How the Mad Men Lost the Plot
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The big egos of traditional advertising will be upset because not everyone on earth will have seen their latest "big idea." This is due in no small part to overall media fragmentation which digital (or the internet) but also cable have played big parts. When that Coke ad aired in 1971 how many channels were there? Maybe 6? Of course a large portion of the population was going to see your ad.
And on the digital side they'll have to accept that measurement isn't the be-all-end-all. Between crazy amounts of fraudulent data and the simple fact that creativity and "brand awareness" are really, really tough to quantify they'll have to concede that sometimes the traditional thinking around creative work and "big ideas" will need to win out over analytics.
Source: worked for several years in advertising on the creative side and then on the tech side (and part of the problem is that those two departments are, well, departments but that's a story for another time...)
I think the same thing is going on in biology. IMHO neuroscience has proceeded more slowly than it should because it is a separate department from other biological sciences.
“the most effective advertisements of all are those with little or no rational content”
Imagine that, ads I saw 30 years ago just popped into my head.
I have to admit I'm in adTech and when people ask me what the highest impact is to any campaign's success I don't talk about the next machine learning algorithm my data science team is working on. I talk about the creative, it's all about the creative (or message). I can find the perfect time, to show the perfectly matched advertisement to a single person, but if the creative doesn't connect with that person I'm just wasting the advertisers money and the person's time.
Apple's move towards blocking ads may help fasten it, but it's not about them. It's something that's bigger and already in motion.
Big brands are starting to understand that what they want is not to force someone into seeing their name, but to create something that people actually want to use. Be it an application, be it a service. And not force "INSTALL OUR APP!" into someone's screen. For a good example, Coke's new app that allows you to customize the drink you can get from their machine. Or Mountain Dew's fidelity program tracking app. Baby steps, but it's actually something useful. Regardless of what you think of soda or soda drinkers, those are a actual services that some people would find convenient, and would help tie them to the brand.
Traditional advertising is a one-way, in-your-face kind of deal, and it works for brand awareness, especially for new consumers (kids). But with the technology we have today, it makes little sense to move that online. We have learned to ignore it. Sure, the internet had to do it, and it helped it grow. But now people are tired. We grew used to it. Most brands are now understanding that there's more they can do with the medium, and finding their way out of that death spiral.
I've worked in advertising for ~17 years, nearly my whole career. Finally got out of it and couldn't be happier. Work was fine and my coworkers were great people (there ARE good advertising agencies out there). But it was easy to see it was a dead-end street.
That sounds like what you're arguing. I agree the trend toward advertisers making their own destinations is interesting. From what I've seen though, these destinations then need to be promoted via paid advertising to get eyeballs on them.
Heck, even a lot of "publishers" these days are buying advertising to drive audience.
Anyone selling stuff looks for ways to exchange money for distribution of information about their products.
I've seeing big brands burning a lot of cash to get ridiculous any way you count it, be it eyeballs or what. But they'd still do it, just because it's part of their "budget". Even if it doesn't work, no one is really that accountable. They're doing what they're told and in reality no one knows what'll stick so it's hard to point fingers.
That will continue for a while, but some people ARE seeing the writing on the wall, and even advertising agencies that are profiting from the current situation can see it. That's what I felt, and I could see the work I did getting less and less relevant.
The move I'm seeing is not just towards brands realizing they're running a lot of fuel to move at a slow speed, but also towards agencies becoming more "studios" than "agencies" (an irony in itself considering it's the opposite of what started happening 8 or so years ago), and building things FOR and WITH clients rather than some on-off forgettable new shitty online campaign or "viral" crap no one cares about.
A great site or application for, say, booking online flights does wonders towards a customer's perception of a flight carrier. It makes sense for Delta or Jetblue or anyone to create the best damn flight checkin/booking/etc app so people want to use it. So instead of spending millions in yet another online campaign, they can spend a portion of that creating a damn good app that will be with them for a while. Same applies to so many other businesses.
That's the kind of move I'm seeing, at least in the kind of work I do. Advertising won't die, banners won't die, but they'll be the loan sharks of the web.
Of course this move also creates a problem, like newspapers that insist on creating their own useless apps. But that's just to prove not everything fits into this model, and each business or brand will have to find its own way to actually serving their customer better.
It's been common advertising wisdom for years that the benefit of brand advertising is simply awareness. Person is in store, person doesn't know which thing to get and doesn't really care that much, brand name pops into their head because the ad had that catchy jingle or adorable cat in it, they pick up that one and go on with their lives.
Perhaps the great delusion was that most people care enough about their purchasing choices of mundane items to "engage" with brands. That's never been true and it's continued to not be true, despite the construction of a vast new internet advertising industry focused around nothing but brand engagement at all costs.
I've said this for years, ever since I started seeing twitter and facebook logos on things like ketchup and cereal. Here's one I just saw: who wants to "engage" with C&H SUGAR of all things? https://instagram.com/p/9JVo-gpvQw/
The only companies that make money from plastering twitter and facebook logos on stuff are ... twitter and facebook.
It's not a huge deal but this sort of thing can move experiences from black marks to something even mildly positive.
It misses the fact, however, that there are more media than ever for inserting ideas - not just brands - into the culture. These are all competing for people's low-cognitive-load "buy" responses.
Most of these alternative media are digital, but some are also hybrid digital/word-of-mount campaigns that move through specific class subdivisions of society. As an example, I have never seen a Nespresso ad (I've heard they exist) but we are heavy users of that product.
Edit: more thoughts.
Another issue is that people have learned to be skeptical of traditional TV brand advertising because it is so broadly targeted. Especially for traditional brands that people often find passé.
Having not read the book referenced, I haven't seen the data. But this seems to go against the Pareto Principle AKA 80/20 Rule which suggests 80% of your sales come from 20% of your (heaviest) customers, and against my own anecdotal experience as a marketer.
Again, let me say explicitly I am reading between the lines, but it is the closest sensible concept I know compared to what was said.
People in general often poorly understand the degree of capital expenditures made by companies, and I suspect those of us in the software vision may have an even more skewed vision since we see billion-dollar companies started with a laptop and ~50 square feet of office space, but when you have real capital expenditures required to make your product (even ignoring advertising, etc.), those little single-digit-percent wiggles right around the break-even point can be huge.
> ... American Airlines president Scott Kirby gave a peek into the lopsided economics of his company, saying half of its revenue last year came from the 87% of its customers, who only flew the airline once.
The flip side is 13% of the regulars providing the other half of the revenue. But those passengers are already familiar with you and using you regularly. The "light buyers" comment is showing that the long tail matters too, and that they aren't that familiar with your business/brand, and also are unlikely to hang out/be reachable in the same way those 13% are.
The regulars are a known base - it is the irregulars who do need focussing on.
In any case, I'm not saying we're there yet
As the article said, it's low cognitive involvement that works best, not brand loyalty. That's why advertisers are using the Low Attention Processing Model.[1] With this particular advertising strategy, brand information is 'acquired' at low and even zero attention levels using implicit learning.[2] Implicit learning cannot analyse or re-interpret anything. The information goes directly to the subconscious mind.
If so, then we are silently influenced by ambient images and messages around us. Advertisers could be affecting our decision making and even outlook on life in ways we can't perceive. This has been the driving inspiration for these posters I designed: http://subliminalzen.com.
Essentially, if anyone is going to advertise to my subconscious mind, it's going to be me. And I'd rather acquire positive habits and character traits than an emotional connection to a product.
[1] http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...