There was a time when media at least put on a pretense of distributing content that was of intrinsic value, independent of the advertising that enveloped it. And because this advertising was not immediately actionable, there was between the consumer’s wallet and the vendor a chain of reactions, stimuli and responses, all of which served as a sort of buffer between the message and the point of purchase. This buffer, and its corresponding passage of time, was filled with (among other things) content: television programming, magazine articles, radio DJ personalities and their shows.
But such cozy consumerism days are leaving us fast, in fact may be far gone already, and in the place of advertising we now see marketing stepping in and taking charge. The distinction is one of process to a closing. Where advertising suggests – the features of a brand, the address of a destination – marketing requests the credit card number. Where advertising plants seeds, marketing tries to immediately harvest.
The television infomercials may be a result or a cause, who knows, but it can’t be coincidental that these began to take over the TV screens in living rooms at around the same time that Internet usage expanded in the office. The impulse buying behavior is similar in both cases, and the toll free number to call for the sharpest-ever razor blade is just another mouse-click for some online purchase.
In such an environment, the delicate ways of creative advertising and public relations are being replaced by the more aggressive modes of lead generation. Similarly, impression-based CPM rates are being replaced by cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-action (CPA) structures, and what we thought was an innocent tweet from a friend we follow about the mystery thriller that he or she is enjoying, may in fact be an e-commerce campaign by Amazon.com.
As advertising thus migrates to the faster and more direct pace of marketing, the line between entertainment and commerce gets erased, and the difference between media and consumer retail vanishes. Simultaneously, as the primary connection device shifts from the local airwaves to the world-wide web, the marketing opportunity expands far beyond the local market and to the world, and the cost and ease of marketing to a large audience diminishes: Yes, anyone can now be a vendor.
When Amazon initiated its user-driven social media-based marketing program last week, this marked an important milestone in the evolution of the consumer economy. Rather than a market fueled by consumer spending, this could be the beginning of one based on consumer vending, in which millions of impulse shoppers become millions of little marketers. Somehow I feel Google stands to gain from this.
