(Delay in Stewart/Colbert story – will resume next week so stay tuned)
I was reading some other students marketing blogs, and I ran into Norbert Ma’s post about Pepsi trying to use Facebook to promote its brand. This got me remembering some articles I came across a few weeks ago about how corporations and businesses are trying to come up with more, more and more ways to use Facebook to promote their products. Forget Facebook, businesses are working hard at increasing their presence even in the mobile front by making apps for consumers smartphones.
What I see coming is a revolution in marketing. In the old days, marketers used to segment, target, and position their product based on the old rules. They would broadly divide their segments, decide who and how to target them, and then position themselves in the center. They’d resort to tried and tested channels of communication, such as TV commercials, radio, and magazines. But gone are the days when that would have been enough. With the advent of the internet and the ensuing exponential progression of technology, consumers these days fast forward commercials with TiVo, download their favorite songs into their car/iPod, and read all their news over the internet. The average consumer today can watch their favorite shows, hear their favorite songs, and get all the news they could ever want without ever turning to their television, radio, or newspaper/magazine.
Marketers have tried to adapt to this shift in consumer lifestyle by making their presence known at the root of all changes: the internet. This started with ads on popular sites (such as Google, WallStreetJournal.com), and slowly morphed into much more annoying memory hogs. I remember at one point 2 years ago, my news article would request 200kb of data, while the commercial overlay for Toyota’s Prius would request 10mb (For non-technical people, it just means that the ads became very cumbersome and annoying). Ads were getting much more aggressive with their presence, and were destroying the content of the news site itself. Perhaps they overstepped their grounds, because they invoked Chtulu; Enter Adblock Plus. It started off small, but the snowball grew into an avalanche in short time as everyone slowly blocked all ads from the internet. Adblock worked to block all sorts of ads: Video ads, webpage ads, pop-up ads, etc. It was a corporations (marketers) worst nightmare. Naturally they tried to stifle the app, but its been getting more and more mainstream. It doesn’t help that initiatives like the national Do-Not-Call lists were being created to chain marketers even more.
So now with TV attendance dwindling and an invisible force field around the growing technological world, marketers were scratching their heads trying to do their job; How could shovel their product and commercials down our throat? It’s my opinion that a marketers job is to analyze where the most of their target market conglomerate, and then (if I may) throw their company in the middle like some sort of grenade hoping to hit as many people as possible. But now that people have more options to view their media and block ad content, how can they do this?
Of course, being the clever and ever-evolving virus that they are, marketers are launching their war against our 5 senses by showing up in our networking mediums such as our social networking sites, phones, and the internet in general. This includes plans to spam us with ads on Facebook with the new Facebook Deal, ads on our smartphones on basic games and apps, and of course, by lobbying the government against ad blocking. Of course this all was to be expected, but the real jaw dropper was yet to be unveiled.
Google, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook, all pinnacles of the world wide web, could no longer fend off lobbyist pressure to do something about “freeloaders.” The drank the kool-aid about 2 years ago, and started playing around with the idea of net neutrality. Net neutrality became a hot topic and proved to be the golden road for marketers to open Pandora. The issue of net neutrality itself is simple; anonymity and freedom of users from Internet Service Providers. This means no discrimination based on how much they use the internet, which websites they visit, etc… ISP’s tried to end net neutrality by claiming that 90% of bandwith (downloading; internet capacity) is being used by only 10% of customers, so it is unfair for the average person to have to pay such “exuberant prices” for someone elses content. Net neutrality became even more of a hot topic when the RIAA tried to push it through so that it could isolate heavy-bandwith users (again for non technical people – people who download a lot) so that they would get a good idea of who is probably downloading illegal content such as movies, music, or software. But this road has long since morphed into a marketing battle. Corporations are lobbying against net neutrality, not on morals grounds, but because they would be able to “package” websites into different rates, much like a “pay-per-usage” cell phone plan. For exmaple, for $10/month, you could get access to Facebook, Google, and a list of 20 sites you choose (excluding certain bigger ones like Globe and Mail), but for $15/month, you could get access to Facebook, Google, Globe and Mail, Hotmail, and a list of 100 sites you choose (still excluding certain ones, such as Ebay perhaps). With net neutrality gone, corporations could finally chain the beast that is known as the internet, and get a stranglehold on it once and for all.
And of course, the kicker, ad blocking/illegal video streaming/music streaming content would be banished forever. It’s like a big reset button; send the world back to the simple way it used to be when people watched TV, listened to the radio, and read their newspapers. This change hasn’t come to pass yet, and it may never should free-thinking people have any say in our society.
I’ll end this article off now with a reference to the title. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: marketing is a virus. It has no use, no value, and no contribution to society. And if marketing is the virus, then technology is the cure. But no matter how much technology you make to crumble the marketing disease, it will also evolve, adapt and gain strength, and move to bring down the beast.
