What has changed?

Marketing is getting more difficult. I write this not to depress you, but to encourage us to expand consciousness for a moment.

I’ve been around this industry for two decades and have watched marketing communications become vastly more complicated. I remember some of my halcyon early years when my McDonald’s account could capture dominant share-of-voice and line up hungry consumers with a nominal television advertising investment.

Not anymore. What has changed? Here are four dynamic forces that have raised the threshold of success.

Proliferation

Think about your own relationship with advertising.

Most of us have consumed thousands of television ads, not to mention tens-of-thousands of repetitions. But television is just one medium to which we are routinely exposed.

Consider the number of ads that reach you from your car radio when your drive to work, and from billboards, and from bus benches, and from diesel smoking buses. Notice the disguised advertisements that whisper or scream from floor decals in convenience stores to announcements piped through intercoms while you fill up with gasoline.

Traditional media have added more advertising messages per unit of time or space. Networks have unveiled one-second spots. Magazines keep adding more advertising pages, with message personalization and special visual effects.

Media alternatives

First, there were the basics: television, radio, billboard, newspaper, and magazine advertising. These venerable media still dominate most advertising plans, but then came along the so-called alternative media.

Remember when you could spend an evening at home without being interrupted by a telephone solicitor? How many quiet dinners now end with rude telephone ringing?

The facsimile machine, once a luxury channel for the technological elite, has become commonplace in every business office and many homes. So has unsolicited fax advertising.

During the 1980’s, advertisements started proliferating on shopping carts, along concourses, on kiosks in shopping malls, on hot-air balloons, inside product packages, in credit card billing statements, and even on the cellophane wrapper protecting home-delivered newspapers.

In 1992, you could surf the Internet’s entire World Wide Web in about an hour – and see few ads. Now there are millions of Web pages, many of which promote products and services with blinking banners. Today’s rudimentary banner ads promise to morph into full-motion multimedia experiences as the surfing public invests in high-speed cable modems and blazing-fast personal commuters.

How long will it be before email starts looking like slick audience-participation television and faxes become multi-page color storyboards?

Changing media influence

Direct mail continues to grow in emphasis by business-to-consumer and business-to-business marketers. Now, on the average, over 35% of advertising budgets have been allocated for direct media. The consequence: mailboxes at homes and offices are bulging with catalogues, self-mailers, letters of solicitation, and electronic media such as audiocassette tapes and videotapes.

As Internet encryption technologies and Web site firewalls enhance online security, increasingly people are willing to send credit card information around the globe to purchase goods and services. As a recent cover article in TIME magazine heralded, "Kiss Your Shopping Mall Good-bye."

Thanks to the Internet, a few long-distance telephone calls, and several faxes, I planned a two-week trip to England last fall with the thoroughness of a travel agent.

This phenomenon is repeating itself thousands of times each day. Consumers, understanding too little about a complex product or service they’re considering, log on to the Internet and open its vast information resources.

We can buy jewelry directly from a shop in Madrid, seek consulting services from a Taiwan-based management company, purchase freshly smoked salmon from a restaurant in Seattle, or read the daily newspaper in Edinburgh, Scotland. We can do this 24-hours-a-day, seven days a week.

A new consumer

Consumers are overburdened with the sheer volume of commercial solicitations. Attention spans are waning. Since most people have too much to do and too little time to accomplish their responsibilities, they will not give advertisers the benefit of self-centered diatribes. Most have a good sense of how advertising works and when it’s inspirational or lousy.

We hear from our pagers and cell telephones. We read our email and faxes. We’re instantly available, and this availability reeks of vulnerability.

We’re also increasingly perceptive about sponsored messages. We spot and reject advertisements that rely on hyperbole. We have learned, both consciously and unconsciously, to tune out a lot of this cacophony.

Thus, we’re wary: more protective of our private time, less tolerant of companies that dishonor our privacy rights. Because we’re always available, many of us are ready to battle advertisers who cross the line into personal space.

Where do these potentially dispiriting marketing realities lead us? To a marketing communications paradigm for the new millennium.