iMedia's news editor reports on the iMedia Agency Summit's keynote presentation by Dr. Don Schultz.

Dr. Don Schultz, professor emeritus of Northwestern University and president of Agora, Inc., opened his keynote presentation "Marketing on the Edge: New Frameworks for a New Era" by asking the audience if they knew the difference between monochronic and polychronic.

 "Today I have nothing but polychronic people," said Schultz on younger media consumers. "They can be online, flipping through a magazine, watching TV and texting on their phones at the same time. Why does it take a college graduate a year to learn at his new job? They have no reason to learn when everything they want to learn is a few keystrokes away."

Schultz explained that we are no longer living in a linear world. "The edge is all about a non-linear world and that's why [marketers] are having a difficult time."

The professor emeritus of Northwestern University and president of Agora, Inc. broke down advertising into three critical elements displayed as three circles with a shared intersection: 

• Content
• Delivery
• Audience

He explained that traditional marketing is linear and is based on an outbound message system, namely giving marketers all the control of the message and medium.

"We believe we control the system. The system meant marketers were in control. In short, marketers talk, customers listen," said Schultz. "If they don't listen, we talk louder or send more stuff out. It's all linear and one way."

Why is marketing communication so much more difficult for agencies?
The problem is that this traditional marketing method is outdated.

"We are doing the same thing with the same tools. Everybody uses the same system. And the result is that we are creating a cacophony of noise," said Schultz.

Then technology came and changed the world. Consumers have all this technology and now they can put up a shield from the marketer. Consumers have more access to information.

"The consumers are in control now and have changed the system. Consumers are going behind the marketer. All the activity is behind us. All the customer experience is going behind the lines," said Schultz.

The battle is behind the lines
The traditional methods of marketing will not work when the consumer is now in control. "Content is king" has been replaced with "Audience is king."

So what do marketers do?

"It's not how many messages you distribute, it's how many messages the consumer receives," explained Schultz.

He also discussed how consumers are creating internal networks.

"The customers know how to solve any problem through their internal network of friends, websites and aggregated data. This is their internal network and we marketers haven't a clue what they are about," said Schultz. "But we are trying to break into it."

Key tactics are understanding the audience and not just creating content to propel at the consumer.

"The problem today is we don't know much about customers. We know a lot of our skills and what we do. The problem is that our research tools we used to use are irrelevant today," said Schultz.

Marketing communication "Behind the Lines" means doing things differently, not just doing the same things better!
Schultz stressed the notion that marketers are locked in the traditional, linear outbound, push system and need to face the other way.

Marc Kiven, COO, Centro asked Schultz what agencies or clients are doing it right and what can be done with the old system.

"Death and lobotomies," replied Schultz, who was hopefully joking. "The real challenge is that we don't know anything about the customer. We need to learn more about the customer and how they think."

Ending his keynote presentation, Schultz said, "Never, ever rely on best practices because somebody has already figured it out. You need to think of other ways of doing it."
 
Roger Park is iMedia's news editor. Read full bio.