Advertising’s Current Growing Pains

This past week I’ve come across some very good thinking and writing on the current state of the advertising business. It’s heartening to see, since so much of the current practice of advertising is simple tricks and tactics, hamfistedly imported from existing media. I’m thinking here of people talking about email as if it were just electric version of direct mail, of Google partnering with Sony to show The DaVinci Code banners and a million other forgetable efforts to get people to buy stuff.

The first article I’ll point to comes from Ron Bloom writing on the iMedia Connection website. Bloom’s article, Advertising 2.0: One brand, many voices does a great job of describing how the rise of ‘consumer-generated content’ totally shifts the rules of the game for advertising. The article is written for those in the advertising industry, hence the mealy term, ‘consumer-generated content,’ but let’s overlook that and get to the guts of the argument.

User-generated content and social networks are the modern media phrases du jour. As an executive with business line and brand responsibility, why should you care? Is this a fad? What is really happening here? Well, let me make a few predictions:

• 1. We are in the midst of a Big Shift: within five years, over 50 percent of the media consumed will be created by other consumers
• 2. This entire movement will not be driven by technology, but rather by consumer demand
• 3. The nature of the content that people will consume will change dramatically
• 4. Advertising and marketing as we know it will have to change dramatically as well in order to succeed in this new media world

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With the advent of pervasive broadband and inexpensive tools, users are now making their own content from bits and bytes scattered across the net. Much of this content originally came from traditional media channels, and the media has done everything that they can to limit that access and control that flow. Well, the audience has turned elsewhere, and are discovering that they can make equally appealing entertainment by mixing their own content with others’.

Today, audiences are deserting traditional media channels for the new media frontier. They are not doing it for the technology, which is barely functional at best. They are doing it for the fresh appeal of this new form of content, the new arena of entertainment and a new community of relationships. The real question you may want to ask is, what should brands do to succeed in a world where they can not control their image or their voice?

The second article comes from the eloquent and always interesting Douglas Rushkoff. Rushkoff focuses on TV advertising and makes some timely arguments about what he sees coming: TV after advertising.

Next month at an annual media and marketing bluff session known as the “upfronts,” TV executives will once again try to sell thirty-second spots of their airtime to advertisers for even more ludicrous sums than last year. Amazing, all concerned are remaining remarkably sanguine in the face of growing evidence that TV ads just don’t (and maybe never did) what they’re supposed to.

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... as Marshall McLuhan taught us, the medium really is the message. TV sells TV, Paris Hilton sells Paris Hilton, and sneakers sell sneakers. TV’s liberation from advertisers shouldn’t have sent brands running to find a new unrelated medium on which to promote themselves; their panicked migration to the Internet, cell phones, or movie product placements only bespeaks a lack of faith in the selling power of the products, themselves.

These days, consumer goods are their own best media. Just as the Starbucks coffee cup and cafe experience sells more coffee than any TV or billboard advertising campaign, the shape of a automobile chassis or placement of its cupholders sells more cars than all that indistinguishable footage of cars taking turns on desert lakebeds. Great products are their own billboards, and satisfied customers (not to mention passionate employees) are their best spokespeople.

The “word of mouth” that today’s hippest marketers covet - whether they call it viral marketing or cult branding - only really happens when people actually like a product enough to share their experiences with other people. And we consumers don’t do this because we care so much about the brand we’re promoting. We do it because our recommendation earns us a certain kind of respect from our friends - our expertise is a form of “social currency.”

Being involved in a number of the movements online that are currently shifting the ground of advertising - web marketing, including advertising, and web community building, in particular -, the staff here at Work Industries take a keen interest in any article that cuts through the buzzword clutter of writing about advertising.

Okay, using the human voice: I, James, take a keen interest in the thinking and conversations going on out there in media and technology and advertising. I love that these changes are happening, I want to be part of them, and, to let you in on a secret, in the next few days I’ll be softly launching a Work Industries Harebrained Idea ^TM called AdHack that fits perfectly with the big shift in advertising. Stay tuned!