Marketing, Advertising & PR: United by the Web

While your industry jargon is a bit inscrutable to me, it's still refreshing to come away with the sense that you do understand the creative destruction your industry is experiencing due to all the assorted internet related technologies being developed, deployed and used.

I'd love to be demonstrated to otherwise, but I don't sense any understanding of the loss of the old, one-way communications model.  Internet communication, by historic design and current implementation is a two-way communication medium and efforts to run against that dynamic will be brutalized by your industry's targets:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/18/meet-lois-whitman-the-poster-child-for-everything-wrong-with-pr/

and

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/13/the-pr-roadblock-on-the-road-to-blissful-blogging/

IMHO, your future is not a single model, or even a three-track model, as I understand you see quite well, but rather an amorphous model of presence, discussion, involvement. 

Think of a cocktail party with a bunch of folks standing around chatting about subject x:  the owner/seller of x, her communications assistant, the host of the party who blogs professionally, the guest who's a political activist, the guest who's a lawyer, the guest who's a... etc etc.  If the communications assistant just broadcasts her view of subject x, every other guest will just dismiss her outright for not being a sincere contributer to the discussion.

And they call what they do "integrated" communications, with a team thinking through the print/web advertising strategy, the social-media/blogging strategies, and the pr outreach methods, without these artificial walls between. They're typically small and nimble, like omnistudio.com here in DC, and very often small, nimble and virtual, composed of small entities or entrepreneurs who come on and off the bench as needed per project. And they employ kids for whom a PC has been their window on the world since birth, for whom all of these methods of reaching customers sort of seamlessly run from one to the next.

Characters on "Mad Men" might not know what to make of all of this!

The Internet is a new and better tool for driving business communications. No surprise then to see it adopted as the means of unifying traditional concepts of customer interaction, advertising, and promotion. Unless the old models take advantage of shape-shifting in a creative way, these businesses will lose out big time.

They already are!

That's right.  The value for all the marketing/advertising/PR is the customer.  How well we communicate our value to the right customer will determine our success.  The venues and tactics are just means to the end.

I like your thoughts about Tom Friedman's book.  I don't think we have begun to tap into the understanding of multi-media and integrated messages. 

What you are talking about is a true supply chain of resources to business in communicating and building awareness of the business, providing viable channels to increase the services to the customer, and of staying relevant in a changing market.

If we just use the web do amplify what we are doing independently we will never achieve the promise and only increase the cost.  I think we have a long way to go!

DHagar

Who cares about what appears on your business card.  What counts is what impressions your target customer is receiving from your company.  That defines the hymn-sheet you should all be singing from.

Done the right way all the individual impressions should be coherent and present a single, unified image of the company.  If not, the ROI will undoubtedly suffer in a major way.

I think these same issues, the walls crumbling are the same internally to an organization.

20 years ago marketing published a brochure.

Today marketing needs to work with IT to publish an electronic brochure.  The best marketers and the best IT people are those that can bridge the disciplines - not those who live just in one world.

You describe the challenges very well - but they apply internally to those companies that can't afford all these third party services.

Thanks Todd for the update on the state of affairs of the advertising and marketing industry.

You say:

Finally, I believe we will see new business models being formed in the communications sector, models that will combine the right team with the right financial structure. The smart group will figure out how to combine several traditional business models together to create the one-stop communications shop.

Coming from a financial background, I have become enamored with the utter failure or lack of successful business models that plague the Internet industry wide.

As someone in the know, what do you see as new business models that bring revenue and real ROI for companies to rollout marketing and advertising campaigns?  At some point budgets must justify spending so eventually a business will receive fees or some revenue structure for its efforts. Is there something you can share with the reader as to how this may be accomplished going forward.