The day after our historic election in NYC, I had a lunch meeting to discuss a marketing conference I was pulling together with an old association partner and the subject of “what do we call this conference” came up. Phrases like Emerging Media, Digital Marketing and of course my favorite, “New Media.” was tossed around. I stopped mid-sentence and said, “New Media…. what the heck is that? What does that really mean?” and my counterpart shrugged as if to say, yeah I don’t know either.  Then I read an article this morning in BtoB magazine that a study called the “Day in the Life of C-level Executive” that talked about how C-Level executives are getting most of the business information online, citing that 67% said it was the most important source with Newspapers being a distant second at 18%. These 2 events, plus my dissappointing experience at Ad:tech (if you were their, please comment or write me about your experience) compelled me to take a brief look at this concept of “New Media” and how it really is an illusion. Below are my week’s worth of “Illusion Observations”….

New Media Illusion 1: The CEOS of Agencies Get It
“YouTube Does Not Equal New Media Prowess, Shelly”
CEOs of big Agencies, like Ad:tech’s Keynote, Shelly Lazarus of Ogilvy Mather Worldwide demonstrate this point beautfully. Shelly gave an engaging and entertaining speech about the next generation of creative marketing that centered around how Oglivy basically took the video shoots for a few of their campaigns and made them into short form videos that they posted on Youtube. More or less the theme was “our commercials are now on Youtube and this is really ground breaking stuff.” She did not mention any ROI that created, she did not mention how that tied back to driving traffic, sales or leads and she did not even talk about how they got those videos found on search or other social media outlets. It was simply a visually stimulating commercial that was put on youtube and this was her “New Media” killer strategy. Reminds me when a watched my dinner partner (Sr, Exec at DraftFCB) give a speech a few months back where he started the presentation by saying “It’ no longer about commercials” and proceeded to show us a 10 min commercial of all the great work his firm was doing. I mean, the duplicity was stunning. New Media is Now Media. No more trumping up elaborate schemes to charge your clients more and using the growth of online video as a reason to shoot more expensive video.

New Media Illusion 2: The Election Was Won Because the Economy
Barack Obama won the election just like all of us business folk do … money. He out raised the Clintons, the well heeled Republicans and any other politician in history. Yet most americans don’t realize that he did that all thru the MyBarackObama social network that my friends at Bluestate Digital built for him. Hundreds of millions of dollar poured through this site and the viral effect of being able to create your own groups and invite others was stunning. Now Barack has over 30 Million voters that he has a direct connection to. meaning he does not need to depend on the top down approach of rallying american citizens through their local leaders, he can talk to them directly. The relevancy here for all marketing professionals is you have a unique chance to connect directly to your customers and listen, support and serve them in ways you could only dream of happening in building and indirect channel sales program. So, New Media is Now Media and if you dont’ figure it out now, your market share will share the same fate as Hillary and John.

Illusion 3: This Is New.
Online Marketing is NOT new. It’s been in practice for over 15 years and has been mainstream for over 6(92% of buyers go online first to research potential purchase, Forrester 2002). There is no excuse left for not aligning your budgets with buying behaviors. In the article I referenced earlier it showed that C-level exeutives spent 15 hours per week online and only half that watching TV (8 hours) and 4 hours reading magazines… seriously, this is the old stodgy CEO of your company that is doing this. We already now Gen Y spends a lot of time on the web, but these are the guys/gals we thought we’re only forced to be online because of email. They have to be the “Last Adopter” and with that the book should be closed on the whole concept of NEW MEDIA.

The illusion of new media only give comfort to those trying to catch up. For the rest of us, this is something we are executing on and learning about now, because we must.This is Now Media that must be dealt with to keep your job NOW, to gain market share NOW, and to ensure that all marketing campaigns are put to their highest and best use in driving ROI NOW. Our clients are there, the buying cycle happens there and now we need to have our resource appropriate there. New Media is a word we should just toss out the window… Now!

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