The Disconnect Between Marketing And Digital Marketing

Seth Godin has a Blog post today called, Time Has A Long Tail Too, that highlights perfectly the problems that Advertisers and Marketers are having with the Digital Marketing space. The crux of Godin’s post is about how still, after a few years, the Terry Tate Office Linebacker long-form video commercials for Reebok have an audience (welcome to The Long Tail… where products have an unlimited shelf life… with unlimited shelves). In fact, the one video I clicked over to check out on YouTube – Terry Tate’s World – had 932,933 with 332 comments and 4/5 star rating. The challenge is that when you go to the URL promoted at the end of the Terry Tate video, the site is down. You get a page error.

I’m going to make an assumption that someone didn’t just forget, or that a hosting mistake was not made, and say that advertising campaigns and online marketing campaigns are dramatically different from a traditional ad campaign. In a traditional ad campaign, Marketers could get in and out in the span of a couple of weeks. Times have changed. The length of an ad campaign in the Digital Marketing space is dictated by the audience not by when the ad spend dies.

Why would Reebok not want to capitalize on this audience? How much would it cost to keep the hosting of the Terry Tate page active, and use it to introduce consumers to newer brands and campaigns? The options seem endless, and there’s a captive (and interested) audience with a steady flow of traffic being driven to the site.

Marketing was about one-night stands. The Digital Marketing world has changed it to a relationship where Marketers can’t just scream their messages at Consumers. And, as Seth Godin points out, Marketing has shifted from a "how many" to "who" model.

I fear that traditional advertising people just don’t take the time to think about time.