Notes & Links: October 28, 2013

What the ad biz needs is to exorcize direct marketing

Doc Searls Weblog begins with a Michael Wolff’s article in USA Today “What ad biz needs are writers“. Searls primary message in this piece is that advertising and direct marketing were kept apart with top notch writers, art directors, creative directors, etc. wanting to go into direct marketing. And as Searls points out. 

In the online world, advertising messages are not much about increasing brand awareness, or other old-fashioned advertising purposes. (Though today’s ad folk love to throw the word “brand” around.) Instead the main purpose is getting direct responses: clicks and sales, aimed by personal data, gathered and analyzed every possible way. The idea is to  make the advertising as personal as possible, as far as possible, regardless of how creepy it gets. It’s all fully rationalized. (Hey, you canopt out if you don’t like it.)

Terry Heaton in Street Fighting Magazine is quoted

Operating within the soul of every marketer is the ridiculous assumption that people want or need to be bombarded by advertising, and that any invasion of their time or experience to “pass along” an attempt to influence is justified. If this were true, there would be no looming fight over DVRs, which allow viewers to skip ads. You have no inherent right to my eyeballs, and it is precisely this axiom that makes today’s instruments and gadgets so powerfully disruptive to the culture

What we have here is the fact technology is changing marketing. It is timely that the next post from Greg at Digital Tonto takes us into the future of marketing. 

The Future of Marketing

Greg writing on Digital Tonoto points us toward the future of marketing. And in todays techno world Greg sums it up nicely when he says “…brans will have to learn to be more like publishers and develop content skills. It also means that marketers will have to create a genuine value exchange rather than just coming up with catch ad slogans and price promotions”

Greg points out the following:

  • From Rational Benefits to Passion Economy
  • From Strategic Planning to Adaptive Strategy
  • From Hunches to Simulations
  • From Brands to Platforms 

This is a great read full of ideas and links you won’t find elsewhere. And with Twitter Chats like #hcsm what Greg offers us are tools, ideas, a directions for those of us interested in healthcare to focus and build. We are marketing outcomes, care, management, cost, etc. It’s time we had the tools to think of it that way. 

Sugar Linked To $1 Trillion In U.S. Healthcare Spending

How sweet it is. Dan Munro Contributor at Forbes takes a deep dive into the Credit Suisse report on sugar and finds this pearl:

So 30% – 40% of healthcare expenditures in the USA go to help address issues that are closely tied to the excess consumption of sugar.” Credit Suisse Report

This is a financial report about the sugar industry, which the US subsidizes in a big way. Americans pay three times the world price of sugar to the tune of about $3 billion a year in estimated taxes. See the full article here. In essence we pay to get sugar and we pay to fix what sugar broke. 

What is of interest is how detailed this report gets into the health aspect of sugar. And below is a chart “Annual Global Soda Consumption Versus GDP per Capita” Check out where the USA sits. No where near the trend line so far above it think heaven. And you really need to see the chart titled “Average Daily Caloric Intake of Sweeteners By Country”. 

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