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Amid accelerated disruption in digital media, consumer touch points continue to fragment. That includes a growing list of interfaces and delivery channels for content—everything from smartphones to watches to headphones and speakers. So what’s a marketer to do?
This is the topic of Jeff Hasen’s third and most recent book, The Art of Digital Persuasion, which we discuss with the author on the latest episode of the Heard on the Street Podcast. In addition to lots of marketing tactics, Hasen has also learned a lot in a career that includes work as both a journalist and an ad agency exec.
The success factor that has persisted through those shifts is Hasen’s intellectual curiosity and propensity to adapt. Those who get too comfortable in their ways, and in current technology, will get left aside in the accelerating pace of media and tech disruption, he says.
“It’s about morphing. It’s about broadening,” said Hasen. “I had my own business before I joined Possible Mobile, and since I’ve joined, my horizons have been expanded tangibly. I work next to data scientists and people whose lives are spent in analytics. And it’s just made us become better marketers.”
As for marketing tactics Hasen practices, they’re reminiscent of the Marshall McLuhan adage, “The medium is the message.” His firm Possible Mobile specializes in apps, a medium with nuanced strategies and success factors. For example, apps should be more for brand loyalists than a reach play.
“The app world has changed,” he said. “I look at the mobile web as a mass door or mass storefront for a business. Apps come to play, and those who are succeeding in apps are providing experiences that become more for loyalists and have more personalization elements to them.”
Check out the episode above. We’ll be back in Part II of the interview to dive deeper into Hasen’s book and what marketers should be doing and thinking to use technological change in their favor. Find out more about Heard on the Street and see our entire episode archive here.
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