As I mentioned briefly yesterday, I attended Day 1 of the BRITE Conference today.
At the end of the day, I think I can honestly say that I believe marketing is a discipline in crisis.
Let me start with this.
A week ago, Saul Hansell of the New York Times Bits blog reported that Google was having serious difficulty figuring out a workable ad model for social networking sites.
Google.
Having trouble figuring out an ad model.
Hmm.
Let's see. Larry and Sergey agreed to a three year $900 million ad deal with News Corp's MySpace in 2006 because they loved social media. They also bought YouTube, but everybody puts that site in a different category, for some reason.
Then, last week, Hansell quoted Brin to say:
“We have a huge amount of social networking inventory, including the
MySpace relationship,” Mr. Brin said. “I don’t think we have the killer
best way to monetize social networks yet. We are running a lot of
experiments and we have had some significant improvements. But some of
the things we were counting on in Q4 didn’t pan out. There were some
disappointments there.”
"I don't think we have the killer best way to monetize social networks yet."
Sergey said that? That's pretty amazing.
In the same post, we have Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s senior vice president for product management, saying this:
“We need to find ways to target people of particular demographics that
are comparable to the people you might find in The New York Times or a
particular publication that you may be familiar with,” he said.
Whaaa??
Google's trying to find ways to find people like the people who read the New York Times?
WTF?? Am I crazy, or, might I suggest buying their list??
And then there's all that talk about TV's ad problems (Super Bowl numbers aside).
OK. So, keeping that as a backdrop, I show up at today's C-level restricted attendance session of the BRITE Conference. In the front of the room, several really smart people talking about very cool things. Lots of energy to create new ideas. Lots of exhortations to think big. Lots of buzzy references to all things social media.
And, what happened? No offense, but, big hat, no cattle.
None of the ideas generated from the floor wowed anybody. Nothing there was any more innovative than what'd you'd find in an afternoon in the blogosphere. It was obvious that some (several? many? most?) of the C-level marketing executives in attendance had never read a blog post. Probably never commented on one. Certainly never posted one.
In 2008!
And, when it came to generating innovative solutions to the problems facing their brands, the group could come up with ideas that wouldn't raise an eyebrow in a junior branding meeting in any Diggable company.
OK, so, I come away feeling like this: when the best in the business can't figure out how to monetize a hugely developing marketplace, and a room full of senior people can't come up with better thoughts than the ones I heard today (an unreasonably generalized conclusion, to be sure), I worry that the emperor is skinny dippin'.
As a discipline, it's time for marketing to step up and take charge of this new world, complex as it is. Lots of people understand what's going on; you can interact with them daily on Twitter, Seesmic, YouTube and in the amazing world of the blogosphere. Get 'em in there talkin' to your people. Get 'em shankin' things up. It's getting very late in the day.
I certainly hope today was the result of some strange lunar juju, and that tomorrow is a bitchin' cool day full of ideas and energy. 'Cause another day like today might convince me that it's time to call in the EMTs.
See y'all tomorrow.
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