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Home  Top Stories Abu Dhabi Media Summit: “The Marketers’ Dilemma”
Abu Dhabi Media Summit: “The Marketers’ Dilemma” |
Written by AdNation Editor, Thursday, 11 March 2010
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 There’s been a lot of talk – inevitably – at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit about the ‘changing media landscape’ and ‘fragmentation’. This seminar, though, was meant to give some practical advice to marketers about how to deal with all this change. Specifically, how to build brands in a fragmenting media world. The answer, from this panel at least, appears to be “We don’t know. But the media world is fragmenting. Make no mistake.”
Moderator Jonah Bloom, ex-editor of Advertising Age and founder of EIC Breaking Media, did his best to keep the participants on track. They were: Samir Arora, chairman and CEO of Glam Media; James Hogan, CEO, Etihad Airways; Alan Horn, president and COO Warner Bros.; Maurice Levy, chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe. Arora and Hogan, in particular, seemed to see the panel discussion as a forum to tell us all about the number of people using their brands. Which wasn’t much use for those of us hoping for an answer to the question that had been posed.
Levy, at least, made an attempt to address the point: “I think we should forget the idea that things will ever come back as they were,” he said. “Consumer behaviour and the media landscape are changing dramatically, but we shouldn’t think that brand advertising is dead. Targeted advertising will grow, but it will only create sales. Now, sales are good, but they don’t build a company, or a brand, or value. To build a brand, you need a halo effect.”
He went on to quote the old “50% of advertising money is wasted” adage, but added his own twist. “I think that’s the most valuable part, because that’s what building the halo effect, the brand image that people carry in their heads and hearts. The loyalty you build with consumers is created through a bond based mostly on emotional links. When you create that, you create loyalty beyond reason. It’s not rational. It’s an emotional decision. This is something that’s well understood by businessmen. But some brands have lost that idea.”
Basically, that was the most interesting point that anyone made in this discussion: Engage your consumer. As Levy said in response to an audience question about whether advertisers were using the wrong metrics to measure the success of an ad: “There are two sets of measurement. Numbers, of course, are reassuring. They’re tangible. But involvement is vital. How much have you engaged those people? That’s very hard to measure. It’s not the time spent in front of an ad, or the number of times you’ve seen it that’s important. It’s what trace it’s left in your mind and how close you feel to that ad.”
Overall, though, even the relevant parts of this conversation could have been heard at any media or marketing convention three or four years ago. Maybe, after all, there is a reason apart from their consciences why marketers can’t sleep at nights.
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