For Susan Evans, the word that describes what has happened in communications and marketing over the past 20 years evokes a powerful and simple image: tsunami.
"The tsunami of change," said Evans, founder and chief executive of Evans Larson Communications in Minneapolis, a business that in the past would have been called a public-relations agency.
Today, Evans and Teresa McFarland, a PR industry veteran who joined the firm about a year ago, get a little stumped trying to describe all the work they and their colleagues do.
"There's not really a name for it yet," Evans said.
"Multichannel strategic communications," McFarland offered.
"I'm not sure that gets it all," Evans said.
For decades, executives and marketers turned to outside PR firms to devise and execute ideas for communicating with customers, chiefly through mass media and special events. "When you go back, there were fewer channels and platforms. It was TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. If a company wanted outreach, they would have to go through those channels," Evans said.
The rise of websites and the internet in the 1990s gave companies the chance to communicate directly to consumers and other businesses. When the smartphone came along in 2007 or so, the internet was available not just at a desk or home but wherever a person went. And in the marketing world, a fever dream grew that companies might someday be able to reach a customer at the precise moment that person needed its product or service.