Gone are the days when businesses relied on newspapers, magazines, radio and television to reach and engage with consumers where the difference between success and failure of an advertising campaign was its creativity. Advances in performance based advertising have caused advertising agencies to abandon the right side of the brain (creative side) for the left side – the analytical side. Recent studies show that businesses are continuing to shift their marketing spend towards direct marketing strategies such as pay per click, direct mail and telemarketing in order to be able to measure the response and get a quick return on investment on their marketing dollars.

The measurability and effectiveness of these aproaches is making them a popular choice among todays Chief Marketing Officers as the marketing roles shift from “creative” to “analytical”. This new analytical marketing function enables businesses to identify, target and measure the customer response for highly targeted search keywords in paid search using pay per click or organic search using search engine opimization (SEO), or through highly targeted placements on relevant content sites. 

However, this has killed the creativity in marketing as it has replaced the engagment element of marketing that invokes the user’s emotion or feelings towards a particular product or service with a transactive element where the consumer has no loyalty towards the product or service. Furthermore, he is likely to change her or his preference with the next click on Google, Yahoo or Micorsoft’s Bing.

But, the pendulum is about to swing back to the creative side. The emergence of online videos and social media will help bring creativity back into marketing as advertisers recreate the consumer passion and feelings for their products and services by engaging with targeted audiences on social media and networking websites such as facebook, myspace, twitter, tradeseam etc. and through viral marketing of creative videos on youtube, hulu etc. This shift back to creativity in marketing will help advertisers re-establish consumer loyalty towards their products and services resulting in high switching costs and repeat purchases.

Tags: direct mail, pay per click, SEO, social media marketing, Telemarketing

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