From Advertising Age:
Jan Thompson, VP-marketing of Nissan North America, recently spoke at the Automotive News Marketing Seminar in Los Angeles, where she scolded the automotive industry for their new-media timidity. Nissan, she said, has extensive relationships with three big Internet sites, Yahoo, MSN, and Google, —which they now recognize as "networks in their own rights, able to deliver audiences comparable to prime time." Appparently this isn't obvious to the rest of the auto industry, as automakers account for 25%, or $17 billion, of the nation's annual advertising spending.
In the past 20 years auto advertising has increased by 1,378% while new-vehicle sales increased by only 17%. As a result Nissan has seen the need for change in its advertising, adopting an approach that Ms. Thompson calls "transformational marketing." This new form of marketing includes measuring the impact and mix of communications; adapting faster tthingsgs that measurement shows are not working; and "getting rid of silos at ad agencies, media outlets and in client organizations."
For the full article click on the following link:
Image Source: Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times
This article from Advertising Age drew correlations for me with something that's been on my mind recently: the oil crisis. Or rather how this crisis was completely avoidable were it not for a combination of factors including the oil industry's corporate lobbying of our government, —lining corruptible elected officials pockets, —and us, the American consumer. How are American consumers at fault? Quite simply, we are extremely slow to adapt to new technologies. For a country founded on the fundamental of change we are surprisingly afraid of it. For the past few years now mobile phone users in South Korea have enjoyed live, streaming telecasts beamed directly to the screens on their phones. So why is that technology only starting to creep over here? Because we are not early adopters, it takes us a long time to warm up to the idea of a new technology, and, after we warm up to it, it still takes the more courageous among us to test the technology and sing its praises before the masses are willing to give it a shot.
I believe this, in conjunction with our government's refusal to move away from oil, has directly led to the current crisis. The American public seems to forget that we in fact control everything. If we put pressure on businesses and on the government they have no choice but to listen to us, after all it's our dollars and our votes that keep them around. But we have not been vocal enough.
Witness Brazil, the fifth-largest nation in the world, according to CBS News Brazil will completely free of dependenceance by the end of the year. Not free in 10 years, or 20, but this year. Brazil is completely switching over to sugarcane ethanol, the cleanest and most-efficient of all ethanol types. But this did not come out of the blue, Brazil's program began 30 years ago during the oil crisis of the 1970's. They were forward thinking, we were not.
And don't believe the auto industry's hype when they try and tell us that it would cost billions of dollars to switch the cars over and that infrastructure would have to be built to accomodate it. Ask yourself this: if that is indeed the case then how can Brazil afford to switch over to sugarcane ethanol? Because the automotive technology already exists. Three years ago the "flex fuel" engine was introduced in Brazil. An engine designed to run on ethanol, gasoline, or any mixture of the two.
Experts in Brazil also say that sugarcane ethanol will remain competitive as long as oil stays above $45 a barrel. HowevBrazilianlian officials and business executives say the ethanol industry would develop even faster if the United States didn't levy a tax of 54 cents per gallon on all imports of Brazilian cane-based ethanol. Which begs the question, why are we taxing something that could lessen dependenceance on oil, help clean our skies of vehicle-produced pollution and (perhaps most importantly) save us a whole lot of money? Kind of makes you wonder what Senator pushed for the passage of that tax.
President Bush has finally embraced, as the New York Times put it, the view expounded by Henry Ford nearly a century ago, when he predicted that "ethyl alcohol is the fuel of the future." One hundred years ago that was known, yet we don't embrace it until petroleum reaches $65 a barrel. Here in the states we're looking mainly to corn-based ethanol, for the same reason that Brazil went to sugarcane, it's what we have the most of. However, sugarcane offers advantages over other forms of ethanol, particularly corn. "For each unit of energy expended to turn cane into ethanol, 8.3 times as much energy is created, compared with a maximum of 1.3 times for corn, according to scientists at the Center for Sugarcane Technology here and other Brazilian research institutes."*
It seems to me that we—the American public—need to turn the heat up on our elected officials and force them to take action. Sure, President Bush in his State of the Union address backed financing for "cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but wood chips and stalks or switch grass" with the goal of making ethanol competitive in six years.* But is that really enough? Have we not dragged our feet on this issue long enough? We can devote even more federal dollars to a program such as this, but that would of course mean making congress stop voting themselves raises and lining every bill with personal projects (for example, a bill recently signed in to donate billions more in aid to rebuilding New Orleans. The problem? Over half the money is actually going to pet projects like teapot museums and bridges in states like Alaska, Arkansas, and South Carolina.).
*Source: "With Big Boost from Sugar Cane, Brazil is Satisfying Its Fuel Needs," Larry Rohter, The New York Times, April 10, 2006.
Read more on the Ethanol Revolution in Brazil with this following links, including the two articles I pulled most heavily from for my little editorial, the New York Times and CBS News.
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