Engagement, Or Lack Thereof
By Jay Friedman
First, thanks to the good folks at Yahoo! for their Long and Winding Road summit series they presented here in Dallas this morning. They are a class act and man are they on brand. My name tag looked professionally printed and my name was even in the Yahoo! approved font.
The main topic of this cooperative effort by Y! and OMD was the purchase cycle and how it has been affected by the internet. I agreed with most of it, although the majority of the findings were affirmations more than discoveries. Actually, the most exciting part of the presentation for me was that a key take away was nearly identical to something I wrote about in my 6/6 posting: Create your media plan around the consumer's daily behavior rather than starting with one medium and filling in around it. A very bright gentleman named Mike Hess, Global Research Director at OMD, presented this and other findings. Mike, I'm glad we're on the same page ;)
Speaking more big picture, one of the two topics/findings they covered ties in wonderfully to this week's Ad Age poll (Thanks to Tammy Cancela at New Media Gateway for this forward.) The findings indicate that there are four different "roads" to a purchase. Quick, Winding, Long, and Long & Winding. Now let's revisit that Ad Age poll. The question posed is whether or not Clear Channel's idea of creating one second long radio ads will work and stay around. Maybe for the "Quick" road described in Yahoo!'s study, but not likely for the other three. In other words, for very low dollar purchases where there is a clear category leader - this might be fine. For the rest of us, it's useless.
This appears to be nothing more than pain management medication for a medium that is bordering on the terminally ill. Radio simply can't counter a) cell phone use at times when radio used to fill the time, and b) Ipods and music download services that allow you to listen to whatever you want, whenever you want. For a year that has featured "engagement" as the marketing buzzword, this sure seems to be a step in the wrong direction.