One to One Marketing Magic

by Ellen Fruchtman, President In a local Toledo Advertising Club meeting years ago, I listened to an interesting talk by two individuals: Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. Martha Rogers was somewhat of a local celebrity teaching marketing at Bowling Green State University. Don Peppers was her business partner, previously known as a well- respected new business rainmaker for advertising giant Chiat Day. It was the early 1990s and they had just formed their own company, Marketing 1:1 Inc, (which later became Peppers & Rogers Group). They had just completed a book called The One to One Future, which at the time was extremely breakthrough stuff and totally eye-opening. In that talk, Peppers and Rogers talked about what lied ahead in the future. How we will able to deliver messages to people based on what they were in the market for; how you would only see advertising for those products you were interested in. And, although the crowd was mesmerized by what they were saying, it all seemed so futuristic. And, as I looked around, I knew what everyone was thinking: No way. And yet, here we are. It’s a great era of advertising. Not those Mad Men days when we placed a print ad in the hopes to elicit a response. True, in those days, there were limited advertising vehicles. Most of the people were sitting around their oversized TV consoles watching Ponderosa and The Ed Sullivan Show. Aside from really dating myself in this article, I admittedly somewhat miss those simpler days of advertising, the days with three broadcast channels, magazines you couldn’t wait to read, and time spent talking to one another. I must admit we’re in an enviable position as marketers and advertisers today. What hasn’t changed is the need to produce amazing advertising. Honestly, that couldn’t be any truer. According to a study by The Statistic Brain, our average attention span was 12 seconds in the year 2000, and in 2015 it was down to 8 seconds, and I can only assume it’s diving from there. Hell, goldfish have an attention span of 9 seconds! Which is probably why 6-second bumper ads on YouTube are not only becoming more popular, they’re wildly effective. Creative couldn’t be more important. If you’re putting yourself out there with mediocrity, you are surely flushing that investment down the toilet. Make sure you (or your agency) is putting out great stuff. The kind of creative that people will notice. Because the amount of messaging out there is enormous – in fact, the average person will be exposed to approximately 5,000 ads per day. Today, we can target people in a relationship in your specific market to sell engagement rings. We can target people taking a Caribbean Cruise if your store is in St Maarten. We can track every interest and behavior. Having a wine event? We can target people in your market who love wine. And, out of those, we can narrow it down to those who might have a propensity to buy fine jewelry. When you’re searching for a particular product online, you’ll immediately see ads about similar products. Hell, you might even see those ads on a different advertising platform. Peppers and Rogers had it right. Stop putting a large percentage of your dollars in advertising vehicles for the masses. You can sell more if you spend your hard-earned dollars targeting people who like what you sell; who want what you sell. It’s more efficient. It’s more profitable. If you haven’t read The One to One Future, pick up a copy. Sure, they may mention things we no longer use like faxes, but I hear there’s a revised and updated version dealing with this digital age of ours. In any case, the basic strategies are what you need to execute today. I can only imagine what everyone who shared that room with me in the early 90s is thinking now. But, I can probably target them and find out.