Simonsays

The Marketing Century

The CIM has a new book out to mark the centenary of the organisation which, according to the press release I've been sent, celebrates the role of the marketing industry's trade body by providing "a comprehensive source of marketing’s evolution over the past one hundred years."

 

The book appears to cover a wide range of themes; although I haven't seeing a copy so I can't overly explicit about what's in there. I have, however, had a quick look at the chapter on digital marketing written by fellow CIPR social media panel member, Phillip Sheldrake.

It looks good. It nicely weaves a readable narrative about the origins and trajectory of digital marketing from the early days thorugh to current challenges for marketers while all the time offering practical insights. It's a pretty comprehensive chapter too, covering email, mobile, search and analytics.

It concludes with a really interesting take on the potential directons for the future of marketing. What I like is the way the information is kept top-line enough to remain plausible but granular enough to be useful.

It's also highly refreshing to see the 'Internet of Things' being raised as a theme - bringing the classically transactional world of marketing in step with a networked-services vision of the future.

My only - and frankly unjustified complaint - is that the chapter (and likely book) doesn't critically engage with the implications of some of developments. It's unjustified becasue it's a CIM textbook so unlikely to provide a deep critique of marketing and also because Phillip does reference the backlash against BT and Phorm in the section on digital data.

I'm also unconvinced of the book's bold claim it's able to predict the next 100 years of marketing - but maybe that's part of the marketing plan :)

 

History, historiography and Wikipedia

I’ve been doing some talking and thinking about post-digital recently. A big part of this involves how our everyday lives have been - and are being - shaped by exposure to online networks and how this immersion in networks of practice permeates into our real-world thinking.

Usually this is best revealed through our behaviour and expectations, but colleague and friend Chris Applegate pointed me towards this awe-inspiring blog post by James Bridle that seems to neatly invert the notion of post-digital by re-imagining a very digital product through a very non-digital channel.

Specifically, the James has published in book-form the entire series of edits made to the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War across a five year period from December 2004 to November 2009 – from invasion/liberation to retreat/victory. 

The series totals 12 volumes and incorporates a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages. It's truly awesome.

This idea absolutely inspired me. It sets out and makes tangible the idea of history not as a fixed entity of knowledge for knowing, but as a historiography; a fluid discourse; a body of knowledge in flux.

Ex-Cluetrainee and Berkman Center Fellow, David Weinberger, in his book Everything is Miscellaneous, terms this process social knowledge while the blogger in question, James Bridle, puts it more eloquently when he states that Wikipedia is:

"not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot.”

I cannot agree more.

Call it what you will, the sooner we - and particularly those in positions of authority, influence and power - can recognise and accept that the representation and manifestation of knowledge and power is a dynamic, fluid, process that yields meaning and suggests outcomes that change over time, the sooner contemporary society will benefit.