In the old days, the days of newspapers printed with cold type, telephone company monopolies, the days when the only video was broadcast, when urgent documents were delivered by bicycle, it made sense to husband your communication resources. This is the outdated model on which most advertisers continue to operate. The idea was -- if you're going to spend a lot of your resources to communicate with the market, then you better make sure you reach as many people as possible. The inevitable result of this thinking has been advertising with minimal information content that is produced to the "lowest common denominator." Meaningless hyperbole, lack of content and depth, over-generalizations, reliance on ambiguous imagery -- these things have infected all advertising. After decades of exposure, consumers no longer respond to mass advertising. They've seen it all before. They don't believe it. It's nothing new, just the same old meaningless hype.
But wait. Something has changed dramatically. The cost of communication is plummeting. The availability of communication bandwidth is exploding. For the effective advertiser, the strategy is shifting. Now, in order to be effective, you need to be wasting communication capacity. It is cheap and plentiful. Marketers can now make detailed, in-depth information available to anyone online. Most of it will be completely ignored by most people, while at the same time serving as a powerful, targeted presentation to the people that are interested. There is one very important caveat. Marketers must make their information available without making it intrusive.
And that is really the skill involved in marketing in this age of cheap communications. Knowing how to make material appealing to a specific target audience. Marketers must learn to be compelling, convincing and credible. Forget about shouting trite little slogans. Forget about response rates. Marketers have the opportunity to deliver effective, highly-targeted presentations by supplying detailed, meaningful information that is easily and widely accessible to consumers.
The new reality of telecommunications gives marketers an unprecedented opportunity to deliver high quality messages that stand out from the crowd.
© 1995 Ralph S. Marston, Jr. All rights reserved.