For those of you born since our Agency was founded in 1984, let me start by educating you about the band known as Steppenwolf. According to Wikipedia, they were a rock group formed in late 1967. They had 8 gold albums (yes, vinyl) and six top forty hits, the most popular of which was “Born to be Wild.”
Which could be useful in summing up the current state of marketing and messaging.
Legacy media, specifically newspaper magazines and telephone directories, still cling to life, though in a declining, greatly diminished and fractured state, with increasingly more attention paid to their “digital platforms” than their paper/printed products.
Persistent media, radio and television, increasingly tout the ability to be “breaking news” via Twitter and Facebook or to listen/watch via satellite or online.
Emerging media, which has in fact already emerged, is the new frontier and is ever expanding/refining means to target consumers with messages they seek, wherever they are, through:
- SEO
- Google Adwords
- YouTube
- Vine
- SnapChat
and on and on.
Today’s reality—and genesis of The Steppenwolf Theory—is that there are more marketing/media “guns” than ever before. What would happen if we used them all to their maximum extent?
As the first verse of their most popular hit has it:
“Get your motor runnin’
Head out on the highway
Lookin’ for adventure
And whatever comes our way
Yeah Darlin’ go make it happen
Take the world in a love embrace
Fire all of your guns at once
And explode into space.”
