Ad Age Hates Innovation
You have to wonder about the ability of the marketing profession to move forward when a mainstream medium such as Advertising Age seems dead-set against it.Here are just three examples:
- Even though they're embracing new media by offering RSS feeds, you can't read the entire posts in your feedreader. Ad Age makes you visit their site for the full content. Yes, they probably want the traffic so they can support the site with (ahem) ads, but you know what? You can run ads in feeds too, guys.
- Today Jonah Bloom decided that he'd call out a small company and rant against it. In this case, he was talking about my company's recent announcement. I couldn't find any instance of him berating any other small companies, but then again, I got tired of scrolling through the archives since the Adages blog doesn't have tags.
- Finally (and this one's a doozy), Mark Simon gives us his take on trends by recommending that CMOs Ditch the Lunatic Web Content Crazes in the CMO Strategy column. He particularly calls out Twitter as nothing more than a personal update application; it's clear he hasn't spent any time on it or developed a network. As the very astute Karl Long puts it:
Even more ironic this is under “CMO Strategy”, yep this is exactly the kind of advice you need if you’re a CMO, ignore new things, don’t experiment, don’t participate and your world will be simpler, safer and easier to understand.Maybe the folks over at Ad Age don't think this whole Internet thing is going to catch on.
Labels: AdAge, Advertising, big media, Karl Long, Marketing, trends
Posted by Scott Monty at 9:26 PM
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Good points about AdAge's "Luddite" tendencies. But come on now - Bloom wasn't "ranting" against Crayon, he was reacting to Jaffe's terrible writing.
Fair enough. We probably talked about it so much that I just internalized it. Helps to get out of the echo chamber from time to time.
I saw that Mark Simon article too and couldn't believe it. Most of his points aren't "hare-brained content schemes" so much as they are Bad Advertising Practices. And he's completely missing the point on microblogging/Second Life, as you mentioned, likely because he's not spent any time there.
From my experience, much of the traditional ad biz STILL doesn't get social media, other than thinking that maybe they need a "Facebook strategy". :)
More reaction to the Simon article here: http://tinyurl.com/yw4xeb
I guess it's one of those speculative things, must be fairly tricky for those coming from a "total up the impressions and clicks" background, to then operate social media campaigns with tricky metrics.
I hear it often here in the UK, how can we measure it... "number of news pieces", "number of mentions"?
How can we measure product engagement?
Indeed, Chris. It's a different mindset. ROI is not immediate, nor are direct sales. What can be measured is number of subscriptions and number of comments, giving you an idea of how engaged individuals are with the content.
General chatter and item re-use around the Web are other ways to measure social media. Technorati authority, Google page rank, and other "hard metrics" help assess that, but I think social media is more about the resulting conversation than about page rank.
The average AdAge reader still gets his email printed out each day by his secretary.