What's The Next Silo?

For the first 8 years of Media Two’s existence, I spent 95% of my time educating clients that interactive was truly a piece of the marketing mix. So as of about 2 years ago, I came to the conclusion that everyone now “got” that – as interactive ad dollars continued to spike while traditional budgets dwindled. The only problem was – apparently we (Media Two and the IAB and the rest of the interactive community) did too good of a job selling interactive’s benefits as everyone started throwing their money into the interactive “silo” and abandoning everything else…

When this happens, it’s great for agencies like ours in the near term, but the long-term prospect for this client is a nightmare… By putting all of your money in one silo, and ignoring the fact that people interact with multiple channels is a death sentence to your marketing mix. I think people just tend to forget that old adage that there’s always going to be a worst performer. If you remove one, the 2nd worst now becomes your worst… So how about not replacing any, but maybe just reducing until you can find the magical combination that they’re all successful? Nah – probably too much work. But seriously, by putting all of your money into one silo now means your best silo is also your worst… So what happens then?

Exactly what we’re seeing… Interactive now gets divided into it’s own silo with Search being labeled the best, and traditional banner ads getting labeled the worst. So the first thing clients start doing is looking to cancel traditional ads and only run search… Now we’re sitting on millions of dollars that have been allocated to interactive, but we can only spend it on search – and best yet, search seems to be “drying” up and we can’t spend millions anymore – we can only spend thousands… Hmm… Should we silo search now and maybe hire an agency that only specializes in 3-word key phrases?

The point is – we’ve silo’d everything, and by doing that we’ve accomplished nothing. Search is driven by other interactive exposure, and interactive exposure can also be driven by offline events such as a newspaper ad, radio spot, tv, etc… Don’t drop your marketing mix – add to it and expand on it – but do it with firms that understand marketing, not just firms that are jumping on the hottest trend and soaking up the most coin.