If you’ve been watching “Mad Men,” you’ve witnessed the magic of Don Draper’s smooth-talking ad pitches that conjure nostalgia and strong visual imagery. Though the show takes place during a time of shifting values and social upheaval, seen both in the advertising world and outside of it, it’s still firmly embedded in an era where powerful creative and a big-impact tag line were the most important elements of marketing.
But that’s no longer true. Today, marketing isn’t so heavily reliant on great art and powerful copywriting that will get a brand noticed and remembered. Now it’s all about information, the data-gathering and analysis that happens behind the scenes. It’s about compiling information and then processing it to learn who your audience is, how they’re responding and what decisions are going to reap the greatest ROI.
In the advertising world, one major shift just happened that confirmed this. In July, giant ad corporations Omnicom Group and Publicis Groupe merged to create a marketing superpower. But what’s the driving force behind both of these companies? What do they have in common? They both focus on media analytics. They’re in the business of crunching numbers and sharing marketing data with secondhand agencies — because that’s now half the job when it comes to successfully and conservatively selling ads.
This shift in the marketing landscape has primarily occurred thanks to the dominance of technology and how easy and profitable it is to collect information from consumers and then use that to target them with marketing that speaks very succinctly to their interests, based on both categorized generalities for their demographic and past personal preference.
At Mad 4 Marketing, carefully researched consumer data does influence how we advise you on your marketing strategies. As your campaign launches and progresses, we track and analyze the response that your ads get in order to capitalize on real-world, real-time reactions from your target audience. However, we also stand by the complete package — eye-catching visuals and memorable copy. Because it’s not just about getting an ad in front of your potential client/customer; it’s also about how they receive and remember that ad, and your brand, that really translates into a healthy company-consumer relationship and ongoing profit.
As for the newly created Publicis Omnicom Group, it is poised to be the biggest marketing company in the world, outgrowing the previous leader, WPP. Combined, the two agencies will represent three of the world’s five biggest marketing agencies, including four of the largest in the United States.