Marketing Week: where viral is dead, data beats opinion, and kids steal TV
“Viral is Dead!” declared comedian-turned-viral media consultant Kevin Nalty to kick off the Marketing Week conference Wednesday at the Royal York Hotel — although he’s willing to be proven wrong by the occasional infestation of roller-dancing babies. (All of his presentation slides are now online.) More than a few members of audience simultaneously tweeted those words in what has become a too-familiar ritual: experts prognosticating about how the future has already arrived. And everyone not in the room? They … just … don’t … get … it. Meanwhile, thanks to Twitter, the smirking never stops! Cynicism that was once the domain of culture critics — who assumed their exclusive dedication to full-time freebie consumption was worthy of being supported by print advertising — now belongs to the people who are trusted with piles of money to spread messages. And corporate journalistic intermediaries aren’t needed to give legitimacy to the Next Big Thing.
Digital Day was the first of two speaker itineraries sponsored by Marketing, a Rogers Media publication which seems especially fond of promoting Rogers Media platforms — although everyone knows they are ultimately beholden to Google. Canadian marketing director for the search engine, Jonathan Lister, came out of hiding from their Yonge and Dundas office to reveal some statistical secrets, then floated a contentious takeaway: “We’ve moved to a stage where data beats opinion.”
What’s the matter with kids today? When a 16-year-old who calls himself Fred Figglehorn gets 65 times the YouTube traffic of Oprah Winfrey, they don’t know what anything is worth, because a regulation-protected company like Canwest still has to fork over money for the broadcast rights to Glee. “Real people want to connect with real things,” counters the head of sales from Facebook, while discovering that the majority of the marketers in the audience had never heard of Facebook’s ever-confusing system of revenue-seeking Fan Pages. When all else fails — blame it on their age!
Media Day, the second round of the confab, started this morning with The Age of Persuasion host and author Terry O’Reilly explaining how “Great marketing is like a shish-kabob.” Michael Quast, the vice-president of development for celebrity handyman Mike Holmes, basked in his strategies for cultivating Canadian fame for a burly man who knows how to build stuff. Can an infinite stream of existential tweets be considered a form of construction? Charlie Crowe, the CEO of branding firm C Squared, came armed with the stats: no more than 20 per cent of the kids are exclusively watching the TV set even when it’s on — but does it really matter when 80 per cent of all media will be digital in a decade? By then, figuring out how to monetize everything will be a different generation’s problem.