Facebook is a ‘broadcast platform’ and marketing faces ‘train wreck’ moment warns content strategist
Rose
Marketing is entering its seventh era which will be based around experiences with the brands which create their own “HBO moments” the ones which will flourish, according to a the chief strategy officer of the content marketing institute.
While relationship marketing, and building followers on social media, has dominated marketing thinking since 2008 in what Robert Rose deemed the ‘relationship’ era, marketers must now focus on building out their experiences via content strategies.
“For the last seven years trying to get customers to like us, follow us and be engaging,” he told the Adobe Summit today. “Engage, engage engage – it’s lost all meaning to marketing now.
“How’s that whole Facebook organic reach thing working out? Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are the NBC ABC and CBS of our time – they’re broadcast platforms.”
But he warned marketing organisations had still not properly adapted to the internet age, and were too often working in silos with disciplines like social, content and web teams, not working together as they were not performance incentivised to do so.
He warned marketing needed to act to avoid its “train wreck moment” referring to the first head on collision between two trains which happened in 1837 in the US and saw a major overhaul of the network.
Rose pointed to three factors which were affecting the change: the evolution of the customer relationship; democratisation of content and experiences and marketing evolution in business.
Of the first point he said disruption meant people were no longer loyal to products, but to “the experience we provide” around it.
The decline of reach and frequency and the ease of publishing had fostered a “small marketing” culture with teams producing their own content for their own channels, but stopping businesses solving the big problems “because we’re engaged in stratification”around those channels.
“We will never scale to the number of channels there are available today,” he warned of the last point. “How many of you have got your Apple Watch teams sorted?”
But he said customers would share your content and messages on all of those channels themselves if you could produce an “HBO moment” which would engage them.
“We can aggregate and build our own audiences,” he said, but also warned “our competitors can do it as easily.”
Alex Hayes
Alex Hayes is a guest of Adobe at the Summit conference in Salt Lake City
topics
Adobe Summit
changes
content marketing
Content Marketing Institute
Marketing
platforms
publishing
