AaaS

AaaS - Advertising as a Service is not a service like Saas (Software as a Service) - it is a mindset whose time has come. Consumers are increasingly aware of the fact that they in fact pay the cost of advertising themselves - and that is one more reason why anything intruding, tasteless, meaningless  or expensive may turn them against the message.

Advertising has very deep roots in traditional media and has not yet properly adopted the interactive Internet as a tool to make advertising a useful - and at best fun - advertisement as a service.

Don Schultz - guru on integrated marketing - spoke in Helsinki how brandbuilding has changed and Timo Lehtinen (CEO 121) summarized in their magazine:

- in the past marketers believed that they did build and maintain brands

- they positioned the brand in the mind of consumers and maintained and controlled it in the market - only they had the right to do it

- BUT when all marketers did the same consumers got increasingly fed up with the market noise and started to shun brand messaging

- brand experience started to appear outside their control - in Internet sites, technical support, retail shops, sales contacts, user communities, blogs and recommendation networks

- now brand building has permanently moved from one way to multilateral and brand experience is born in brandcontacts

- brandcontacts are not generated when messages are sent - but when they are received and reacted upon

- winners will be those mastering ROMI - measuring the efficiency and reacting on it

This surely corresponds to my beliefs. The next question is how you -  on the net -can equip your customers with simple-to-use tools where they can describe the reality they live in with a limited enough number of choices. ZEF  is a forerunner here. And once the recommendations show up - easy tools for see2buy2pay or registering for contacting.