Today at the DMA conference in Atlanta during the keynote address, Seth Godin told the audience of direct marketers that they are all spammers.
He accused the industry of "...sending me unanticipated, impersonal, irrelevant junk in a format I don’t want to get about a product I’m not interested in and won’t have time to look at. And you’re hoping to persuade enough people to buy so you can go buy more stamps, or call more people, or buy more inserts, or run more ads. And the problem is, spam doesn’t work like it used to."
Godin has hit the nail on the head (see my August 04, 2005 blog entry, "Cut through the clutter"). Consumers are so overwhelmed with advertising messages that they (i.e. we) seek ways to eliminate, skip, avoid or otherwise tune out the marketing clutter. We are so tired of being bombarded with irrelevant messages that we simply are becoming cynical toward all things marketing and advertising.
It is time we all learn the lessons of spam.
The only way to break through the clutter is to start eliminating the clutter.
The way to do that is to target our audiences with precision, tell them things that we know to be of interest to them using media that we know they prefer in ways that will connect with them and do it in a way that is relevant, useful, helpful and informative to THEM.
Spam is spam, no matter what the medium.
Amen, Seth Godin.
No comments:
Post a Comment