Microsoft aQuantive acquisition and Google's recent move to hire Madison Avenue talent has created a lot of controversy about their future plans and how traditional agencies should respond. Some argue this heralds the end of the agencies and all of us need to pack their bags. While I don't agree with this doomsday (at for agency people like myself) scenario, it is certainly interesting to hear what Google and Microsoft have to say about the future of online marketing.
Rebecca Lieb of ClickZ, one of my regular reads (see blogroll), shared some very insightful thoughts on this topic today. The two key points that make me think are:
- "You don't need to go into a fixed budgetary cycle," Armstrong argues. Instead, advertisers must learn how their budgets fluctuate with consumer-interest cycles.
- Utten may have put it best when he explained insofar as E-Trade's constellation of traditional, interactive, and media agencies are concerned, the company remains idea agnostic. Instead, what he's buying is the "best optimization."
While idea 2 is not really new, and everyone in web analytics space should live and breath it already, the first idea takes online advertising and web analytics to an new level. It really is the next big step away from the broadcasting marketing model of old to a targeted, focussed and optimized advertising model. It recommends moving away from spending money communicating to your customers when you want to say something, to spending money communicating to your customers when they want to hear from you. That for once sounds like an idea that moves the needle on marketing effectiveness. While I continue to wrap my head around this, I hope to hear your thoughts in the comments section.
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