Marketing Awakens

October 28th, 2004

Published in the FT Creative Business 26 October 2004
I opened FT Creative Business today and thought I must be dreaming. It felt like at last I was reading about the real, threatened, exciting marketing world of 2004, rather than the comfortable, outdated one that so many people in the industry would like to cling to.
Tim Thorne gets it absolutely right when he says "FMCG's business model has collapsed, and companies need to move from product to business model innovation." But he could go further. This is a problem in nearly every sector, not just FMCG, and one that everyone in marketing should have woken up to a long time ago.
So far, so interesting. But even more invigoratingly, Fallon's Lawrence Green concedes that The ad industry has a terrible reliance on billings. It's our crack cocaine, while Peter Miiles of SubTV points out an obvious but oft-skirted truth: Young people have better things to do than sit in front of the TV.
Any one of these statements on its own would have been intriguing, but together they seem to represent the first stirrings of UK marketing from its long Rip Van Winkle sleep to find that the old, interruptive marketing model isn't just unwell, it's dead.
Marketers worth their salt must recognise this and act decisively, help our clients become relevant again. Post-Big Brother, it is obvious that people want to interact with brands, co-create them. The message couldn't be simpler – its time to remove the old furniture of advertising communications, and to make advertising useful.

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