Have you ever heard the story of the boiled frog? I have not tried myth-busting this one in real life, but the story goes like this: Throwing a live frog into boiling water will make it instantly leap. But if you bring the water up to a boil while the frog is already in the pot, it won’t realize it’s being boiled alive until it’s too late.
While this story is usually used to stress the importance of innovation and going upstream, it holds some truth for overall marketing, too. You detect sudden changes and respond to it. As a marketer, you probably know how an eye-opening headline in a press release or a great picture on a billboard can have an impact on to the success of your campaigns. The attention of your audience is reacting to change. That’s the frog leaping out of the boiling pot.
The bad news is that most marketers fail to respond in time. They place their budget in the same channels as everybody else, and as a result, it takes so much more to get their message to stand out. The audience gets bombarded, your message lands in a pool of noise, and as a result, the entire channel turns into a boiled frog.
How marketing channels get over worn
Here are some facts that my fellow countryman, Martin Lindstrom, also refers to in his famed book, “Buyology”:
In 1965, commercial TV spots were rare and people paid attention to them. The average consumer could remember 34% of the commercial they watched. In 1990 – when programming was filled with TV spots – that number went down to 8%. In 2007, A.C. Nielsen found that the average commercial “recaller” claimed only to remember 2.21 commercials – in total!
TV spots are the most extreme example, but the same trend is seen in almost all marketing channels that have been used for a while. Take email marketing as another example. Ten years ago, you could expect high open and click rates when messaging via email. Not everybody had an email address, though, but those who had one were paying attention to the media they received through it. Over the last decade, people have been far less responsive to email marketing. From being an instant channel for communicating a message, this method has become, to most people, an annoyance. They protect themselves with spam filters and certain countries are prohibited by law to send email messages without an opt-in accept from the recipient. For marketers it gets harder to get the message out there and get ROI on their campaigns. Looks like that email marketing frog is swimming in hot water.
Early movers in marketing get the frog to leap
Getting a message out there and getting your audience to respond is easier said than done. However, chances for success are higher if you explore the potential of new media and dare to utilize those channels before everybody else. Currently money is moving from print to online, but it is much more than just raising budgets on PPC campaigns and adding some banner ads.
But where exactly is the money going? Clearly social networking is on everybody’s lips these days, and it moves the budgets, too. According to Outsell, B2B marketers’ spending on social networking is expected to rise by a powerful 43.3% this year. Budget dollars go from designing outbound campaigns to fostering community interactions, which is a sign of frogs jumping into another pot. But if all the frogs land in the same pot, the competition for eyes remains the same. Early movers can still gain advantage: Basically it’s about chasing the channels that have a high media time spent and low ad spending.
Interactive magazines show potential
The same study mentions the less well-known category “Interactive”, of which the budget is expected to rise 9.2%. Interactive can include items like webinars, but also interactive magazines that are specially designed for being read online are fast-growing right know. A recent study of interactive magazines – that included Zmags titles like the Winding Road Magazine – shows that readers of digital magazines really like the media. According to the survey, 82% of respondents say digital magazines were “more engaging” than web sites with similar content. What’s more important: 71% of respondents said ads on digital editions were less intrusive than web sites.
Fellow co-marketers, please have a look in your marketing pots. Do you see well-boiled frogs down there? Flush them out and try messaging through channels that are on the rise and yet unexploited. I bet you will see an instant leap in the share of audience paying attention.
