BrandSavant

Gaining Insight From Social Media Data

I Do Not Think Real Time Marketing Means What They Think It Means

by Tom Webster on March 6, 2013

The current usage of “Real-Time Marketing” confuses me, to be honest. It has certainly inspired a lot of hashtaggery, and gotten the chattering classes talking about Oreos again. A leading publisher is now sending me a “Real Time Media and Marketing” newsletter. And yes, it has inspired a lot of blog posts, including this one.

I hesitated writing this, because curmudgeonry is not becoming to me. However, two aspects of what we seem to be calling “real time marketing” don’t really jibe:

1. Real Time Marketing was already a thing. Its been a thing since the 90′s. When profile data is used to generate a just-in-time offer for an individual customer on the fly (what CRM systems have been doing for well over a decade,) THAT’S real-time marketing. You know when you search for a product on Amazon, and you get two more products recommended to you for one package price? RTM has been used to describe that process for some time now, so the term’s current usage in reference to “I tweeted that really fast” is a little misleading. The key to RTM is personalization, not tweet speed.

2. …which leads me to my second point: that thing that is currently being referred to as “real time marketing” is not marketing. I suppose you could call it “responsive advertising,” but it kinda isn’t that either. When I lived in New York City, one of the local radio stations used to position their “street team” at the George Washington Bridge, and pay the tolls of incoming drivers. It was a “real time” act that got people to talk about the brand. And that, I always thought, fell under the umbrella of “Promotions,” not Marketing.

I guess I am a stickler about the use of the word “marketing.” To me, it’s the theory of the firm; the name we give to the process of anticipating and creating demand for products with a combination of price, product, people, and–yes–promotion that constitutes the firm’s raison d’être. Getting people to retweet a brand message (no matter how quickly that message is generated or disseminated) plays a promotional role, but there’s nothing personalized or strategic at play here, so there doesn’t seem to be much justification for co-opting a perfectly good term for what seems to be an inaccurate use.

Now get off my lawn!

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  • http://twitter.com/jtobin Jim Tobin

    To say nothing of the fact that “social marketing” was a discipline 30 years before “social media marketing.” Kids these days. <> but seriously, it does belie a certain ignorance that doesn’t help us build credibility.

  • http://www.edisonresearch.com Tom Webster

    That’s crazy talk, Jim Tobin. :)

  • http://twitter.com/DebraWilliamson Debra Aho Williamson

    I’ve been struggling with these same issues over the past few months that I’ve been researching and writing about “real-time marketing.” Search is real-time. You enter a query, you get results. Fast. When an advertiser knows that President’s Day is coming up, and they know many people like to shop that weekend, they place an ad in the newspaper. Under some people’s definition, THAT could be called real-time marketing. Heck, driving a car is real-time. You hit the gas, the car goes. Turn the faucet, the water comes on. You can see how ridiculous it can get if you start to dissect the words.

    I think the underpinnings of what is going on here are more important than the term we use to describe it. Regis McKenna may have coined the term a long time ago, but I doubt he could have predicted where we have ended up: Today, the intersection of mobile, social, location data and big data is creating new real-time marketing possibilities that even a few years ago were not possible. Whatever we call it, exploring those opportunities is a thing.

  • http://www.neverstopmarketing.com jer979

    Very soild post. Thank you. Being a purist can be lonely.

  • Rosemary ONeill

    I call it “opportunistic advertising.” Much of what passes for “marketing” right now is actually advertising dressed up in social media costume.

  • http://www.mydisruption.com/ Disruptive Dave

    Good stuff, thanks for posting. I agree with this curmudgeonry. I will also note (actually, you inspired a blog post I’m drafting as we speak), that Oreo was prepared for this. It had a full team watching the game with the goal of posting during it. And, it obviously got very lucky that a major, rare incident occurred. Kudos to them, though.

  • http://twitter.com/TomAsacker Tom Asacker

    Have you ever heard of “real-time comedy?” It’s when stand-up comedians cleverly respond to hecklers in the audience. Same thing.

  • mankul65

    With the advent of technology, would definitions of words change accordingly?
    After all, we do not search any more. We now google it!

  • http://twitter.com/robgarner Rob Garner

    Great article, my sentiments as well. To Debra’s point below, McKenna’s definition is not exactly dead on, but it was incredibly accurate in terms of the marketing-tech role, and also in predicting social. It was 17 years ago, and certainly it is somewhat fit for the time, and it be great to see him revisit the topic. But I believe his defintion is the right one – real time user experience, real-time replacing mass media, and also informing all aspects of business in terms of production, time to acceptance, and a constant feedback loop with an audience or customer base. The bottom line is that businesses must be active and present, just as their customers are.

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