Posted on 

 by 

neilperkin

 in 

Counterintuitive

The principles on which the networked world are based are counterintuitive to those that govern the world of industrial era mass-marketing. That means the opposite to what we're used to. Reinventing what we know. Which isn't easy. And if the two worlds are co-existing right now, it doesn't mean that you can fit old established practices to a new environment based on fundamentally different logic and expect them to work.

Two things I've read in the past week express this divergence in two fundamental ways:

1. Pull not push. If you haven't read Mark and Alex's AdMap piece on how ideas spread in a flattened, networked world, go read it:

"Copying among a population with frequent interactions creates a pull mechanism by which things – visible behaviours, opinions, skills, fashions and so on – spread through populations. This is the opposite to conventional marketing wisdom, where 'influence' is a 'push' idea, in being about what we do to people, rather than them chossing to do themselves, without us."

2. Learning to speak human. Adriana's presentation on how an entirely changed communication context shapes the need to change the approach, tone and language of our interaction. From the notes:

"The web has removed physical limitations on space. Data was expensive to create, store and move around and now it is not. This made room for context, which is becoming at least as important as the data…The important thing is that context can be provided only by a human mind. It cannot be automated."

Good stuff.

4 responses to “Counterintuitive”

  1. Tom Avatar
    Tom

    Strikes me that advertising has always been concerned with HOW the mesage is conveyed (this is what planners do isn't it ?) – in terms of how the recipient de-codes the message.

    NOW, because this additional CONTEXT has been created – advertising has to deal with it's old fashioned approach AND figure out how to amend it given that the creation of context is already empowering the recipient to decode it however he / she wants.

    Is that all rubbish ? There's go to be something in it.

    Reply
  2. Tom Avatar
    Tom

    Strikes me that advertising has always been concerned with HOW the mesage is conveyed (this is what planners do isn't it ?) – in terms of how the recipient de-codes the message.

    NOW, because this additional CONTEXT has been created – advertising has to deal with it's old fashioned approach AND figure out how to amend it given that the creation of context is already empowering the recipient to decode it however he / she wants.

    Is that all rubbish ? There's go to be something in it.

    Reply
  3. neilperkin Avatar
    neilperkin

    Don't disagree with you there Tom. I suppose the question has always got to be about whether it goes far enough. Much communication (of all types) seems still stuck in an old model.

    Reply
  4. neilperkin Avatar
    neilperkin

    Don't disagree with you there Tom. I suppose the question has always got to be about whether it goes far enough. Much communication (of all types) seems still stuck in an old model.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Categories

Archives