Where global warming meets interactive marketing
October 12th, 2007 by Hugh Kennedy”Our stock in trade seems to be going away.”
Is this a) a print media-based marketing agency or b) a geophysicist lamenting the disappearance of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean?
You’ve probably guessed b, but if you’ve been following the flood (figurative) of information about global warming, you’ve seen a lot recently about how much faster the Arctic ice cap has been melting (literal). The transition seems to be moving from sequential to exponential, far faster than anyone predicted. Remember, the Sahara used to be covered in water, too.
It strikes me that the same rule is applying – and the same phrases are being used – in the transition from print to interactive marketing. After ramping up for some years, this transition is moving faster than anyone predicted. When a media rep offers you the print buy for free if you’ll do the interactive program, it’s not a transition: it’s a sea change.
Of course, much of this transition is still isolated to BtoC. Why is BtoB still moving so…dare I say it, glacially?
Is this glacial pace reflected in the fact that BtoB marketing budgets are shrinking? Or is the real problem that marketing allocations are still out of alignment with reality? A new IDC tech benchmarking report shows that technology companies are, on average, spending a combined total of only 13.5% of their budget on their online and interactive marketing and their Web sites. They spend far more than that on live events.
And let’s face it, it shows. Most BtoB Web sites are abysmal: monolithic, built poorly, flat and platitude-laden, about as interactive as a Rand Corporation press release from the 1970s, and not even tagged for optimized search. Too many BtoB companies are afraid of social media and are resisting it even as their customers are dragging them into the spotlight – and those customers usually aren’t focusing on the beauty spots.
Whether you’re more into global warming or an effective marketing spend, it’s clearly time to get activist about it. If the Web is, as one of my colleagues puts it, “the place people are looking,” using the Web to meet your mission needs more funding and more attention. Status quo won’t cut it anymore.