Imagine you\u2019re a marketing executive back in the 1960s. Your company has a product, but your sales team has a problem: not enough sales! So how do you solve it?<\/p>\n
If you took the traditional approach to marketing, it would boil down to two words: buy ads \u2013 preferably lots of ads, and get them seen by as many people as possible.<\/p>\n
Call it the \u201cCoca-Cola method.\u201d As the world-famous soft drink company has done year after year, you would flood the airwaves and magazine pages with advertisements.<\/p>\n
Your objective? In a word, mass<\/em>. You use the mass media to achieve mass saturation of the mass market with a mass message aimed at \u2013 you guessed it \u2013 the masses.<\/p>\n And what\u2019s the message? Mass again. It\u2019s about persuading your mass audience that your product is a part of the mass culture. For Coca-Cola, that meant convincing people that everyone\u2019s drinking Coke \u2013 and enjoying it!<\/p>\n Back in the 1960s, when the United States had three main television channels, and nearly everyone was watching the same shows, that was a viable strategy. If you ran an ad on The Beverly Hillbillies, <\/em>your message would reach millions of people \u2013 a large percentage of the television-viewing public.<\/p>\n But those days are long gone. Now the public\u2019s attention is split between thousands of television channels and shows, and many people are watching YouTube and Netflix instead.<\/p>\n The internet is a game changer. On one level, it\u2019s the most massive mass medium ever created, connecting billions of people. But on another level, it\u2019s also the least<\/em>massive medium. That\u2019s because everyone can curate their own private version of it, with personalized Facebook timelines and Twitter feeds, and tailored YouTube video suggestions and Spotify playlists.<\/p>\n Just as mass media has splintered into numerous smaller media, the mass culture that used to be centered around it has fractured as well. The television show Mad Men, <\/em>which ran between 2007 and 2015, chronicled this shift, and the show itself provides an example of the change that\u2019s taken place. The show received a great deal of praise, yet on average, only about 1 percent of the US population watched it.<\/p>\n The mass-advertising approach to marketing no longer makes sense. Clearly, a new approach is needed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mass advertising made sense in the heyday of mass media; in the internet age, it no longer does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":87756,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[104],"class_list":["post-20520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-advertising"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20520"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87669,"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20520\/revisions\/87669"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/87756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/procure-media.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}