I like this guy! A tear in my eye.

We all know that Greenberg is a beacon in the fog.  But then I read a column (aka blog post) back from September in AdWeek called Funnel Clouding and found a tear gathering in my eye.  He really gets it.  He really does.  Here's a quote.

The fact is, the role of traditional media is more limited than ever before. Our ad messages co-exist alongside thousands of other voices that consumers trust more, like their peers. In the past, marketing went deeper into the funnel, beginning with awareness and continuing into consideration and preference. But now the drivers of consideration and preference have shifted in droves to the Web and social media, confining traditional media to mere awareness drivers. This is a shift as dramatic as anything in our industry, with ramifications far and wide.

When a single TV spot or print ad used to be able to simultaneously drive awareness, consideration and preference, marketers got a lot of value out of this ad. But now the best ads can do is start the consideration process, which more often than not is happening online. And although a punchy line might trigger awareness, it plays almost no role during consideration. Here, the "rational" experience of brands trumps the "emotional" delivery of a clever tagline or visual. Yet ad agencies have almost no experience in the former and way too much comfort in the latter. Even when they develop online campaigns, traditional agencies tend to approach the Web as just another place to deliver a metaphor. So instead of creating useful tools, applications, demos, customer support communities or streamlined ways to complete a transaction, they fall back on familiar stunts and gags, such as viral videos.

I suspect the reason agencies haven't tackled consideration and preference is because they are far beyond their capabilities rather than simply outside their comfort zone. Real engagement requires entirely new teams of people—like information architects, data analysts and an army of technologists of various stripes. The traditional teams found at agencies simply do not possess the skill sets needed to tackle areas that are deeper inside the funnel, where purchase decisions increasingly take place.