No Free Lunch: A New Age of Marketing

What’s of greater value: the idea itself, the selling of the idea, or the production of the idea? asks Tim Brunelle, CEO of Hello Viking. Why does the advertising industry continue to struggle to ascribe value to and get paid for the core concepts that fuel everything else? — In other words, the exchange of money for ideas.

Marketing 1.0 Vs Marketing 2.0
“Shouting from the mountaintops with bull horns, hands firmly pressed against the corporation’s ears to thoroughly insure a consistent stream of one-way communication.” The only question merely was, “How could we keep costs down?” Agencies with glorious offices slaving away on your account, adept account executive picking up your check for dinner, drinks, and what-have-you. These where the glorious days where agencies often put more effort into the packaging and selling of their products “ideas” than into the ideas themselves. You see ideas, brilliant or otherwise can appear limp, so the agencies gussy them up to create a stage and enhance the performance to protect and serve the idea. Often, doing so is essential to the selling of the idea: because to those buying, the idea is lost without the packaging. Thus the client ends up paying for everything and everyone outside the idea along with the people who created it. Brunelle believes advertising has become a commodity and advertising professionals no more than glorified used car salesmen. “In steps Procurement and the people who’s job it is to keep costs down find themselves effectively in charge of marketing, agency fees and budgets, and thus, in charge of ideas.” This according to Brunelle is Marketing 1.0

Then, Al Gore invented the Internet. And all kinds of smart people figured out all kinds of new ways of doing everything, including creating ideas.

Introducing Marketing 2.0: Leveraging the power of the crowd. If the true power of marketing and advertising is ideas, then why not embrace a system that can take advantage of almost everyone’s ideas? Recent trends in technology and culture have created an environment where everyone expects to pay nothing or close to it for the ideas that fuel marketing and advertising. After all, how hard can ideas be? But the notion that anyone can come up with marketing and advertising ideas is both empowering and devaluing simultaneously. If anyone can come up with ideas, how valuable can they really be?

What has predominantly defined the financial relationship between the marketing department and the advertising agency over the past century has been a discussion of practicalities, of highly tangible deliverables—ink, paper, distribution, airwaves, bandwidth, etc. It’s never been about the ideas themselves, perhaps because they’re not immediately quantifiable. We seem more absorbed with the math, 15% on media, photocopies, and production markups; the deliverables have always been the solid bedrock for advertising topped off with the idea.

We now however live in more transparent times, ones that unleash the powers of technology, the internet and innovation— times that tell us, for example, that marketing campaigns can be had for free or next to nothing.  The traditional model of the expensive advertising agency with its commissions and overheads no longer applies. If this is the case then the question arises – How do agencies get paid for that idea? Indeed. In this Age of utility, empowerment, and transparency, marketers might think they have it easy. Think again – Marketing 2.0 requires an upgrade to Advertising Agency 2.0 for maximum results.