Joel Pinkham

I’ve just read an article on Ad Age about new legislation in the UK.

Essentially the new law makes it illegal to:

• Not disclose that you are being paid to write a blog post about a product
• Pretend to be a consumer

All in the name of consumer protection. I must applaud the law makers over in the UK, we might get a law like this in New Zealand in 2025.

It’s a nice time to be a consumer, where companies are needing to be transparent to be competitive.

In my experience with banks and insurance companies – transparency is not usually a term they know about. The financial services industry has the biggest challenge with ‘new marketing’ in my view. They have made screeds of money over time that they aren’t as likely to get away with now. Somehow they need to be transparent and add more value for consumers – great customer service isn’t going to be enough. Although they’re spending a bunch of money online – they’re not embracing new marketing and instead dishing out a meatball sundae.

NZ Marketing Magazine and DLB (NZ Marketing Association) seem to be constantly regurgitating messages about “embracing new marketing” at the moment, so I apologise for the cliche.

AdAge recently reported about chief bloggers being a new trend with corporates. Does your company need a Chief Blogger?

To start with; “Chief Blogger” is a wanky title. Hiring someone to blog is essentially the same as hiring someone to manage PR which defeats the purpose of blogging in the first place.

The best thing I’ve seen in company blogs is the passion that comes out of them. Google has their geeky engineers talking directly to other geeks. We love it. It’s not someone blogging trying to manage the brand; it’s the Google engineers being the brand. Sure the chief blogger could be passionate and be a part of the company, but he/she would still be out of the front-line where sometimes the best insight comes from.

It’s best when people are talking to people.

I just read that AdAge have named Unilever as digital marketer of the year. The interesting point about the article – Unilever doesn’t really do digital campaigns. They use digital as a part of their broader campaigns, or as they put it “far from done in isolation”.

It’s good to see the industry going this way and someone getting awarded for this kind of effort. In a few years things will change for the better. I can assume it’s not so much like this in the bigger parts of the world, but in New Zealand; online marketing is put up on a pedestal like it’s something special. I have to admit, myself included.

Some corporates hire specialist Online Marketing Managers simply because a traditional marketing manager isn’t expected to ‘get it’. These companies are generally looked at as doing the right thing and taking a step in the right direction. It’s a step yes, but I think it’s a temporary step until the marketing manager’s do ‘get it’.

In my second year at uni I took an ‘e-marketing’ paper, which was it’s last time running. Now, instead all of the elements of the course are integrated into the other papers. In a number of years, there should be a bunch of marketing managers who get the online theory into them early so that they do indeed ‘get it’.