There’s a bit of a preaching-to-the-choir quality to Syndicate. Most of the attendees appear to be bloggers or social media companies. A lot of people are asking where the marketers and ad agency people are. It’s a good question, since Syndicate was sited in Manhattan presumably to reach these people.
I suspect this deficit is indicative of the head-in-the-sand attitude of mainstream marketing toward social media. One possibility is that marketers are scared. They’re deer in the headlights of a fundamental change in the way business and consumer customers want to be reached. So instead of dealing with the change, they’re denying it and simply hoping it’ll go away. A lot of these people will lose their jobs, in the same way that hundreds of CIOs were fired in the 80s and 90s because they refused to make the transition to end-user computing. The value proposition of direct-to-customer marketing is too compelling for this industry not to grow a lot. Marketers who aren’t embracing this change are signing their own walking papers.
A more cynical theory I’ve heard here is that marketers and agencies don’t want to embrace this media because it’s so cost-efficient. A three-month viral marketing campaign can cost less than a single 30-second TV commercial. If you define your value to an organization in terms of the size of your budget, are you going to embrace a new approach that promises to substantially reduce that budget? It doesn’t matter that you’re delivering greater efficiency and lower cost. Budget-cutting is a sign of weakness in most organizations. And ad agencies are hardly going to support a strategy that reduces their commissions.
An agency that gets it is NightAgency. Check out this new viral campaign they did for Symantec called SafetyTown.
Hi Paul,
Not to defend agencies or marketers by any stretch of the imagination, but I’d ask whether they actively rejected attending?
With a name like “Syndicate” and a sub-head calling out “Content Syndication Trends”, it’s not as though an email, direct mailer, etc are going to make one think, “Hey I Gotta Be There! That hundred million dollar media budget should be moved to content syndication activities…”
The blurbs I read referred to distributing Syndicated Content, not advertising, not pr… those are publishing issues, not marketing issues. I honestly thought the conference might be people trying to get me to buy their content for use on my corporate site. No thanks.
Besides, the event is produced by IDG (which reads “technology conslutants” to most marketers I know), not the ANA, ARF or AAAA where it’s an easy sell to management bean counters.
And to think anyone is going to ask agency people for $1100 (plus the internal cost of unbillable time) to get pitched by search engines, email analysis services, or podcast remarketers that call them everyday already is silly…
My perception is that a certain bunch of bloggers (aka pr people looking to reinvent themselves) are putting those “head-in-the-sand” messages out there to persuade others they’re the vangaard and hype themselves.
I think the story is that there is no story. But, it’s great to read you think the event had value.
I think you’re giving marketers very little credit. While the topic of syndication may be a bit of a misnomer, there’s no question that the speakers were a who’s-who of social media. And the tag line, “Reinventing the Experience of Communications,” couldn’t have been much clearer. Also, this is a repeat event, so word of mouth should have had some impact by this point.
No, I think marketers just didn’t think it was worth their while. And they may be right; all this stuff may be a flash in the pan and could become irrelevant after awhile. We’ll go back to the good old days of 30-second TV commercials and 3% direct mail response rates and media training so executives don’t say anything and stay “on message.” After all, it’s worked for all these years….