Yo!
When was the last time you wrote a long post on Facebook? (Only exceptions on my feed are the ones supporting jallikattu.) Once Facebook added the ‘angry’ and ‘sad’ emoticons even a funeral doesn’t require you to actually write your thoughts! LinkedIn automates its congratulatory posts and if the person can’t type out a response all they have to do is add a cute sticker. As for Whatsapp, what are emojis for? No idea who is making those “forward-or-die” urban myth chain-posts but possibly it’s a bot because who can type so much nowadays? We all communicate way more in images these days than we did back in school. (And yes, I’m that person in a group who carefully researches each post on Snopes.com and breaks the lucky chain.) Next, as bandwidth costs drop, speed improves and image editing features come into ever-cheaper phones is video. Hotstar, Netflix, Amazon Prime are all moving the action to video-on-demand. A generation brought up on YouTube kids is unlikely to love long copy. Going by the number of video forwards these days, neither do adults.
So what does this mean for marketers? In addition to omni-channel, we have to think of omni-format. Text ads for the few readers (like me), video for a larger group and infographics for the in-betweens. And even in video, attention spans are dropping – many advertisers see the internet as a way to move away from the 10 second TV-spot but again, YouTube is training users to watch less than that as they wait for ‘real’ content. Best is if you can get your messaging to be the story or at least part of the story – Barbie (yes, that much-derided doll) does it very well. Interested in Omni-channel marketing? Join us for a webinar on Tuesday, 24th January.
Whether it’s through text, images or video, what customers today expect is advice and guidance not interruptive, event-driven marketing. One way to do this is to approach a community with shared interests and invest in valuable content, education, research and interaction. We have been following this approach for the CMO community for the past few years, have enabled it in the last year for a user group of CIOs and are now ready to launch one more community - more details next week!
In other news, registrations and activity around our upcoming Great Indian IT Marketing Summit & Awards on February 21st at the Ritz Carlton Bangalore is hotting up. Not yet registered? Not yet submitted your award application? Better hurry 
And on February 22nd, select marketers have the chance to participate in Microsoft’s flagship Future Decoded event in Mumbai. Keynote by Satya Nadella, special CMO track and first-time-in-India Immersive Zones to experience the coolest new tech for marketers.
On another note – and as a token of my appreciation for reading this text-heavy note – I’d like to offer you a chance to get your senior and midlevel marketing vacancies (10 Years+ or Rs 25Lakhs+) seen by thousands of qualified readers for free. You can either post directly on our site or just email the details to us. We’ll forward any responses we get. Please note that we can’t promote ‘blind’ listings where the company name cannot be revealed to candidates.
Have a great weekend!
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