I recently read What the Dog Hears by Malcolm Gladwell. If you haven’t read it, you should. There are some excellent lessons for marketers. What caught my attention was his chapter on “pitchmen.” It describes marketing in the late 1800s, where salesmen pitched their wares on soapboxes to townspeople gathered to hear their story.
It all sounds so quaint and old fashioned. So far removed from what we do as “modern” marketing professionals. But is it?
Gladwell describes the 1890’s world of the pitchman. The pitchmen were the marketing execs of the 19th century. They spoke directly to the consumer and spun a tale that would be the envy of any PR person. They — like us — worked hard to create their story and then created content appropriate for their medium (in their case a 20 minute pitch). If you ever saw The Music Man you’ll recognize Professor Harold Hill as the prototypical pitchman.
But then the pitchman’s world irrevocably changed.
First, the industrial revolution enabled mass production. Suddenly manufacturers could make enough product for the whole country, not just their village. Second, the advent of the railroads allowed them to distribute nationwide. And, finally, advances in printing allowed massive print runs and enabled — for the very first time — truly national publications.
As far as shifts go, this was a biggie. It spawned modern advertising, which grew from nothing to a four billion dollar industry in a single decade. It you were a pitchman it must have been a scary time. There you were on your soapbox talking to fifty people while your competitors were advertising to 30,000.
But, if you were smart, you realized the process hadn’t really changed all that much. You still needed to craft a good story. The only difference was how you get the message out. So you designed print ads instead of 20 minute pitches, but the story was still the story.
This was the era of national print advertising. An example of a company that prospered during this era was the National Biscuit Company. They took a commodity (the common biscuit) and created a brand (The Uneeda Biscuit). You may know them better as Nabisco. They were the Amazon of their era in that they invented a new industry — branded consumer goods.
These were heady times for this new breed of marketers. I am willing to bet that the advertising executives of that era figured they had it made. Marketing had finally matured and they were the titans.
Then again, I’ll also bet they didn’t anticipate the advent of radio. Like all fundamental shifts, it was easy to miss. The first radio broadcast came 100 years ago — in 1910 and it took another decade for the first commercial radio station to emerge. But then the floodgates opened.
After all, radio had some major advantages. First, you didn’t have to be literate — not an insignificant advantage in the beginning of the last century. Second, you didn’t have to buy a magazine. Once you had a radio, content was free. Furthermore, radios were as ubiquitous then as computers are today. At one point, 25% of all furniture purchases in the US were radio consoles for the living room.
But once it got going it didn’t take long for radio to establish itself as a dominant media. It didn’t hurt that in 1930 a fellow by the name of William Lear invented the car radio (the 1930’s equivalent of today’s iPod). Yes, that Lear, the one who invented the business jet in the 1960’s. How is that for a resume!
And so a new medium took hold. Yet in the radio era marketers still crafted stories and then created appropriate content. For radio that meant jingles and content baked into radio dramas and comedies. But the story was still they main thing.
Certainly now marketers could sit back and relax, having mastered this new media. Well, not exactly.
Television had emerged after WWII, and took hold during the 1950’s. In hindsight this was the zenith of mass marketing. There were just three networks. Everyone had to watch one of three TV shows at any given time. If the fifties were colored by anything it was colored by this one-size-fits-all mass marketing era.
If you were an advertising exec — a Mad Man — you must have felt invincible. You held the keys to the kingdom. Your work influenced an entire population.
But the 3-network, mass market fifties was also pretty boring and stultifying. Is it any wonder that the mass-market fifties led to the “I’m different, I am an individual” sixties? I lived through the sixties and I can tell you that everyone was focused on the same goal: Being different.
It may seem obvious now in hindsight, yet in the sixties it took a true visionary — Bill Ziff — to see the need for segmented, individualized media. Whereas the country had long had monolithic publications like Time, Look and Life, Ziff introduced Car & Driver, Skiing and PC Magazine. No more one size fits all! Now marketers needed to craft their message to hundreds of vertical audiences.
This was the age of public relations. PR was the king of the hill because these vertical magazines needed content and as PR people we could supply just that. And, yes, we all felt like we had the world by the tail and that nothing would ever change.
And yet, the world did change. Completely. Now the medium is the Internet. Not the Internet of 2000 — where all you did was add an “e” to existing techniques and called it good (e-brochures, e-commerce, etc.). No, the Internet that is changing everything is the Internet that came of age over the last five or six years.
Let’s call it Web 2.0. And in this world we find ourselves communicating directly with our communities, through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and hundreds of other communities that seem to appear daily.
We are entering the golden age of community engagement.
But, as marketers, we haven’t done that in quite a while. In the last era we used gatekeepers — the editors — to get to the prospect. Ditto in the age of TV, or radio or the early days of advertising.
In fact, we haven’t spoken directly to our communities since the era of the pitchman that Gladstone describes. No wonder we’re a bit rusty. But, when you take this long view of marketing you realize that the more things change, the more they stay the same. After all, we’re still creating stories. All we need to do is make sure we craft these stories in a way that is appropriate for the new medium.
More on how to do that in my next blog. But for now it is enough to realize this shift is not as scary as it seems. We’ve been here before. What was old is new again.
We are all just pitchmen.
