The New Generation of Marketing

For most of all of our lives, traditional advertising has been set up to essentially to catch our attention while we are going about doing *other* things in our daily lives-- watching TV (commercials), driving down the street (signs and billboards), reading the newspaper (classifieds), listening to the radio (commercials), and more recently while surfing the web (popups, banner ads and spam).

Traditional "interruption" advertising is far from going away. It seems that the space between commercial breaks is shrinking, commercials themselves are getting longer, and in places like myspace and ebaumsworld you can usually find three times more sponsored ads and links than actual website content. However, we are seeing more companies making a subtle shift AWAY from "interruption" marketing to actively ENGAGE consumers in surprisingly positive ways. The new generation of marketing is no longer about distracting consumers from their destination long enough to ingrain your brand in their brains; the new generation of marketing is to BECOME the destination.

The New York Times released an article in October that underscores this exact shift in Nike: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9503EFD81E3CF937A25753C1A9619C8B63.

Stefan Olander, the global director for brand connections at Nike, sums up their new marketing goals pretty well: ''We want to find a way to enhance the experience and services, rather than looking for a way to interrupt people from getting to where they want to go" (qtd. in article above). They're allocating much less of their advertising budget to traditional marketing (like television and billboards), and more of it in very nontraditional marketing, like creating a fitness-centric social network (Nike Plus) that may someday give Weight Watchers a run for their money. (I don't think anyone here will be surprised to see that nike.com is developed almost exclusively in flash.) http://nikeplus.nike.com/nikeplus/

Other companies are taking a page out of YouTube's book and creating websites that seem to be dedicated to just to entertaining consumers. We've already looked at Altoids.com, and this is really another great example. You're not going to altoids.com to actually buy altoids, or even to look at the nutrition content. You're going to altoids.com so you can send your buddy a singing telegram, watch funny videos, and play games. The altoid brand is firmly established in their mind; but because he is being entertained, the consumer really doesn't mind this one bit.