John Stratton, VP-chief marketing officer at Verizon, commands a $1 billion+ marketing budget, so when he talks agencies are more attentive than a dog with a steak being dangled just out of reach. Just watch that Pavlovian response kick in.

But he’s not a happy bunny

“Last year I spent well over a billion dollars buying space, time, air, hits and clicks across a multitude of mediums,” said Mr. Stratton. “So if you’ve been selling me this stuff, you probably need to know that I’m not perfectly happy. And I’m not alone.”

So he told the great and the good of adworld at Advertising Age’s Madison & Vine Conference at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

In case anyone mistook his position for fence-sitting, he clarified:

‚ÄúYour clients are in trouble. They are looking to you to save them.‚Äù He said the ad inventory that has been sold for the last 50 years ‚Äúno longer works,‚Äù and marketers ‚Äúhave started to figure that out.‚Äù In the process, ‚Äúyour clients will fire, hire, fire, and hire agency after agency‚Ķseeking someone ‚Äì- anyone! — who can help them perhaps on where to go next.‚Äù

“Major money is going to be in motion in the next decade and yet no one really understands exactly where it will and or even if it will land, or just disappear altogether,”

.

Few intelligent observers of the marketing scene would argue. Interruptive Marketing is dead. Long live Engagement Marketing.

Mr Stratton’s solution is to stop dabbling with online and jump right in. But then hint of his real motivation comes to the fore when he predicted that 25 -30% of the $100 billion annual spend on branded advertising is going to go to the mobile phone channel. And in case you still haven’t caught his drift, Verizon is the second largest network in the US, with 51.3 million subscribers. It’s also currently testing an advertising programme on its network.

Actually, despite his obvious vested interest, Mr Stratton may well be right that mobile marketing will command a huge slug of marketing spend in the future. However, Verizon’s vision currently seems to be restricted to ad-subsidised content - in other words, taking the broken TV model and simply hoping it’ll suddenly work again if you slap it on a mobile.

Worse, is that regular readers of MobHappy will know that better targeting and relevance of any marketing messages will be of paramount importance in making the ads be both acceptable in the first place and to stand any chance of working. Worryingly, Verizon seem to think that targeting is actually a breach of privacy and therefore won’t be allowed. This could be one of those “out of context” things, but he said:

“ad delivery cannot be personal. It needs to respect the privacy of the individual while connecting them in a more meaningful way with the message we send.”

How can we hope to be more meaningful without personalisation and, I assume targeting? I’m certain most people would accept an apparent breach of privacy in return for a better service. I mean, that’s the whole basis of Google AdWords.

In fairness to Mr Stratton though, he does warn that a fresh approach to the medium is needed by both content providers and advertisers and simply re-purposing material from one medium to another won’t necessarily work.

However, I think that there’s an awful lot more to mobile marketing than running ads on phones to subsidise content. Indeed, in my recent and pretty exhaustive analysis into mobile marketing, I certainty identified a place for it in my IDEA concept - that marketing messages on mobiles must do one of the following: Inform, offer a Deal, Engage or Advertain.

Subsidised content offers the user a Deal and Advertainment, with the possibilities of Informing and Engaging thrown in for good measure, for the savvy marketer. However, just as no one saw Google AdWords and the multi-billion dollar market it represents, the answer to the mobile channel must be sought in a far wider remit than simple advertising terms.

Verizon and all the agencies they sought to influence need to think in a far bigger framework and - dare I say it - my IDEA framework may be the one that will actually lead to some very radical marketing that actually works.

Story from Ad Age.