It is central because it points its nose right at the bullseye of marketing -- accountability, or ROI as it is popularly called these days. Here's the problem: If marketing, for all intents and purposes, is television advertising, and television advertising cannot truly be linked to measurable outcomes (in terms of brand image, equity, or sales), then marketing is not accountable. It gets no respect from the CEO, so the CMO gets fired, and the marketing budget is re-deployed to something more accountable, like the company picnic, for example.
In this scenario, television is the criminal, in large measure because, among other shortcomings, it is, as we all know, a passive medium that has little, if anything, to do with making cash registers go "ka-ching."
Well, that just isn't so if you appreciate what those students did with that wine bottle, what Truefire is developing with b-mail, how DigitalView is working with retail television, and the way EMS-TV has improved, yes, defibrillators. They take a new view of "television" as a supremely relevant medium that is rarely out of sight, and of "advertising" as a discipline that doesn't assume its viewers are necessarily leaning back as passive receptors of well-crafted story lines and emotional appeals.
When "television" is whatever we decide we want it to be and its "advertising" involves and informs and incites us as much as it entertains, engages, and emotionalizes us, the myth that marketing is not accountable will go the way of Mr. Whipple.
Television is dead. Long live television!
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