A relationship platform

I’ve been spending my last evenings trying to articulate an article on the Mobile abilities map commissioned by Mediacoms Blink magazine. Thought I’d share one of the abilities here, and invite you to go visit the Blink site and hopefully look forward to the whole article is published next year.

– A relationship platform
In the words of Kevin Slavin of Area/Code:
“People watch a TV program once, maybe twice, but they can play chess a thousand times.”

This quote has great implications for how we think about marketing. We need to stop asking ourselves which platform is best suited for display advertising, there is no question, traditional media far trumps the ability of online and mobile

. We need to ask ourselves; is online and mobile a direct sales medium for our brand? What are the connected platforms best abilities?

It seems we have been blinded by our eagerness to measure direct sale, the ease of analytics engines spewing out statistics on click rates and unique visitors at extremely low cost
.

But this has lead us into a haze, where the simplicity of measuring our ability to transport people around the web, has come in the way of seeing the platforms real potential: Establishing lasting relationships with participants through fresh content, conversations, ideas and limitless value.

Online is a relationship platform, not a direct sales platform. It might be an easy platform to measure, but creating the illusion that most products can be sold through a display ad is at its very least misleading.

As the New York Times writes; more and more business models are focusing on subscriptions rather than single sales.

And as more and more products are becoming inherently similar, the unique offering of one business has to come through unique experiences offered through its marketing, rather than the product alone.

The question is: Where can we grow our most important customers? This is the single most important future role of the connected platforms.