Reading through the May issue of Media magazine, I read Joe Mandese’s page (Editor-In-Chief) with great interest. He was illustrating some points regarding something that I have been talking about for awhile and that I have been calling the “impersonalization of personalization”. I’m sure as a term it won’t stick and I wish I had something more catchy to call it, like Y2K, but between tweeting, facebook and the occasional microwaving of dinner, who has the time?
Mandese starts off his page by saying “Let’s begin by talking about some human beings. They are, after all, what this media thing is all about. We sometimes lose sight of that. We get so caught up n the process of what we do that we forget it is all about connecting people. Connecting people to content. Connecting people to brands. And increasingly, connecting people to each other.”
However the approach to doing this “connecting”, as most of us involved in any aspect of advertising and marketing has borne witness to, is clearly becoming more formulaic and impersonal. The terms that are used , the methods employed and the mindset behind most of the shifting media; social networking, online entertainment, online shopping and in general the simple desire for monetizing the web pushes us further away from feeling the intimate nature of “connection”. By the way this is me talking and not Mandese, although he and many others seem to feel similarly.
I tweet, but like so many others, I’m not exactly sure what I’m doing. I definitely see quite a bit of the appeal and I have discovered quite a few fascinating and useful things via twitter, but even as I amass more and more followers, I wonder why someone might want to follow me. What are their expectations? Do some people simply have an allure? And why should I care if I have 50 people following me or 50,000? I follow Ashton Kutcher, but I have no idea why.
But it’s easy to pick on Twitter. Twitter just happens to be the hot topic. The issue is not so much that things are changing. Nor is it that things are changing so quickly. What needs to be examined more closely is the why’s and how’s of change. And how those why’s and how’s break down into human needs, desires, wants and understanding.
I was a bit surprised when I attended a 3rd year college advertising class and spoke to them, to discover that while they all seemed to understand the implications of push vs. pull advertising, social media advocacy, Internet based CRM , etc., none of them knew AIDA. Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Nor had any of them really grasped the concept of “storyteller”.
A house is only as strong as its foundation. While so many things tend to change, it’s the things that don’t change that will act as the foundation, the mortar and the bricks.
