There is a risk of having a twitter feed on live TV if there is no way of blocking certain tweets. But certainly displaying censored tweets or a select few encourages audience participation from the sofa. Just watch the joy when someones tweet is read out on Frontline.

Perhaps RTE should have a show where a live Tweeter feed is shown? Perhaps this is the future of TV entertainment.

So what do we call this new TV social interaction then? TweetV?

Marketing is very much alive of course. You are correct in that lots of people confuse the word ‘marketing’ with ‘promotion’. It would be foolish for any brand to rely on fancy words, promises and images as a substitute for delivering insight-led products and services. Of course it happens. But this is just ‘bad marketing’.

Good marketing is alive and well – which is identifying real customer needs and finding a way to meet them better than competitors, at a profit. Proctor and Gamble do it every day, are world leaders and are led by marketers. As Mr Drucker once said, (I paraphrase) there are only two things a business must do – innovation and marketing.

Promotion and advertising is still very important. And it works. Of course not all of it works. There is lots of poor advertising. Poor strategy and poor execution. But (as somebody close to advertising), I suspect most marketing comms folk would rather be talking about real and obvious game changing products and services than using image advertising alone to differentiate.

But marketing is more than research and advertising. If marketing doesn’t exist, who is going to be the voice of the customer in the boardroom? And who is going identify which segments to focus on (and not focus on), thus allowing the brand to identify the needs in the first place and deliver better products and services for these customers? What about the much-neglected pricing?

We need more marketing-led companies. Yes, the entire business need to educate themselves to understand marketing but somebody needs to lead. And as you say, they do need to get into the gritty parts.

Marketers are somewhat to blame themselves for the poor fluffy image they have. They need to be accountable for that they do, for what they spend and for really understanding customer needs.

Clever ad.

I’d keep the ad agency.

A link to the US ad for Old Spice that aired during the Superbowl earlier this month. In a market where homogenous products have to slug it out for market share, the only thing that differentiates them in actuality is very often not actual at all. They’re selling a dream, a lifestyle, a set of cues that the buyer wants to identify with. The Old Spice ad, I have no doubt, will give those values to a tired old product and re-energise it for a whole new generation of (initially female) purchasers. It’s quite simply brilliant. Old Spice is a bottle of scented pisswater, same as all the rest, but just like Lynx did for 18-25 year old pimply guys, it is creating an artificial need. Sweet FA to do with the actual product, but the manufacturing guys, the R&D guys, the sales guys and most especially the accounts guys will not care so much about that. They won’t be axing the marketing dept any time soon.