connected to your surroundings

How connected are you to your surroundings?

Richard sent me a link to an interview with some "mad men" (advertising folk) pontificating on the relevance of marketing, products, and advertising channels to the internet. Much of what I gleaned from reading this is that they are not as "in touch" as they think they are. Have a look and decide for yourself before reading what I have to say below.

highlights and low-lights

1. The EA Sports / Tiger Woods story is a communications department shining at its brightest. That was awesome.
2. Internet Overalls - I liked the creativity here but I think they're missing the point. The point would not to be to solely cover internet relevance, it would be to make the product relevant to all marketing channels that it could be profitable in. If you concentrate on something that would only make sense to those on the internet, you're ignoring a good chunk of the market. You are missing out (again.) The goal of marketing on the internet should be additional coverage, not mutually exclusive coverage.
3. Katie Couric - They criticize her for not being interactive enough. But first, 2 out of the three interviewees admit to not watching the news, and the third suggests something that's already being done. They suggest bringing her onto the web, or coordinating some sort of Katie-on-demand - but in reverse, where she demands your attention when she talks about a certain keyword. Sounds annoying. I see these guys are not aware that Katie Couric was doing a web-show on the night of the election, which had plenty of interaction on it too. Katie had some small-time guests participating like Hilary Clinton, but who am I to judge? Katie also maintains Couric & Co, a blog on the CBS site where she leads the charge on interactivity. I think these marketing gurus have pigeonholed her to a fault.
4. It appears that some marketing ideals suggest that you have to rush to one channel or another to hit the markets you want. The brands that I see with the most credibility in the music industry have their product and their marketing in all relevant advertising channels and media forms. This does not mean going apeshit and putting your CD in every Wal-Mart and Best Buy, it means that you find the channels that mean ubiquity for your genre and you hit those so that any time that a person is in their shop of choice, your product comes up in their searches. With searching online and in-store inventory systems advancing further all the time, availability is the new advertising. If you aren't in inventory, you don't exist. If you disagree with this, may I present to you: amazon.com.
5. I think TV stations are beginning to make some really great web-content, some of the best web-content lately. They may be adapting faster than a lot of people give them credit for.

The point I'd like to make here is this: If you don't see it with your own eyes, that doesn't mean somebody is not out there doing it.

I'm curious what everyone elses' take on this is. I am into marketing, I run and work in business on the web and off the web so I may be a bit biased in terms of how the nascent internet/real-world marketing practice will turn out. Did you get the impression that perhaps the interviewees, though very accomplished, may have been a bit under-prepared for this, or do you think they were spot-on?