The reason for the change? They’re too busy doing other things. Healthy sports? Interesting hobbies? I wish. No, they’re busy with much more interesting things. Online games, social media and messaging their friends, to name a few. 

 

At the same time, I’ve stopped buying newspapers and magazines – the paper ones, I mean. But I haven’t stopped reading newspapers and magazines. It’s just that I now read them online, mostly for free.

 

All of which says a lot about the sea-change that is occurring in the news, communication and entertainment industries that’s giving the business of marketing a shake-up.

 

 

But the dusty old Marketing 101 textbook tells us that for marketing to be effective it needs to go further than that. It’s not enough to simply identify a sore point. You’ve got to make an offer that promises to solve the problem. Then your product or service, plus the way you deliver and price that product or service, must all live up to the promise – or you’re never going to get the opportunity to cross-sell and upsell and keep that customer for life, marketing's ultimate aim.

In fact, the title may not suck but the book does, according to the majority of the Amazon reviewers, who gave it just one star out of five. They complained that the book never delivered on the offer implicit in the title that it would show them why their marketing sucks and what to do about it. Although most agreed with the book’s main premise – that when you don’t start with a plan or strategy and don’t have a way to track results, you may as well be throwing your money away – they were clearly disappointed to find that the book isn’t a ‘how to’ guide containing lots of great ideas they could use and a step-by-step guide to creating the ideal marketing system.

Using actors and fictional characters in advertising isn’t new, of course. In this ad for Hathaway Shirts from 1951, legendary adman David Ogilvy came up with the idea on a whim of putting an eye-patch on the otherwise perfectly-sighted model. It worked. It added what Ogilvy called ‘story appeal’. “It made Hathaway instantly famous,” he later said. “Perhaps, more to the point, it made me instantly famous.”

The difference between the Hathaway Shirts campaign and the ‘Like My Addiction’ campaign is, of course, that the former appeared in paid advertising whereas the latter was posted ‘for free’ on Instagram.  But was it really free? The marketing agency invested heavily in bots and influencers to build Louise Delage’s followers rapidly. And Instagram was the ideal medium for their target market of under-25s. 

   

Trouble is, the internet and social media have become more addictive to marketers than alcohol. That's caused many who are normally quite smart to have become so swept up by the whole Web thing that they’ve abandoned reason completely and chosen to ditch their traditional marketing for the new media.