Max writes a review post ANA conference, that completes the view I was getting when it began last week. Its worthy of note that this audience of over 1,000, was the largest gathering of CMO’s Max ever witnessed.
When Cammie Dunaway, CMO of Yahoo, during her keynote, asked the audience if they knew what Web 2.0 was, I estimate that less than 50 hands went up (or five percent)
Source: Online Spin » Blog Archive » Are Marketers Serious About Ceding Control to Consumers?
5%! Its not that the question was wether they understood it … these are marketers and were just being asked if they knew of it. They are marketers, and didn’t even lie about it!
Seriously this is highly indicative of the crisis that besets marketing departments. What struck me is the emptiness of the words at the conference about “ceding control to customers” yet the best practices said something totally different.
Perhaps at the next ANA conference, we will see fewer presentations and “successful case studies” rooted in 30-second spots!
The question posed in the headline of Max’s post is likely the wrong question.
Are Marketers Serious About Ceding Control to Consumers?
A better question, with all due respect, would be, ‘what should marketers and marketing departments do differently’. Here the lessons are all written out well in Cluetrain.
A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.
Key words here are:
- conversation
- Internet
- share
- speed
- smarter
Consider the 30 second spot against those words, and a simple pass or fail:
| conversation | fail: there are no opportunities for conversation in a 30 second spot on TV |
| Internet | fail: TV is not Internet |
| share | fail: share implies two way, not one way |
| speed | fail: it takes weeks or months to develop a 30 second spot |
| smarter | fail: maybe partial pass, as in smart a@# |
This is a loose, and somewhat tongue in cheek assessment, but the point is that traditional marketers can’t simply tweak current practices; they need to learn brand new ones, and it remains to be seen how many existing CMO’s are capable.
Bankwatch 
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