So this week I did two full days at the Financial Times Digital Media and Broadcasting conference. I spent the first half day just reading the title. The coffee was excellent, but deceptively strong so be lunchtime on both days I was riding a caffeine wave and pestering and pontificating out in the lobby.
Most of the audience could have done with a double espresso. There were very few people under 30, if any, and there was almost a palpable sense of "inverted commas" when talking about concepts like the "semantic web" (there, I am doing it myself). I.e. nobody really knew what they were talking about.
The penultimate session on advertising was interesting/amusing. Sour grapes all round it seemed. The panel included the IPA - The institute for practitioners in advertising, someone from Saatchi, a couple of commentators in the space.
The IPA guy, and the M&C Saatchi guy both agreed there was too much emphasis on search advertising. Clearly the money flowing into Google's coffers for adsense and not into their creative extravanganzas is clearly a sore point. Moray Maclennan, of M&C Saatchi, claimed marketing depts. spending 50% of their money on paid search/contextual advertising are no actually advertising - just depleting their budgets. Hamish Pringle, of the IPA declared that search advertising worked well for the classified space, but could never create the great brand desire that classical advertising, bought of course through an agency, can.
Bollocks to both of them I say. The first sign of a failing business is to blame the customer for being too stupid to buy your product. Mr Maclennan says search advertising is all fine and good for ads which sell people to products, not for ads that sell products to people. This is all about the mystique the creative ad world loves to cling on to. The magic that markups a $5 bottle of industrially-produced scented alcohol for $50. Mr Pringle described it another way. Advertising for BMW, he says, is not just about communicating the joys of a BMW to its target audience in order to make sales. It's about communicating it to everyone, so the BMW owner knows that everyone else knows that a BMW is so great - that's why he has a BMW.
Maybe so. But I don't think that means anything more is that advertising of this type is becoming a luxury product suitable for a niche of brands. It's a classic internet pattern of POLARISATION. Things separate to high end and low end, the middle space is obliterated. low end here is search advertising - bread and butter. Google has democratised this fundamentally, and to fail to see this is to fail to understand the paradigm shift.
Consider how Google has allowed ANYONE to reach just about anyone/anywhere but in a wholly targeted fashion, who is in active seeking mode, provided measurability and charge on a targeted basis. What it means is that SMEs have power the traditional advertising industry was never able to give them, and at a fraction of the cost.
At the same time, the ubiquity of media, and a general post-modern cynicism with the media amongst a savvy population makes the traditional methods of the advertisers look increasingly hackneyed. The result is diminishing returns in the prospect of persuading us that mid-market brands are luxury brands, and the increasing commoditisation of services. Take air travel: differentiation of brand based on soft attributes is much diminished, whereas price, flexibility, availability and access to that information in context is massively more important. Where soft attributes are still important - like the customer service of an insurance deal - the community is providing a more authentic assessment of that than the advertiser's agent.
Advertising, like publishing and television is another industry where its exponents are facing a difficult truth, smacked on it by the internet. Someone younger, cheaper, less experienced and less proficient can achieve the same commercial effect. The answer to that is respond to the new need, not try and justify the old one. That their love of what they do is not paramount, it's the benefit of the customer. It's the advertising industry's choice to decide whether it wants to shrink into its new luxury niche - big budgets, big concepts, intricate bespoke campaigns - but fewer of them - or combine their creativity with more technological solutions.
Those technological solutions are behaviorally targeted creative advertising, contextual video, interactive creative, and working with services like search and social networks to weave their clients' messages into these experiences. Also, lower prices, faster turnaround.
Comments