ORLANDO, Florida – Georgine Anton believes the “marketer’s dilemma” is something created by marketers themselves. She describes it as “a vestige of many years of building the marketing department so that today they’re built more by channel than around the consumer.”
Anton, who is President of Meredith Xcelerated Marketing, has a theory for how this happened, as she explains in an interview with Beet.TV at the annual Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.
Instead of organizing themselves to best serve consumers with optimal content, some marketing department brethren think, “Hey wait, I’m a channel lead. I’ve got to protect my channel. I need to make sure my budget’s as high as last year. I’m competing with the other folks that I work with.”
The answer, according to Anton: “Reorganize the marketing department around the consumer as opposed to being channel-centric.”
Having been in the content business for more than four decades, MXM is in sync with the content-generation demands of the current consumer marketplace. Now Anton is seeing some clients paring back on paid media for more reliance on organic earned and owned media, with search engine optimization critical to driving website traffic.
“Many of our clients have very ambitious goals around traffic generation and yet they don’t have big paid budgets,” Anton says. “So you really have to be creative about driving that traffic through excellent SEO.”
MXM planted its flag in the mobile space in 2008, so “We’ve been thinking mobile since way back,” Anton adds.
The agency has already embraced virtual reality in a pilot for a paint company client that shows consumers how certain colors look throughout an average day. “To have something like VR to be able to bring to clients is an awesome tool,” says Anton.
We interviewed her at the ANA Masters of Marketing annual meeting in Orlando. This video is part of a series produced at the conference. Beet’s coverage is sponsored by Cadent. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
