The Digital Tsunami™
Author: Eric Hillerbrand
January 23, 2012
The “digital tsunami™” is a term we coined to describe the overwhelming amount of information that a consumer confronts in the online environment.
A lot of messages. A lot of noise. A lot of stress. Lousy conversions. Today’s consumer is ready for the next generation of ‘noise canceling headphones.’ The only question in my mind: will consumers develop them or will marketers offer them. Your answer to the question will affect how you approach marketing in the future.
One approach says that smart marketing is just better noise. Get the right agency and they can figure out clever ways of rising above the noise. If a duck can get people’s attention what about an aardvark. Water buffalos can be warm and cuddly. Or, maybe a clever Facebook™ game that involves watering your squash plant or goofy YouTube video of the water buffalo autotuned to Nicki Minaj. And there are some great noisey metrics. They describe the noise but exactly capture the ROI: numbers of mentions, retweets, clicks.
The other approach is to enable consumers to cancel the noise. What if your marketing campaign was about producing ‘noise canceling headphones’ that your consumers could use on loan. The more they cancelled the better you could be at messaging. Think about noise cancellation as essentially a filter. The filter is designed to filter the noise. The finer the filter (the better the filter) the more evident it is about what is being filtered. Some noise is getting blocked and some noise is getting through. The more the filter is refined the more you can understand what get’s blocked and what get’s through. The finest filter would let only one sound through—the right sound, at the right moment, at the right volume. The sound that got through would be highly personalized. Everyone’s sound would be different and everyone’s sound would change based on motivation, location and context. I would argue the impact would be incredibly powerful. A fact that consumers would quickly appreciate.
Give me noise cancelling headphones and I would be loyal customer forever.
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Noise cancelling headphones sound great. But how is this different than the targeted ads on Facebook? It seems like that’s exactly what they’re working towards– refining the information you’re pitched so that it’s relevant to your location and context. And they need to pull information from that tsunami in order to pair it down into something more palatable.