Television Killed the Radio but Who Killed the TV?

Television by any marketer's standards is an exciting tool for getting your message out.  It offers not only sound but also a visual picture for your audience.  This double message reinforcement has helped to build franchise empires such as McDonald's and Coca Cola.  We have all sat back on Superbowl day and watched in amazement at the largest yearly advertising event entertain us with outstanding movie like commercials.  The next day everyone races to the office water cooler to laugh about the new commercial they saw the day before.  But someone wants to take all of this water cooler chatter away?  Who is the dirty rotten scandal that seeks to make the job of every marketer harder?  None other than the criminal minded TIVO and DVR.  These two partners in crime have single handily destroyed the the advertising campaigns of countless marketers.  Don't get me wrong, I think whomever created the technology should win a Nobel Peace Prize.  However, the amount of commercials that get fast forwarded are continuing to grow exponentially.  DVR penetration, for US homes, is expected to climb between 30% and 35% by 2010, according to an article on Businessweek .com (Watching the TIVO Effect).  So the Million or Billion dollar question that I ask all of you Marketers and Advertisers out there is how do we combat this phenomenon?  How do we do what we do best and find a way to take advantage of the trend and increase company profits? 

What is Multi-Channel Marketing and Why is it Important?

Multi-Channel Marketing to most marketeers is the use of many different marketing channels to reach customers.  For example, using radio, television, and social media marketing to get the word out about the new Eminem CD.  Your objective, as always with marketing, is to make it easier for your customers to buy products from your organization.  Basically, we are offering customers more than one way to buy products from us.  But why is multi-channel marketing so important.  Well, many different reasons.  First it makes things easier for the customer so they are more likely to continue with their purchases.  We all know that convenience is a key component to customer service. Next  multi-channel marketing allows the company more opportunities to interact with their customers.  More interaction leads to building customer relationships and that leads to more purchases.  Customer interaction, particularly website or phone calls, allows marketers to gather important customer data that can later be used for  developing mailing list, or for future promotions or branding campaigns.  Multi-channel marketing is essentially bringing together a complete and cohesive marketing campaign that provides value to customers and profit to the organization.