Today, it is quite literally both the best of times and the worst of times to be a professional marketer.
The best of times—marketing is gaining recognition as a strategic function
- 75% of senior executives agree that marketing is far more important to corporate success than it was 5 years ago
- The CMO title is in place within 47% of companies, at companies that range from A (Allstate) to almost Z (Yahoo)1
- CMOs are increasingly responsible for defining how their companies
interact with customers and for creating a differentiated customer
experience
The worst of times—marketing is at serious risk of becoming marginalized
The problem is that too often “marketing” is equated with
“advertising.” But advertising is not marketing, especially today
when there are many other media and programmatic means to reach
customers and prospects and move them to action. In fact, there
is a host of evidence that the fragmentation of media and rise of new
technology such as TiVo will make TV advertising as we know it extinct
in the near future. Consider these facts:
- Today 8% of homes have PDR/DVR devices and of these 70% will
skip over commercial interruptions ; by 2009, 40% of homes are expected
to have PDR/DVR devices.2 - Audience delivery for TV during prime tme fell by 30% between 1994 and 2004;3 radio, newspaper, and magazines suffered similar declines in listeners, circulation, and readerships over the same period.
- Despite the marked declines in viewership, listeners, circulation,
and readership, the major networks and publishers continue to act as if
they have monopoly power over pricing. Perhaps they do. How
else to explain the fact that each year, prices on advertising units go
up even as the size of the audience reached goes down.4