• by Sam Levine , December 6, 2010

Food flew by my head as I pleaded with my two-year-old to eat his dinner. My silly faces, which worked at six months, and the crazy-man dance that worked at 18 months, fell on deaf ears and a beet-red face. Daddy was worthless, mommy was a wash and he had no real language to tell us anything different.

Despondent, I collapsed on the couch and shuttled through commercials, hoping to catch the beginning of my program and tune him out. Crap, crap, new movie I wanted to see, and more crap, until I found my show. Soon I was media multitasking among the television, my computer running the trailer I missed, and text messaging with smashed food flying around.

It dawned on me that my life mirrored work and that we are all children with powerful yet sometimes limited abilities to connect and communicate our needs and wants. It was a frustration I'd heard from clients, audiences and everyone in between.

There is more content, across more platforms at our stream-of-conscious disposal, yet we consumers are never satisfied with our options, always asking for and open to more. Good luck, brands!

Modern media technology allows for global reach, hyper-targeting and the 360-degree ability to track from message to purchase in ways that have never existed. Even with all the fancy technology, brands and advertisers fight for eyeballs.

Ironically, these innovations also allow us to filter, block and bypass unwanted messaging and content. We are almost fully insulated from spam, making almost all communication opt-in and increasingly difficult for anything unsolicited. Staggering amounts of resources; money, time, and energy, are potentially wasted on marketing plans and initiatives that may no longer be effective.

Behind the scenes, brands, marketers and vendors are faced with this same paradox. Decision makers and gatekeepers are shielded from genuinely engaging communication by the ubiquitousness of digital communications via email, text, tweets and the like, making innovations and alternative solutions just as difficult to share.

Effective and efficient results are the product of people engaging with people. In today's stream-of-consciousness ability to hyper-target interests and needs, media planners and account executives can't just check off boxes based on what they spent last year's money on and expect to get the desired result.

It is frustrating to watch brands and marketers spend a lot of money and produce minimal results. Some try to go it alone, while others rely on existing relationships that may be convenient but not competent. Even with a product that delivers hyper-targeted audiences with television reach at a fraction of the cost, having meaningful conversations with decision makers is elusive at best and impossible at worst when trying to introduce innovation to the marketplace.

Although brands understand their own DNA, elusive audiences across emerging opportunities evolve faster than any one individual can keep up with. Without actual conversations that educate and optimize everyone's efforts, brands and marketers will continue to overspend and under deliver.

The challenge of distinguishing relevant solutions from wasted time is significant, but imperative to measurable impact and a profitable bottom line. Theoretically, the "real" work should be determining the best course of action via the most dependable partnerships, not in micromanaging another's expertise.

We co-produce branded online videos. Our clients need to connect with engaged online audiences and our partner has millions of them waiting in the seat for the next video on a daily basis. One client was only interested in distributing its videos on a particular platform, although we both pushed for alternative strategies based on our experience. The brand trusted us and two days later, there were 700,000 more organic views at our partner's chosen touchpoint. An open dialogue, trusted expertise and tremendous results ... all based on a series of deep relationships and real conversations.

Vendors must know their clients and their clients' consumers as well as they know their own product. Everyone up and down the food chain has to intimately know the organic DNA of all the players to effectively speak to their needs, find solutions and produce results. Otherwise, they will get tuned out like mommy and daddy trying to get a two-year-old to eat his dinner.