The Future of Advertising Is Beginning To Fade Into The Past.
Sad but true, our moment in the sun has begun the slow fade to black. In 2006 when P&Gs CEO, A.G. Lafley stated before the 4A's that the Marketing Business Model was "broken." There was a flurry of editorial interest in what comes next.
New age agencies like Anomaly and Mother got started. We initiated the Institute for Advanced Practices in Advertising. The technology companies like Google, Cisco and Microsoft got into the game with initiatives and aquisitions. Everybody had a new business process to brand or define. But when the dust settled the only thing that was new was the pile of press releases on the floor. Nothing substantial had evolved. Advertising was the same as it ever was. Only with less intellectual capital because the plus 30 guys have been dropped because of the strange belief that new blood yields new ideas.
So now the clients, who have been more than patient with our industry are starting to look elsewhere. Advertising had its opportunity to drag itself into C21 and blew it. But maybe not. What do you think can be done to make advertising more engaging to the audience and more meaningful to those who have a need to know what product or service can best fill their unmet wants needs and desires.
New age agencies like Anomaly and Mother got started. We initiated the Institute for Advanced Practices in Advertising. The technology companies like Google, Cisco and Microsoft got into the game with initiatives and aquisitions. Everybody had a new business process to brand or define. But when the dust settled the only thing that was new was the pile of press releases on the floor. Nothing substantial had evolved. Advertising was the same as it ever was. Only with less intellectual capital because the plus 30 guys have been dropped because of the strange belief that new blood yields new ideas.
So now the clients, who have been more than patient with our industry are starting to look elsewhere. Advertising had its opportunity to drag itself into C21 and blew it. But maybe not. What do you think can be done to make advertising more engaging to the audience and more meaningful to those who have a need to know what product or service can best fill their unmet wants needs and desires.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Mary Baum on -
I've actually read some explanations of the current financial crisis and global poverty that trace the problem directly back to the Western world's insatiable need to keep producing manufactured goods and our continuing overcapacity to produce those same things.
Apparently, this overcapacity to produce goods causes all kinds of issues - it's part of why manufacturing labor seems to be in a global race to the bottom of the wage scale - and it throws off the value of money and capital (in the old-fashioned, means-of-production sense) - and others I'm forgetting because they must not have made good sense to me when I was reading about them.
Which kind of reminds me of the old farmers' dilemma that resulted in farm legislation that I was once taught to think of as 'paying farmers not to farm.' (That view, and that part of the legislation, may be completely out the window now; I'm under the impression that farm policy has changed massively in the last couple of decades in ways I only vaguely fathom in spite of halfway paying attention and that most people have absolutely no clue about).
Then there's this: I for one don't understand why there's not a way to have more balance between us in the first world, who have to be practically drugged to want more of what we manufacture, or cause to have manufactured for us in third-world countries, and the desperate poverty in those parts of the world, where we evidently have people working around the clock, in awfully squalid conditions, who ought to have some use for at least some of what they're locked in those factories producing, but aren't earning enough to afford.
I guess the answer has to do with the root cause of the even worse poverty that occurs in areas of subsistence agriculture - the utter corruption and lack of political process that keeps what resources there are out of the hands of all but a very few. And they use their relative wealth to resist any change in the status quo, perhaps because they themselves have no understanding of the prosperity that could bloom - with even more for them, the already-better-off! - from just a little injection of education and initiative?
I look at microlending as an example, and it seems like an answer - a sort of rebirth of the Jeffersonian ideal, writ very small, and wonder why it doesn't take hold in more places, and inspire more experiments. I suppose an issue there is the inherent feminism of microlending in particular - it works when we lend to women, I'm told, but not to men (who on balance take less seriously their obligations to put the capital to good use and pay it back). And of course that's another source of the pwer imbalance that perpetuates poverty and ignorance.
Is absolute power over other human beings - even if it keeps the holder almost as poor and sick as the subject - so intoxicating that its holders won't trade it for what must otherwise seem incalculably vast riches?
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Permalink Reply by Lane Casteix on -
Bill,
I think you have nailed it! "We have too much shit." I have recently dealt with my parent's estate and getting rid of their shit. My wife is dealing with her mother's shit now, as we try to move her out of a home that is too large for her. I have too much shit, and my wife and I are trying to get rid of as much of it as we can before our kids have to deal with it. One proof of too much shit in the world is the insane growth of rental storage. I know people who are renting two or more units! For what? Stuff they will never use again as they gather more shit to put in storage?
