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=============== Publisher's Note =============== An Audience of One One big problem with today's marketing campaigns is that most marketers think of the audience as a seething, heaving blob of humanity, rather than one person at a time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's "1:1 Marketing," to which we all pay lip service. But how many copywriters think of an actual individual when they sit down to write copy? Old time radio host Arthur Godfrey actually pinned a picture of a face to the microphone and talked to that face during his broadcasts. No wonder listeners said it felt like he was talking right to them. This is what today's marketers have long since forgotten, amidst all the statistical analysis, demographics, geographics, psychographics, etc. This cacophony of data produces so much of that advertising clap trap that spews out the other end, which you and I get to watch, see, hear, and surf right past, because it isn't talking to us. Those ads are talking to abstractions, not people. Do you talk to your TV or radio? I do. I'm usually poking fun at the advertising pabulum pouring out at me. It's insulting to be exposed to it. I think most ad units as we understand them today will be gone in less than ten years because they're just chattering to no one, not even themselves. In order for advertising to survive, it's going to have to get a whole lot more straight with its audience. True DM copywriters know their copy must be in dialog with the reader, or else there are no results. I think brand and retail ads will have to adopt the same principle if they really want to pull more traffic through stores to buy products. Ad agencies used to spend lots of money pitching accounts and then amortized those costs over the many years that the account was with them. But now accounts hop around like Mexican jumping beans, as do the people who populate them. Now it's true, there are audiences within audiences. So you may want to pin up more than one face on your monitor when writing copy for a given product. This is what I call "addressable advertising," aimed at someone, not at some thing. LC |  Order Larry's Book Now from Amazon.com |