, proximity marketing on a mobile level, lead-generation on the Internet, affiliate marketing channels, coupon channels, on-line flyer distribution—now, you’re literally able to deliver flyers on-line for a particular brand.”
And yet, after all of that change, executives see plenty of room left for the medium that Gutenberg helped jump-start more than half a millennium ago: print.
“People still read print,” Gragg said. “Even with advent of e-readers out there, I still see people utilizing print and relaxing by
the by pool with a Glamour or an Ingram’s. I think we’ll always hang on to some level of paper format, but it will be more
strategic in its use.”
Cook concurred.: “I don’t see print going away. It becomes a bit like the company’s Web site: a foundational element that is the launching pad to a whole host of ways you’re going to interact with the brand as a consumer.
“The best print we’re seeing these days,” Cook said, “is being written as a gateway to starting your experience or deeper engagement with a brand, as opposed to the last stop in the communications process.” 