Steve Yastrow reports a speech by John Stratton, CMO of Verizon. Here are the first 4 of the 8 points he made, according to AdAge.
1. Your clients are absolutely in trouble and they are looking for you to save them.I wasn't there and I may be taking this out of context... but he sounds like a desperate man. More so when you get to point 5:2. What you've been selling for the last fifty years no longer works.
3. Major marketing money is going to be in motion in the next decade and no one really yet understands exactly where it will land, if it even will land, or if it will just disappear altogether.
4. Before they figure out where to put their money, your marketer clients will hire and fire agency after agency, seeking someone, anyone, who can tell them where they might go next.
5. CMO average tenure, already famously brief, will get even shorter as CEOs begin to recognize how much money they are blowing on antiquated media plans.I can't help thinking this speech reveals what sucks about some agency-client relationships. The client's job is just to dish out the budget, and the agency's role is to provide the butt to kick when it doesn't work.
I'm sure Stratton is right about the need for radical thinking, but CMOs had better not wait for agencies to do it for them. What about something a little more collaborative and less blaming?
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Comments (2)
Johnnie,
I am a market researcher who is kept sane by your and others blogs. Market research is a difficult world to live in. It's scared, navel, academic and mostly uninspiring. But there's hope. If you ignore us, you are doing us a disservice, You have to come across the divide and educate the plebs by engaging with the enemy. Go to the connections forum and blog, give us something to talk about because it's dying a slow death. Kevin Mclean is a great guy who is doing his best to get people engaged. No other Chairman of MR conference has been brave enough to allow free opnion on the conference, It's hard work, people are watching but no-one is talking. He has created the first MR blog. Help him out.
Hey, it's not that difficult.
February 23, 2006 00:04 Permalink for comment
Hi Vic. You probably spotted that I've written some irreverant posts about Market Research and it sounds like we have some views in common. Of course there's nothing inherently bad with the notion of market research, just the way it is often implemented. Ditto for advertising etc. I'm looking forward to speaking at the conference in March and kicking this around more.
February 23, 2006 07:59 Permalink for comment