In God I trust, all others bring data.
Right off the bat Dan and Tony raised an important point that I'd never really considered the implications of: internet culture affects all other media. This is seemingly a simple idea yet it's changing the entire media landscape. Millennials are leading the charge to this effect, because much of what was revolutionary like a wireless lifestyle (cord cutters & cord nevers), global content, mass personalization/customization, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and social media are now all commonplace to the younger generations. In response to this massive cultural shift facilitated by new technologies, marketing must also embrace these new mediums and realize what implications they might have on their messaging. Dan and Tony named authenticity, inclusiveness, and innovation as key directives for all future marketing efforts in this changing landscape.
On top of that our attention spans are shorter than ever, clocking in at 8 seconds just below that of a goldfish at 9 seconds and the average person sees 1200 ads per day. So breaking through all this noise and actually reaching people is as challenging as ever but we have more mediums than ever before.
Aside from our discussion on the general changes in media and marketing, Dan and Tony explained how these new mediums allow much more dynamic messaging that is influenced by knowledge of where the target is in the funnel. Did they just hear about our product, are they already in our network and waiting to buy, or are they even a repeat customer? All this can be answered through programmatics used in digital marketing—especially banner and column ads on websites. The depth of information available for targeting digital marketing efforts is appalling to some but an amazing tool for marketers—you can narrow down to the time of day, demographic, location, and your recent web behavior.
Dan and Tony also showed us how being in tune with the digital world is now essential for top brands, and provides unique opportunities. The prime example is Reese's tree chocolates that didn't quite look right and became quite the laughing stock online, but Reese's took advantage of this publicity with a series of hilarious professional memes like below.
