Emerson: The First 2.0 Marketer

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’m not sure how many self-reliant marketers there were in Marketing 1.0. These marketers of consistency probably sat around a big conference table making fun of Emerson’s middle name. Countless billions they spent building campaigns around consistent messaging. Now, they are dinosaurs. 2.0 is causing a sea change in marketing tactics and tools. The critical mass of broadband and the open source movement are the catalysts for this. For marketers, the long awaited holy grails of targeted content delivery and automated optimization are upon us allowing “wisely inconsistent” marketing. James Roche, CEO of OTTO Digital has coined this, dynamic experience (Dx). Unfortunately many marketers and businesses are slow to embrace these tactics. Even if they want to, many others don’t know where or how to begin.

Tools like AJAX, JSON, Ruby, and Flex are doing more then rekindling Berners-Lee’s original vision of the web as community of ideas. These dynamic experiences are not the Flash bells and whistles of yore. Now they can deliver relevance. Today’s top metric driven marketers understand that relevance=ROI and the best strategy is NOT showing everyone the same message. The same message…even if you get it right for one type of user or goal path, is only effective to the same bucket over and over again. And there is no shortage of buckets that businesses need to define and target in order to maximize performance.

The benefits of creating Dx go even further. Dx enables fluid, rich environments and interactions where testing the delivery of targeted content can occur. Within this dynamic Dx optimizes by creating rules-based relevant experiences to any user segment marketers desire. Dx also decreases the reliance on heavy IT investment and involvement. This all works because it is serverless programming. Most of all, done right, Dx, creates simplicity and exceeds users expectations.

Dx is already all around us online. Maps, SERPS, RSS, geo targeting. These are fundamental changes in the way users experience the web and when done right clearly these tools are for the better. Sooner than we think the first ten years of the static commercial web experience will look like ancient. The website is dead. Long live Dx…and self-reliance.