Is time dying?

Seeing that Facebook has launched IM, I'm interested in seeing how having two speeds of communication changes the way people use FB. "Sitemail" is often slow and leisurely but with the way people constantly use facebook it can also be very quick, whilst IM is, well, instant. On the day this launched I heard Michael Tchong say that "kids use IM to talk to their friends and email to talk to old people" and this recent data from Morgan Stanley supports that.

This need for instantness chimes with a good post from Chartreuse saying Time is dead. The key quote is

        They are not going to be looking for Molly’s great post about the Zune today. Or any links to it.

        They are going to be looking for it when they are looking to buy a Zune.

        Today they will be looking for something else.

And this sums up the problem with most traditional marketing - which work on the basis of time and have a lifespan of 4 or 6 weeks. Great for those people in the market right now, but no good to those who start thinking about it in a few weeks time. Because the footprints of the campaign stay alive online - the microsite appears in the search results even when the brand has turned off the light and gone home, the bebo profile is still there even the brand has stopped monitoring it, the blog comments don't go away.

The challenge then is how to create marketing that stays relevant and doesn't die when an arbitrary date is reached. To take the view that a brand has to be visible in search all year round and that expensive creative assets should be kept alive.

Of course that's difficult. But the whole problem with time based campaigns was brought home to me at Easter. In the UK there is a long established tradition that Easter marks the launch of advertising for gardening products - so seeing a number of ads for lawn treatment wasn't too surprising until one looked out of the window at the weather -cold, wet and windy. A smarter business might have decided that, given this was the earliest Easter for 90 years, it would make sense to rethink the timing.

Comments

[Damiano]

Hi Simon,
what about this for one idea? Create and produce a timeless but great piece of entertaining branded content that is there online forever and essentially always easily searchable and contextually associated with a brand? Like this.

http://nitmesh.typepad.com/blog/2007/12/scorsese-hitchc.html

[Simon Andrews]

I watched that on Friday for the first time - really interesting. I'd like to know what distribution it got but its a clear indicator of where the world is going