As advertisers we are selling to need or want, as you say, and today it seems we are spending more time convincing consumers they really "need" this or that, when what we are really doing is selling "want". Engagement is not necessarily the answer to that. As you point out we can be engaged but never buy. The previously mentioned GEICO ads are a perfect example for me. I love their ads and turn up the volume to hear what they say, but I am perfectly happy with the insurance I have now. They have not convinced me to buy their product, but they have built a brand (for me) that should I ever want change I will consider GEICO. So, I guess my rambling thoughts lead me to conclude, as you, that engagement may not sell, at least in the short term, unless there is a "need" (or "want"), but engagement can build brands?
Lane
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Permalink Reply by Harry Webber on
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Lane, Bill and of course Mary.
I got me several of them there storage units full of crap. I completely identify with your pain. But I would beg that you consider an alternate reality for the reason we are surrounded
by so much stuff. Perhaps it is our inability to come to grips with an industrial society that has moved on from “Have and Hold” Product development, production and distribution to “Score and Fold” Product development, production, distribution and recycling.
This is the result of the quantification of the volume operations model of the consumer products and services business. Thank you MBAs.
The "Quntafiers" forgot to factor in “Consumer-Product Engagement.” So it starved to death. On the factory floor and the testing lab. But not in our storage units. There are still products we will not throw away.
An original Coke bottle. Most of us would put that (or those) in the "do not toss" pile. A 1957 through 1961 Chevy 2 door hardtop, Or any year Corvette. A Motown vinyl record w/cover designed by me, any artist.
We engage with a small number of brands on a purely personal level of preference. These are not products we don’t exactly “want” or “need”. These are products we “like.”
At IAPIA we are developing the NeoAdvertising Network Platform to evolve the practice of being liked by the audience, not ignored by consumers. In fact, we see the word, "consumers" as an outdated terminology.
People are resistant to being identified by their automotive, or after shave choices. They see themselves as being much more complex than that. The practice of NeoAdvertising sees these individuals as our audience. Ready to engage intellectually, emotionally and extendedly in topics that align with THEIR Spheres of Influence.
Of course that means to practice NeoAdvertising you have to know what those Spheres of Influence are. More to the point, cultivating audience involvement in Neo Advertising Practice is based upon what is most meaningful to the Audience and that is generally not a new product benefit or a new global logotype or green initiative. Which means that in NeoAdvertising the brand is just along for the ride as sponsor, not ceter stage as subject matter.
Engagement is hero in NeoAdvertising and whatever the audience finds meaningful at the moment drives the campaign strategy. NeoAdvertising Practices ( as opposed to Ad Agencies) serve at the will of the audience for the benefit of the brand relationship. It is a very different way of looking at what it takes to sell to the growing number of “Advertising Immune” folks walking around with our money in their jeans. Visit http://MadisonAveNew.com or http://iapia.org for more on the NeoAdvertising Network Platform.
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Permalink Reply by Mary Baum on
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Thanks, Harry, for getting us back on topic.
That is of course the missing link - no matter how many storage units of stuff we have, there aren't many of us who are completely full up in the four spheres: financial security (imagined if not real; it can all somehow disappear, as if by magic), family well-being, personal growth and fun and escape.
And then there's the overlay of how the world sees us in those four areas versus how we see ourselves, versus how we really are.
That, of course, is the real reason we carry iPods instead of Sandisk players, and why the iPhone doesn't really have much to fear from the Google phone (imho). It's why today's products are really services, and the big-box electronics stores will die for forgetting that (but Nordstrom never will).
I think it's also why cause marketing has taken off - Breast Cancer Month, which I think happens about five times a year; giving heifers in Africa for the holidays to our friends in Missouri; a year ago, some friends of mine decided the best way to start a shoe business at retail was to use school fundraisers as the distribution network and the marketing hook. It probably would have worked - and gone national - if the guy with the shoe connections hadn't landed a merchandising job and lost interest. In fact, given our fears about the state of education in this country, I bet we could sell root canals if we told people the proceeds would benefit their schools. (I was going to say crack, but then I realized that education is exactly how we sell gambling here in the great flyover. It's almost the same thing.)
So what we're doing with NeoAdvertising, then, is holding up a mirror to our audiences and looking for ways to fit products into what those audiences see looking back at them - ways for products and services to help them be more of who they are, to use a phrase coined on Wilshire Boulevard, or more of who they want to become.
