Viewpoint: Martin Lindstrom, neuromarketing expert and author of Buyology
- Brain teaser: click here to read the cover feature about how the 21st Century is causing ’brain change’ in consumers, and why it matters to marketers
- How Microsoft has tracked brain activity: read the case study here
- Chief product officer at Bebo and co-founder of Xbox Kevin Bachus, answers questions about the role of social media in the great ’brain change’
The role of the marketer will be obsolete really soon. I predict that it will not be about marketers running online communication, instead it will be in the hands of psychologists and data miners.
The amount of data that social media sites can crunch through and use to simulate the effect of advertising even before they’ve been on air is enormous. The entire industry of communication online will leapfrog any other traditional marketing technique because print and TV ads do not have that quantity of data.
Effective advertising of the future will be all about data analysis and the marketing field will not have enough intelligence to understand this data as it’s just too complicated. You are talking to an industry right now of which 99.9% will understand the concept but most likely will never work with it, because it’s too complex.
Another key issue is that messages are frequently being fragmented into such small pieces, dramatically changing our experience of them.
For example, if I asked you to read all the Harry Potter books you will have one type of experience; if I ask you to read just one of the books, you will still get a feel but it will not be so comprehensive. If I take out a chapter it will be different again but if I create a Twitter version of it, a short summary in just 140 characters, that’s not going to engage you properly.
The communication industry has to find a way of communicating things in an engaging way in just 140 characters. It may mean using pictures or sound or other aspects of engagement that aren’t that active right now.
TV advertising should be used as a story-telling platform, then the fragmented media used as a follow-up that links back to the longer version of the TV commercial.
