Geoffrey Moore has made the understanding and effective exploitation of disruptive technologies the core of his life’s work. Currently a Venture Partner at Mohr Davidow, he serves as an advisor to many of the firm’s portfolio companies (including ours!) and draws upon best practices derived from his extensive work.
But most, particularly in marketing circles, know him best as the best-selling author of Crossing the Chasm…and others including Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game, Living on the Fault Line, and Dealing with Darwin.
For the PR folks in the house: earlier in his career, he was a principal and partner at Regis McKenna, Inc., a leading high tech marketing strategy and communications company. In other words, he knows just a little bit about the “mess” that is marketing and how it’s changed and evolved over the years.
Straight from this very insightful horse’s mouth are Top 10 Insights about the PR/Marketing industry of yesterday, today, and tomorrow…pulled from the 20 minute keynote he gave at our San Francisco launch event a couple weeks ago (also below for your viewing pleasure).
#1 – We have completely disintermediated media; the digital infrastructure has completely changed the rules.
#2- Engineers in particular often need speakers for their product. They can make them but they can’t tell their story.
#3 – We talk about STEM in our society, because if you don’t have STEM you can’t make things for the Internet. But without the liberal arts you can’t use the Internet.
#4 – Product used to be the complete currency of PR.
#5 – The need for narrative has never changed. That skill is still at the core of PR. But in the digital world it’s not enough, you have the extra reach (data provides this).
#6 – This system (AirPR) is built for people who want to be accountable. In the absence of a good mechanism, money will always go to the advertising side, instead of PR.
#7 – At the front end (top of the funnel) we need digital tools to help us hear the first set of impressions. Then you have to distill them.
#8 – When you hear “ROI” the first thing you think of is the CFO. But at the end of the day, it’s about the CMO – what they want to know is “what the hell is really going on?”
#9 – All my life marketing has been an open loop process. But the truth is we just didn’t know what was working. Now we can.
#10 – You need both quantitative and qualitative. We need [PR] to get to 50/50, or even 60/40. In other words, we need a quant front-end and a qual back-end.
BONUS INSIGHT: Predicative analytics is still about reducing the number of wrongs. In terms of increasing the yield on high volume things it’s a miracle!
