This story got me fired up on a Monday morning.
It’s nice to be ahead of the curve don’t you think? Hopefully, a growing number of you agrimarketers out there are jumping onto the online bandwagon. Your customers are already there. Yes, farmers too. But how many of you still can’t grasp the concept of what a blog is or Twitter? Agencies, how are you really serving your client’s needs when you don’t understand the concepts much less the technology? Is pasting a paragraph of text on a web page a blog? No. But I still see some of these weak attempts to “get with it.”
I know that there are many of you who get it. But there are still a lot who don’t. Take a look at this excerpt from a story on AdWeek about an IBM consumer research project.
NEW YORK Ad agencies are years behind in catching up to digitally savvy consumers who are moving their media habits online more quickly than expected, according to new global research from the IBM Institute for Business Value.
The first thing that popped into my mind was, “than who expected?” It has seemed obvious for years that consumers (farmers) were moving media habits online. Even ag industry research like the USDA NASS surveys and NAFB has shown this.
IBM found that between 2007 and 2008, the proportion of consumers saying they used social-networking tools soared to 60 percent from 33 percent; for online and portable music services it more than doubled to 46 percent; mobile Internet nearly tripled to 41 percent; and access to mobile music and video quadrupled to 35 percent.
In contrast, 80 percent of the ad executives interviewed expect the industry to be at least five years away from being able to deliver cross-platform advertising, encompassing sales, delivery, measurement and analysis.
Five years away from being able to effectively place your client advertising dollars? I’m not sure I get that. I think what it means is that social networking and new media channels of communication don’t fit into nice little computer programs with pretty charts and graphs. It would be nice if it did but while we wait for people who are way geekier than me to come up with all that, how about getting started and investing your media dollars where your customers are? Spend a portion of it at least and start to figure it out before someone else does and you’re wondering where all your business went.
Most new media advertising is less expensive than traditional media. Is it possible that the fear that “we won’t make as much money” is keeping some back from investing in it?
You might want to take a look at the IBM research which is available online:
Beyond advertising: Choosing a strategic path to the digital consumer (pdf)
By Saul Berman, Bill Battino and Karen Feldman
Succeeding in the new economic environment: Focus on value, opportunity, speed (pdf)
By Saul Berman, Steven Davidson, Sara Longworth and Amy Blitz
via Steve Rubel (his Twitter feed btw)