A Marketer’s Manifesto
We, as marketing professionals, live in an age of seemingly unlimited reach and ever-more-specific information, with amazing new conduits to reach our target audience. But this cornucopia comes with a price.
We no longer have the luxury of a mass audience.
We must now understand every possible segment, every possible target, to reach an audience compatible with, or interested in, a given entertainment product while competing against a myriad of possibilities.
We must leverage original content in as many ways as possible to create the income streams that keep the industry healthy and happy. To do this, we must go the full length and extension of every possible tactic to make sure that the entertainment the customer is consuming is ours.
We must keep pace with constant innovation. We must understand and use every tool available to build the highest degree of loyalty and expand our share of mind and pocketbook to the greatest percentage possible. We must use all distribution platforms, all devices, and know how to connect all of them for the greatest exposure.
And in this new arena, once we achieve that loyalty, that share, we can never take it for granted. We live in a world of ever-shifting attention spans, with every new entertainment product competing with one another for a finite amount of time and money.
We face a lifetime marketing challenge, one that requires not only the classic reminder, but a constant catering, stroking, and branding whenever possible in order to make the content desirable and of value in the selection process.
Be warned: If you think the entertainment industry is a glitzy, fun business, full of ski-slope weekends and fabulous meetings with moguls, you’re right—for one-tenth of one percent of the industry population. For everyone else, it’s a shin-skinning climb up a greased power-pyramid, each and every one of the contestants willing to do what it takes to get to the top. Life at the top is high-stakes, high-speed, and high-risk—and for very few, high-rewards.
Still want to take the ride? Well, buckle up.