At first glance, that doesn't sound so different from what advertising has always done, but I think what advertising did in its creative heyday was - with the rest of the mass media - tell a captive audience what it should be, or aspire to become.
Now, of course, we don't have that kind of power, because the audience has fragmented and is no longer captive. And we have the technology to listen to the upstream - to understand what the audiences do in fact want to be and become, and to help them get there. And that ability is only going to improve as we get better at processing natural language into data.
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Close Mary, but no cigar.
But close, if the topic of interest is teen smoking. And cigars start showing up in the back-packs of our audience's teenage daughters. And we have to decide whether Lesbian sex toys are off-topic. These are different, but no less challenging creative considerations as we build out NeoAdvertising to Practice strength. The signifficant differences betweeen writing ad copy and developing meaningful content that can engage a serious interest.
" I think what advertising did in its creative heyday was - with the rest of the mass media - tell a captive audience what it should be, or aspire to become."
You hit the issue right between the eyes in that one Mary. As you state, a "Captive audience" is to Marketing as "buggy whip" is to Space Travel. "Adaptive Audience" is much closer to our focus with Adaptive Markeing and theNeoAdvertising Networks that entails. However, before we can monitor these audiences and their interests we have to recognize certain flaws in traditional thinking. And strive to look in different directions. But our search should be for insight. This is far more crucial in NeoAdvertising then volumes of raw data.
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Permalink Reply by Bill Sellers on -
Sounds somewhat like a theory I had years back of human relationship marketing. In a nutshell, it takes on the guise of the same conversations we as individuals have day-to-day in are relationships with friends, co-workers, people on the street, etc... if some how that one-to-one experience of determining the level of relationship an individual consumer might be at with your product or brand you would then know the conversation that would be needed to make those subtle suggestions.
Another way to think about it... the conversation between husband and wife of 10 years is typically vastly different than the conversations between man and woman on a first date. First date... your trying to sell yourself in, or get out of the next date... 10 years of marriage... your trying to keep things current, and a little spice to your relationship, make sure both of you are happy with the relationship, OR trying to get out of the relationship. At any rate the level of engagement from a standpoint of language usage and the puffing of the chest are different on each point.
So, how do we get to that level of knowing at what stage of the relationship we are at with the consumer? Behavioral marketing maybe. Or I could see Google being a part of this, I am thinking Google.tv will open entire new possibilities when it comes to determining where in a sales funnel folks might be and then tailor then message dynamically to the individual. Through the use of tracking from a traditional medium to the internet, in real-time, we will be able to see just who has been engaged enough by that traditional placement to move forward into the funnel. I am sure they have already thought of this though as there are much smarter folks working on the issue than myself.
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One significant difference in what we are attempting to define in the NeoAdvertising network Platform and your human relationship marketing is that Neo seeks to determine the minimum role the brand can play. Not just at the introductory stage of engagement but throughout. Our objective is to have the brand always present but never, ever prominent.
The Husband and Wife analogy fit NeoAdvertising to a T. it is a long, involving, learning experience. Neo is advertising as knowledge transfer. Toyota can teach you brain surgery on Neo.
Google should be a part of the NeoAdvertising Network Platform, as should Microsoft. And they will. And Behavioral Profiles and Web-based Interest Patterns have their place. But the main issue is to create a business model for the advertising that has a purpose other than societal exploitation. You can visit our first test site at http://Branswers.com where
the basic concept testing has taken place. The current sponsorsite is off-line for the next series of studies.
As for guys working on this being smarter than yourself. Not in the stuff you're smart in. Jump on in and give us a hand. http://iapia.org . Have something to raise a glass to.
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Permalink Reply by William FitzGerald on -
In an Ideal world media providers, PR / event houses, ad agencies, and developers should properly merge [back] together, that way the concept, timing, presentation and whole entire package can be planned at the same moment; the budget will be balanced and go further with in a newly formed collaboration between the creatives, developers, planners, writers, producers, and salesmen all doing there proper part no more no less like a counterstrike or team fortress multi-player game.
Who knows, I do know that something needs to change, cuz the sh*t is about to hit the fan I agree. Everyone need a chance to spread there wings without having them clipped by the client beforehand, but thats a whole other issue.
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Permalink Reply by Kevin McIntosh on -
Like a lot of things, it's easy for marketing clients to blame agencies for sales challenges. Perhaps, thought it would be wise of more marketers would look within and come to the realization there's no single magic bullet. And also, perhaps clients could get a little more innovative with their products. When something as revolutionary as iPhone or Wii comes out, then consumers will find out and become engaged.
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