Around the consumer. Around the world. Around the clock. We’ve heard it all before. Integrated marketing. 360-degree approach. Permission marketing. Digital marketing. Cause marketing. Engagement marketing. Connected marketing. Content as marketing. One-to-one marketing. Glocal marketing. Every day seems to bring another approach, another buzzword, another label, another short-lived bestselling business book from another author who is never heard from again.

Perhaps that’s the very issue. Many of us lived our marketing lives in the 20th century under the benign and consensual hallucination that Kotler had it all covered. Then came the internet, the set-top box, e-commerce, new logistics, 3D printers, social networks and suddenly Kotler’s 4Ps seem as contemporary as the Bible on astronomy before being rudely corrected by Galileo. The only issue is that there’s no Galileo here yet. No new widely-accepted Way How Marketing Works. And there may not be, for some time yet. Perhaps we’re going through some sort of Cambrian explosion in marketing, with a new technique, a new theory, a new differentiated species of product launch campaign being born every day. Some will make it through, some will not. But it’ll take decades to settle down into anything predictable and stable. If at all it does, that is. Till then, we can’t stop marketing, of course. That’s silly.

But it’s just as silly to continue to market with ways that we know that do not work. We know that the two pillars of traditional advertising – big-budget television commercials with big agency mark-ups – driven by big-budget media buys with big agency kickbacks, both do not work. The low cost of creating great video for YouTube along with the transparency in buying Google and Facebook have put paid to the old-school way of doing things.

It’s not about back-room deals with back-room guys any more. It’s not about TV production markups or media kickbacks either. So what is it about?
We have a glimmer of a clue, but we don’t know for sure either. We started in the era when search was big, grew at a time when display came of age, matured with social networks and YouTube, and now see equations change again with what seems to be the decline of the Facebook age. And we’re just 10 years old. More has changed in these 10 years than in the 50 years before. We don’t have a magic prescription for you.

But what we do know is this: it’s a time to be flexible. It’s a time to be agile. It’s a time when your technical chops play a big role. When your brand should have the ability to listen every minute of every day, and react in minutes. To build an app one day, project on walls another. To create channels on YouTube, fight Facebook’s limits on virality, compose music one month and make a movie in another. Create buzz on-ground and measure it online. Change the way you do your budgets. Change what your people measure. And, through all this, be guided by people who are neither trying to sell you media, nor TV production. As the world changes, brands need to change to be in sync. More importantly, the companies behind the brands need to change just as rapidly. Marketing processes need to change. People need to be re-trained, they need new frameworks, new metrics, new KRAs. This isn’t the time for a mainline agency or a digital agency or a creative agency or a media agency. It’s the time for a transformation agency.

Hi, we’re Pinstorm. Can we help you through some of this change?
Do carry on to read about some of our beliefs, see our work, read client case studies, a little about us or – hey – get in touch with us.