• by Jim Meskauskas , March 17, 2005

Last week I wrote about the possibility that the cookie - or, more precisely, the data harvested from it - is not the only thing that should concern us when advertising products and services to people. I dared suggest that singular reliance on the myriad data we can get might not be the solution to all our marketing problems. Would it surprise you that a lot of readers were upset by that?

I did say that cookies help, and I very briefly sketched out some of the ways they do. What I tried to do was simply caution against cookies serving as the laurels upon which marketers rest and I suggested that smarter marketing is borne of something other than technology and the data it makes available.

Marketing is in big trouble. As an industry we find ourselves at battle with the prospective consumer. At every turn the consumer is trying to avoid us. With pop-up blockers and cookie sweepers and TiVo, the consumer is going to great lengths to get away from advertising.

Some have suggested that precision and relevance of advertising is all that is needed for a cure to advertising's ills. If your ad is placed in front of just the right person at just the right time, a person will be grateful to you for giving them the proper ad message when they needed it. Or maybe if your advertising had more appropriate entertainment and information elements, the advertising would be seen as a service; that it is simply the "selling" part of advertising that most audiences don't like.

But those are not real solutions; they are just palliative salves to temper the status quo. Maintaining the current level of ad message volume but making those messages more "meaningful" to audiences is not the answer.

Some have suggested that if only marketers and advertisers did a better job of educating consumers on the different formats of advertising on the Web, they would be more forgiving. If only Laura knew that it was a pop-under rather than a pop-up, then she would be okay with my ad message. If only Frank knew that the ad he was getting was from adware instead of spyware, then he would smile softly every time he was confronted with an advertisement instead of bleeding a chicken to curse me with a Santeria ritual.

A marketing model shift is necessary. Most advertising consists of the "yell and scream" variety. It means reaching the potential consumer where they are at not by virtue of knowing they are there but by virtue of being so loud and ubiquitous that the message is everywhere and can't help but reach them.

We need, instead, something more sublime, something that gets into the spirit of a person. Marketers need to use methods of marketing that are built around the notion of 'subconscious utility,' that sense that comes from just below the circumspective surface, that a product is meaningful and necessary to us. Marketing needs to find a way to place itself and the agents it promotes on the currents of our flow experience.

I heard someone once suggest, that maybe one day we will be talking about anti-marketing purchasing behavior, where a consumer purchases a product based on it NOT having been seen in marketing messages? Will we ever get to a point where the level of advertising in our daily lives is so overwhelming that purchase decisions are made based on a product not being advertised?

"Huh... I've never seen that in an ad before; I'll give it a try!"

Marketers and advertisers need to start thinking about actually providing a benefit to the audiences it claims to serve rather than assuming that is what advertising does.

The focus of marketing needs to be reset on people. A better experience needs to be given to them in exchange for their time.