In radio programing, there’s a formula for choosing music to play to an audience. Music programers know your music taste solidify around the age of 32. Yes, you can still like new music, you’re more inclined to really like, consistently listen to and know the ins-and-outs of music that falls into that music period sweet spot.

Are the marketers in the baby boom generation too locked in to their marketing sweet spot to move marketing forward? Especially in these rapidly changing times?

For most baby boomers, that would be the pre-digital, one-way, linear distribution marketing era of the 80s to 2004.  The hots shots were the Annie Oakley of marketing. Lay out the targets. Point message. Pull the trigger. And get an award based on how well your peers liked the ad, not actual measurable results. And certainly not bother to use a data-driven profiling or targeting approach beyond a mailing list. A time where a copywriter would fight the whole agency and client on a request to change a verb form. Now they live in an age where it’s expected to revise a whole document to please a computer algorithm. Though many are afraid to admit it, because their livelihoods are attached to it, the changes in marketing have been a head-spinning shock.

Once the digital revolution reached a tipping point in 2007, these changes to the advertising/marketing community happened fast. But instead of being forward thinkers, many in the marketing community first dug in their heels and became the industry protectors of the status quo. In fact, the upper echelon of the marketing related industries affected by the disruption seem to be running the playbook of the music industry.

Like the music industry who saw a new model that disrupted their existing business model (Napster and file sharing over physical CD and stores). They, like many marketers, didn’t ask, “how can we make this idea better and work for our customers?” Instead we wondered how long we could ignore it to keep things the same. In print and TV, marketing firms. knew how to to get revenue from our work. New media was not (as is not) as certain.

My company Adhocracy started warning clients and friends at other agencies about the impending changes back in 2005. We gave presentations about the revolution. Problem was when many of our clients looked around at their peers, they didn’t seem them  reacting to a revolution, so they thought “why should we?”

While some clients did trust us to walk forward into the new age, other clients and many in the advertising industry collectively put their head in the sand. And while they mentally checked out, it was the young minds that navigated around that defensive thinking and built the next generation marketing models. Ad networks. More sophisticated data based marketing. Facebook.  Since then our industry has always been playing catch up. Not just agencies, also our clients.

I see so many marketing personnel.  Many in very high positions that just don’t get even the basics of new marketing. In the past six months, I’ve had two clients that manage millions in marketing spending and assigned to doing social programs who don’t even have Facebook accounts or know how Twitter works. That’s a bit like being a telemarketer and saying you don’t really care for using the phone.

There are some older age leaders in he new world of marketing, but like the 80/20 rule, the other 80% are either afraid to embrace it, understand it. Those things alone make it impossible for those same people to use and embrace new marketing to give their business an edge.

Imagine if you had an office manager, who in the age of computers, kept the office using typewriters. How much productivity would you lose by today’s standards?

Or take for example, Glenn Britt, the CEO of Time Warner Cable who said he doesn’t know what AirPlay is. A technology that clearly can work with or compete with his company. How is that executive going to make innovative decisions or build new marketing and revenue models for his company? In fact, Brit said, “So the current Apple TV, the little thing, the hockey puck, really doesn’t do anything to help enable you to get Internet material on your TV.”  To me, that’s a bit like a music exec wondering why would music consumers want the ease of convenience of having any song they want instantly when they now have the ability to drive and ramble endlessly through a music store?

With that attitude or a CIO that doesn’t sit down with him for awhile, the new marketing revolution will eat this guy’s lunch.  And that’s the danger of an older, old school top executive in marketing not getting out the mindset of how things used to be. I’m not saying the older generation automatically needs to set out to pasture. But it’s absolutely a wake up call to say it’s time to get with the program. Things have changed. Be that change. Or perhaps it’s time to stand aside at let those who are ready do so.