Online Marketing Is Like Fly Fishing
You can’t catch fish unless you put your line in the water. In the case of fly fishing, you can throw your line in the water but if the fish aren’t interested your fly will float on by. The fish don’t care if it’s a really expensive fly, really cheap fly, if your a pro fly fisherman or if this is the first time you’ve ever fished. If they’re not interested, they’re not interested and you can never predict 100% what the fish will bite.
Online marketing is very similar. Trying to guess what piece of content or marketing message customers will bite on is unpredictable (just look at how random the most watched videos on YouTube are). The stream of content the fish are swimming in is getting wider and faster everyday. And the context of your marketing message will unavoidably be among very armature, poor quality and/or irrelevant messages (lots of flies out there for fish to bite on). Most of the pieces of content brands put on YouTube cost 100 times that of the video next to it and chances are, half the time the viewer doesn’t even notice and chooses the home made and poor quality option instead. The carefully crafted Facebook marketing page and status updates the advertising agency has meticulously built over a two month period will appear in the customers news feed right next to their friend’s post of a shaky video with terrible audio, and yet, that video is what will be viewed and shared instead.
So why do brands spend so much money on advertising agencies to create very expensive flies, to be cast in front of very unpredictable fish, in a stream that is covered with millions of other inexpensive, armature and home made flies for the fish to bite on?
The traditional model of advertising where months of time and effort and put into “the big idea” for the brand to sell one consistent branding message costs too much and doesn’t scale online. In the past it made sense because every time you would cast your fly it cost a lot of money but there weren’t very many fisherman because of the high cost and the stream was smaller and slower moving.
I think the future of online marketing is about having as many lines in the water as possible. The goal should not be to have the most expensive, finely-tuned, most researched or highest quality single idea. Every post, tweet, update and video is another line in the water that gives you one more chance to get a bite. The amount of effort and cost that is traditionally spent on the big expensive ideas that ad agencies sell to brands are not worth it. The customers don’t care, they’ll let that beloved idea float on by.
The lower the cost of distribution, the more content will exist and the lower the attention level of the customer will be. The lower the attention level, the lower the cost of production should be to accommodate more frequent and diverse ideas.
ericf Said,
June 14, 2011 @ 6:04 pm
Lots of true principles here. Imagine if they were applied to a smart, nimble agency partner (not vendor, rather more of a partner) with the strategic, creative and production chops to be much more accurate and compelling with their fly-tying and recommending? Imagine if it wasn’t as much of a crap shoot as you paint it, so long as the dice are loaded and aimed at very specific fish (which the both parties have already determined through cognitive cultural and business sleuthing) that are hungry for certain flies…or dice (okay, now I’m mixing my analogies, but you get it).
Do such agency/client relationships exist? Doe such agency’s exist? What if they did and they were mostly paid on the basis of success of mutually agreed upon KPIs and/or ROI? What then?
On a related note, it’s been my experience (as an account guy at a relatively big agency) that agencies are much more nimble and quick reacting than you paint it. Believe it or not, it’s actually the client bureaucracy and corporate hierarchy of approvals (strategic, creative, production and budget approvals) that makes it slow and in some cases, even more expensive. Agencies are eager to always be in a state of constant optimization and adaptation – especially if their revenue is partially based on success.
Good agencies are out there, and they know it’s a fast paced world. (Indeed, their survival depends on this very knowledge, otherwise, they’ll go the way of the dodo, in which case it’s a moot point.) But depending on the brand/client, it’s not about being diverse. It’s about being strategic and focusing on the right product truth(s) and cultural insight/tension that resonates with the target.
And having great analytic reporting to show all the pretty trout.