Is scale (or lack thereof) just an excuse for laziness?
Lack of scale has to be one of the most commonly cited reasons why marketers (and their agencies) don't greenlight emerging media programs in social media, mobile, gaming or even broadband video. On the flipside, the ability to deliver scale is one of the benefits most often cited by media companies (particularly mainstream media companies) when pitching their wares. The logic seems to run that, in order to be worth the time, effort and money, any marketing tactic needs to (1) allow us to reach millions and millions of people, in a short timeframe, with exactly the same execution; and (2) be easy to replicate time and time again.
But here's the rub -- people don't love brands or buy stuff because they've achieved (shallow) reach of a large audience. In fact, it's the brands that do just that (and only that) that consumers are most likely to ignore. Instead, people love brands that make meaningful connections with them as individuals. If scale measures breadth, what are marketers doing to achieve depth? Our ability to have deep, lengthy, rich engagements with a relatively small audience will ultimately determine our success as marketers. But these types of engagements are hard to come by, difficult to replicate and generally require us to think in terms of growing relationships (real brand relationships rather than simple message exposures) over time (most likely in partnership with influential consumers who will help us spread our message to others) rather than in terms of big hits right now. And that, for many brands and media companies alike, means departing from the tried and true.
It means pursuing innovation, knowing full well that -- even if our innovation delivers results -- we can't do the same thing a second time. It means coming up with new ways of advertising, instead of recycling and repurposing the old formats. It means trying something without the assurances that we're adhering to well-documented best practices and that our success can be measured against established benchmarks. It means doing something that won't "scale" but that will allow us to engage a core audience -- be they influentials who will talk up our products or services to other buyers, or just committed buyers themselves -- for whom our brands are actually relevant. Imagine that!
That might be pretty scary to some -- and it's not easy. To succeed in this environment, we need to stay on our toes, commit to trying new things all the time, acknowledge that something that works today for one audience on one media property simply won't work tomorrow for a different audience across a wide range of other sites. But to the smartest marketers among us, it's exciting and ripe with promise.
