White Paper Pundit

There’s not doubt that we live in a youth-oriented culture. All one needs to do is look at today’s TV commercials, print ads, new products, and the age of the developers behind some of the most innovative Internet technologies and marketing campaigns as proof.

But as a younger audience becomes the target for online marketers, what are we to do with white papers? Are they rapidly becoming a dinosaur in a business market dominated by blogs, webinars, interactive forums, and wikis?

According to blogsite Giantpartners, a post entitled, “Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks“, touts the benefits of younger business professionals, indicating that they, instead of older more experienced executives, are now leading the way with innovative business marketing:

“Once upon a time, it made sense to create a Board of Directors and fill it with people that had a few decades of experience on them.  Now even venerable firms like Delloitte are writing white papers suggesting Boards have a specific technology section on the agenda.  That young IT hot shots be held accountable at these very same Board meetings.  In order to truly have the best shot at success in today’s world, we need some youthful advice.”

As I have indicated in a previous blog post, younger business executives have a tendency to minimize the effectiveness of traditional marketing tools such as white papers, preferring instead to entrust newer marketing resources such as blogs, webinars, interactive forums, and wikis to do the heavy lifting for their business marketing campaigns.

The problem with this philosophy is the belief that “old” equates to “ineffective”. There are many examples where younger generations think they know more than us “old farts” who have more experience. The result is that these younger executives eventually realize that they must go through the same learning experiences and failures that baby boomers experienced years ago when we were the young foot soldiers in the business world.

The fact of the matter is that white paper work. While the medium has been around for a long time, baby boomers have taken white papers and evolved them well beyond the more staid formats that “The Greatest Generation” had applied when they were plain text-oriented documents targeted for technical audiences in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

This transformation has included a changing audience (from technical to business), new layout designs and formatting, smaller page sizes, and different hosted platforms (print verses digital). Perhaps in future decades, the GenX’ers, GenY’ers, and the MTV Generation will transform white papers even further, leveraging new technologies, designs, and platforms.

On the other hand, the court is still out on whether blogs, webinars, and wikis will have the same effectiveness, longevity, and staying power with today’s business audience than white papers have exhibited over time.

So are white papers just for us “old farts”? I don’t think so.

When young business executives are in the position of having to make a multi-million dollar career “make or break” decision, I’m confident that they will turn to white papers, just as their older counterparts did a decade or two before them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 4th, 2007 at 10:33 am and is filed under WP Opinions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.