Had the pleasure of attending this year’s OMMA Hollywood conference. The theme of this year’s conference was “High Anxiety.” The contributing factors to this “High Anxiety” listed on the program cover were: Big Media Disintermediated, Agencies Left Behind, Marketers Perplexed, Creative in Turmoil. I’m thinking to myself, wow they (publishers, marketers and agencies) really get what is happening to their industry.

What followed however, was the reality that branded publishers, marketers and ad agencies really have no clue as to what is happening. They continue to see the world from the old world Marketing 1.0 construct.

I call it the “follow the money” model. But for sake of demonstration, I’ll call it Marketing 1.0 – The Intrusive Model. This is the way marketing has worked for the past 100 years.

The Marketer, the client, has a product or service and a marketing budget to market that product. Client hires Ad Agency to help determine strategy, create creative and execute media campaigns to reach the “target audience.” Agency negotiates with media reps to purchase media adjacencies. Media companies deliver content with imbedded marketing messages directly to consumers.

This model worked perfectly in a mass communications world of scarce content, scarce distribution and abundant user attention. However, the world has changed dramatically in the last 5 years. I’ve written many times about the new fundamentals of media 2.0 – content is abundant, users are producers, distribution is abundant and free, user attention is scarce and saturated, therefore the user is in control!

Ahhh! The key! The user is in control! That’s the fundamental difference! We heard several presenters pay lip service to the notion that the user is control, however we never heard a single presenter, panel or person talk about how this notion fundamentally changes every aspect of marketing on the Internet and off the Internet in traditional media.

Granted, one panelist did make mention that a “Deep Impact” event is headed towards the big agency world as we know it today.

In my view that “Deep Impact” has already occurred. The comet hath comith.

While we were all sleeping there was a coup d’état. The client is no longer in control or at the top of the heap, the user is and that changes every aspect of marketing.

The game is no longer about how do I get my message in front of my target audience at the right time. Cause, guess what, your target audience is completely attention saturated and is blocking 99% of what you are sending to them. The new game is how do I get invited in behind the attention firewall?

That’s a completely different game and one that no one discussed at OMMA. This game requires a new question – how do I get invited inside the attention firewall? And when you get behind the attention firewall you better be targeting user intent or you will never get in again. And to understand user intent you will have to have a much different relationship with that consumer.

This game requires a new agent/ agency. One that represents the consumer not the client. This new agent will negotiate on behalf of their client, the consumer, for access to the consumer’s attention with the goal being maximize Return on Attention ROA!

So:

• Does pre and post roll ads on Internet Video maximize consumer ROA?
• Does marketers reaching their target audience piggybacking on content maximize consumer ROA?
• Does branding and building brands maximize consumer ROA?
• Does rich media maximize consumer ROA?
• Does mobile marketing maximize consumer ROA?
• Does behavioral targeting maximize consumer ROA?

Wow behavioral targeting doubled click rates! So now instead of failing 99.93% of the time we only failed 99.87% of the time. Touchdown!

My point is Marketing 1.0 philosophies will not fly in a 2.0 world. The intrusive model is OVER! OMMA was all about clients, agencies and branded media. The consumer was not represented. Yet the consumer is in control! Go figure?

I hope someone will do the real Marketing 2.0 conference someday and invite some consumers……….

Technorati Tags: Attention, Deep Impact, Marketing 2.0, Media Strategy, OMMA, User in Control