A Change Of Seasons: To paraphrase an REM song: "It's the end of mass marketing as we know it and we feel fine." Two different events of the past week really drove that home to me. Yes, the ad
industry has been attracted to the idea of targeted marketing for the last couple of years. But let's look at what Wunderman and Procter & Gamble did in the last week. Wunderman merged with
Mediaedge:CIA. Now you can write that one off to a huge holding company just wanting to combine some resources, but I think it's more than that. This is a major media buying firm taking on the ability
to take mass market ad campaigns and bring them down to a more specific behavioral level. That's a big shift in attitude from the days when one campaign to address the masses would get the job done.
And look at P&G. The company that virtually invented mass marketing assigned two agencies that deal specifically with African-American consumers to work on many of its major brands. One size doesn't
fit all anymore. The philosophy of "big umbrella" mass marketing is truly falling in favor of a more targeted approach. And planners and buyers, which have known this all along, are going to have to
stay one step ahead of this wave, which is growing by the week.
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Spiked: Tell me you weren't shocked by TNN's loss in court last week on the matter of Spike TV. This is a company
(Viacom) where every legal nook and cranny is checked before an important move is made. They even took Spike TV to the upfront presentations and now the Appellate Court is causing the company the
revisit its rebranding to Spike TV. So what to do? I think Viacom has no alternative but to work something out with Spike Lee. They've come too far down the road to do anything else. And my sense was
that the agency communities were excited about the change. So was TNN.
At The Buzzer: I keep seeing Kmart inch their way toward better results, and it strikes me that its commitment to
multicultural advertising as the best way to play offense was a brilliant strategy.
