Meadows-Klue on Media: Thought Leaders: conversations with Joseph Jaffe

Joseph Jaffe is refreshingly plain spoken; and pretty outspoken at times. He’s enjoying exposing the truths and challenges of television advertising and the staggering media wastage facing most brands. In the virtual world of Second Life, his agency, Crayon, has put a massive energy into their presence in the virtual world. The model is simple: “if the weather bureau want to find out the size and damage of a storm they fly right into its heart, and that’s the only way you can tackle online,” explains Jaffe.

When it comes to new marketing for the new consumer, Jaffe boils it down to a confrontation between three key streams:

Technology: massive change
Consumers: constant changing
Organisation: change resistance

“As the marketing industry, we’ve lied to our consumers. We told them they would get rich, we told them they would get the girl, we never listened to our consumers, it was a world of ‘ready, shoot aim’: just firing messages at them.”

Jaffe says that’s why he wrote the ‘Life after the 30 second spot’. He’s adamant that the whole marketing process needs a rebuild from scratch, and the thinking behind it needs a paradigm shift. Citing annual budget cycles as being a perfect tool that works against smart long term marketing thinking. 152 Chief Marketing Officers left their jobs in the US last year, with an average tenure of 24.2 months. “Two years to make a difference just isn’t long enough.”

“Marketers have to start akin the question: ‘why doesn’t it work the way it use to’. Iconic brands are having to compete with crap on the left and crap on the right.” Jaffe is vitriolic about brands that wholeheartedly fail to even bother engaging in the digital spaces.

1. Your consumer is fragmenting; fragment with them

It’s a neat way of bridging the gap for what firms should do, and Jaffe says that “you need to fragment with them because every time they fragment further it makes it easier for you to be relevant to them.”

…and the bad news is that it’s only going to get tougher: “We’re not walking in the park any more, we’re climbing Everest: the rate of change is increasing all the time”.

2. It’s time to regain the trust of our consumers

“Small print is the instant indicator that you’re lying to your customers,” and Jaffe is not pulling any punches in challenging brands to be more honest.

3. Follow the trail

Data and analytics may not be the sexiest branch of marketing, but Jaffe is absolute: “where most marketers are looking is the wrong place, if you open your eyes you see them. Data is the DNA of the new marketing model.”

4. Explore new roles for marketing

The explosive growth in new marketing formats is something Jaffe neatly champions.

As an aside Jaffe’s take is that the high frequency of advertising in any media is just a direct correlation to its inefficiency. To explain it he twists around the classic models of marketing to indicate the legacy of the thinking.

Traditional models: Informing, persuading and reminding
New models: Demonstrating and empowering

Jaffe cites four strategic trends as the drivers of change: the always on nature of broadband, the any-place nature of wireless, the power of search advertising and the concept of social networks. He sees them coming together to create “the perfect storm” in the scale of change they demand.

5. Embrace the 93 colours (it’s an analogy of the colours in packs of crayons)

Today’s consumers need more than three primary colours in their communications. Jaffe has a neat way of summarising this by looking at the colours in a massive box of crayons and all the shades and blends that go way beyond the primary colours. “To call the web a medium is an insult; it’s a storefront, a community, a psychologist, an entertainment platform. It’s whatever you want it to be”

On the topics of integration he’s clear that “everyone talks about it but not that many people really get it”.

“The internet is the integrator in marketing. If you’re buying integration and there’s no web element then you’re simply not buying integration”. He argues that it’s not about the duplication of messages between channels, but about how each channel can work in a combined media mix.

6. You are the community you keep

“….or more importantly you are the community that keeps you.” This is another neat way of twisting the convention of ‘you are the company you keep’.

7. Join the conversation

The shotgun approach to marketing in the early days gave way to Peppers & Rogers. In Jaffe’s reading of the market that gave way to a ‘one from one’ model, before today’s mashed up YouTube many-to-many debates

8. You must activate the new influencers

The message here is to get engaged with the real influencers who are driving the discussion about brands online.

9. Production is the new consumption

The rise of consumer content creation has hit the media industry like a tsunami in the last three years. It’s hard to imagine the full implications for brands, but Jaffe is clear that firms need to be embracing this.

10. Experiment (or be experimented on)

Like Jaffe, we’ve been arguing for a decade that this isn’t amount minor change in the economic landscape, but about the death of brands that don’t get it. It’s worth checking out Jaffe’s manifesto for experimentation.

[Apologies if this is a little ropey in parts: challenges of live blogging]

Comments

Thanks michael, though the Ad Age article is a little sharp imho. I studied the impact of Joseph's talk in Mexico last month where there were about 500 of the country's top digital guys, and it's exactly this sort of speech and this sort of book that has the power to shift opinion.

Having taught online marketing for over a decade, I'm conscious that people respond to different types of persuasion and what Jaffe has delivered is a theme that forces strategic media planners to think twice, and forces their clients to ask tough questions about the impact of TV budgets. We need more of this sort of challenge to conventional thinking :-)

Posted by: Danny Meadows-Klue | September 17, 2007 at 09:19