Becoming Media Cognostic

At its core, marketing should be in line with customer expectations and experiences, not external, interruptive, or irrelevant. (Irreverent, though, is okay.)

The choice of media to use in a given situation must be determined in the context of audience understanding and the business objective: Why are we communicating with this group, and what behavior would indicate that we’re successful? Without answers to such questions we might as well pick our favorite media vehicle and run out a program or two.

We should not be “media agnostic,” but rather “media cognostic.” Media agnosticism is about being unable (some would argue unwilling) to commit to an opinion about how particular media work for a given purpose and to reach a given audience. Being media cognostic is about understanding how media choices interact and influence attitudes and ultimately behavior. To that end we must select media with knowledge.

Taking a lesson from product development (in particular, “Agile Project Management” by Jim Highsmith), being agile with media means focusing on

• individuals and interactions rather than processes and tools.
• working solutions over comprehensive media plans and spreadsheets.
• customer collaboration instead of contract negotiation.
• responding to performance rather than strictly adhering to a plan.

Complicating matters, the lines have blurred. Just exactly what is a media channel anymore? Consider the following:

• billboards communicate with you (using RFID key fobs) .
• store aisles spit out coupons based on what’s in your basket.
• printed pages that link and smell.
• video that is TV; TV that is video.
• radio is ubiquitous and nonlocalized and allows music downloads.
• catalogs are print, online, and smart at the same time.

The marketing model used to be a fairly linear process of awareness, consideration, and purchase. It fit the sales pipeline and financial reports reasonably well; at the end of all roads the company could measure value. Consumers accepted (passively?) those conditions.

Today is different. “Co” is the moment: cocreation, coengagement, codevelopment, cooperation.

We are used to deploying marketing tools that do not involve the prefix “co” or even the word “customer.” The arsenal consisted of sampling, direct marketing, point-of-sale, packaging, brand identity, advertising, and a host of other unidirectional tactics. They all interrupted the content or experience with “a message from our sponsor.” In the case of advertising, there was an inherent tradeoff between content accessibility and funding of the distribution. If I wanted to read, see, or hear something I had to either pay directly for distribution or allow someone else to pay for it in exchange for accepting some form of marketing message.

The economics of participation have changed for two reasons: First, fragmentation makes it more difficult to find enough people in a cast-and-blast model. Second, technological advances have made participation easy and generally free of direct costs. It is now a “what’s in it for me, and we play by my rules” world. It isn’t called MySpace for nothing.

We must now consider participation as part of the mix. From a marketing-tool perspective, this translates into working with content, information, experiences, and some sort of “tainment”—entertainment, edutainment, or infotainment.

One of the most-debilitating hindrances is the organization chart. Take the tendency to organize around “online” and “offline” marketing. This dichotomy is artificial, is full of risk (not to mention politics), and needs to be eliminated. And since online is now fragmented into “traditional online” and “social,” it all is beginning to seem a bit silly. At best the terms define a set of marketing tactics; at worst they divide the budget before answering the question “What are we trying to accomplish?”

Note to all: There isn’t a silo to be found in the mix, so don’t organize that way.

Are network or spot buys “out”? Not at all; they just need to be part of a coordinated plan. And just as creative for new channels changing, it is likely that creative for old channels will change to support a different role.

Building an inline marketing program using the principles of media congnosticism involved four steps:

1) Define the audience.
2) Define the objective for the campaign.
3) Figure out how to marry the audience with an objective.
4) Implement in sizes appropriate to risk/reward.

Note to all: If you haven’t done steps 1 and 2 do not proceed.

Anthony Power works for Studeo, a direct-response -riented marketing agency, where he helps clients use information to create innovative strategies, positioning and solutions. He also maintains a blog at apowerpoint.blogspot.com.