Media and Marketing

Traditional forms of media and marketing are losing efficacy, and rethinking the media industries requires a three-pronged approach: listen, create, and develop. Media executives must embrace collaborative innovation and transparency to create new sources of value and meet their obligations to stakeholders.

Privacy in the time of Big, Little, and Baby Brother

The Facebook leadership continues to treat privacy as an afterthought, which could prove to be its undoing. To be sure, when hundreds of millions of people post online detailed data about themselves, their activities, their likes and dislikes, and so on, they do this voluntarily. But this information should be treated with respect. Unfortunately, Facebook’s leadership confuses the right to privacy with transparency, arguing that transparency is good for individual relationships. This is misguided. Transparency applies to organizations, not people. Organizations are increasingly obliged to communicate pertinent information to their customers, shareholders, business partners and so on. This is not the case for individuals. Indeed, individuals have an obligation to themselves to safeguard their personal information. And institutions should be transparent about what they do with our personal information.

Rethinking the Media Industries

How can newspaper executives reinvent their value propositions and their business models to survive in the digital age?

First, listen to today’s youth, because within their culture is the new culture of news and information.

Second, commodity news won’t cut it for any audience, so create a distinct offering.

Third, develop rich, multimedia experiences for new digital platforms and devices.

Finally, embrace collaborative innovation by creating an open platform so that others can help you invent new sources of value.

4 Ps of Marketing

As the Digital Economy explained, the industrial age paradigm in marketing founded on traditional media. The old paradigm was one of control, simple and unidirectional: firms market to customers. We create products and define their features and benefits, set prices, select places to sell products and services, and promote aggressively through advertising, public relations, direct mail, and other in-your-face programs.

The Brand was an image, badge, promise, trustmark or “word in the mind.” Industrial age marketing models emphasized pushing images, messages, and other marketing content. All this is best summed up in the famous “Four P’s” of marketing – having the right product, being in the right place with the optimal price and effective (one way) promotion.

There has been some progress in using social media for effective customer interaction but the old paradigm in marketing remains intact. Today companies need to build wiki brands, and integrated customer experience platforms. There are important breakthroughs in mobile and geo-spatial technologies that change many aspects of the customer experience. Social analytics can pay off big time. However firms need to show that they have integrity and consider the interests of their customers to privacy.