September 17, 2006

Hiatus

Alas, there has been a two-month hiatus in my blog. No real excuse, except that summer felt like a good time to give it a rest and do more contemplating than communicating.

My sense is that there were no cataclysmic changes in our industry. The trends toward new and alternative media, audience fragmentation, and customized messages and media certainly continued. A new study by McKinsey reported that by 2010 traditional TV advertising will be only one-third as effective as it was in 1990: a 37% drop in message impact, 23% fewer ads being seen, a 15% decline in buying power, due to cost-per-thousand rate hikes, and a 9% drop in ad focus because more viewers are multi-tasking.

These are not new challenges, but they will certainly separate the smart and creative thinkers from everyone else.

The summer also brought the London terrorist raid, which provided a particular challenge to airport shops that profit greatly from selling cosmetics, perfumes, and liquor...all products presently banned as carry-on in airplanes.

Now many of the stores are scrambling to figure out ways to ship your purchases. And some clever marketers are taking wise advantage of the situation. For example, Proctor and Gamble donated "smile packs" of toothpaste, mouthwash and floss of Avis to leave on the front seats of its rental cars. Every challenge provides an opportunity!

Wal-Mart stayed in the news all summer, too. Disappointing sales results, store redesign plans, the decision to adjust store product offerings to reflect the variances from one market to another, wage wars, etc. kept the drums beating.

Yesterday, I was watching a documentary about D-Day in which someone pointed out the fact that American troops were trained to take more individual initiative than their counterparts. Confronted with an unplanned set of circumstances, they were more likely to be creative and pro-active, while others who had been more rigidly trained would wait to receive new orders from on high.

And that reminded me of the story of the train wreck near a Costco store, and how the Costco employees rushed out and played such a vital role in saving the passengers. They took great initiative, as that was part of their training at a company whose culture seems to be the antithesis of Wal-Mart. You get as good as you give. That's always been the case...and it always will be.