Prompted by Avinash’s post on Recency (if this topic interests you, there is much more here), I have to return to an idea that keeps running through my head:
Why do so many Marketing people fail to understand the basic underlying dynamics of Interactive / Online Marketing? Relative to the Comments on Avinash’s post, why would Marketers not be interested in the Recency metric? If the Marketers are not aware of it, why would Analysts not push it to them, show them the power of it?
The more I think about this issue, as I have been for several years now, the more confident I become the answer is quite simple: Nobody ever taught most Marketers how to communicate properly to Individuals. Their training, their experiences, their peers, their conferences, all of it is about Marketing to Audiences. The nameless, faceless hordes represented by GRP’s.
They simply don’t know how to do it any other way.
And as a result, neither does whoever they report to.
Which means any Marketing Accountability or Productivity Metrics, if they exist, are about Audiences, not Individuals.
So, all the Marketers care about are Audiences, these one-off blips on the screen, as opposed to Individuals, who carry longer-term, Potential Value to the Company that can be measured with Recency.
That’s why they allow the blasting of e-mails, they buy untargeted impressions. They repeat what they know from offline, online.
Sad, really. A one-way thought process in a two-way world.
What can we do about it?
I’m going to talk about these concepts with a few Marketers during the AMA’s Digital Marketing Lab at M.planet next week.
I’ll let you know how it goes…
Update: I should probably skip Marketing, go straight to the CFO.