Advertising Void
Gaping Void is beating the hell out of traditional advertising agencies:
- There will always be a market for somebody who can sell your stuff better than you can. Advertising 2.0 does not exist. Marketing 2.0 does not exist. Whatever new tech and media comes along, this simple truth remains.
Full Text: advertising 2.0 does not exist
I have a different opinion on it’s post title: marketing and advertising have a body of knowledge with more than 50 years, so it’s quite silly to dump all that just because we have some new tools. If Advertising 2.0 doesn’t exist, then it should be invented, formulated, whatever fits these wonderful times.
If Hugh bothers to read David Armano, Martina or AdverLab, he’ll notice there’s some brilliant people out there working to bring this new kind of advertising forward. But i suppose he’s never worked at an advertising agency, so it’s easy for him to make such assumptions.
You just can’t see the forest for the trees, so it’s better not to label all advertising a “has-been”.
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Great blog.
But…
Think you’re wrong about this.
What people like Hugh and I are on about is that the way of seeing the world that underpins what we do in marketing no longer works as well as it used to. That’s why it needs to be rethought and reworked.
Of course, you’re right to suggest that shiny new tools are a bad reason for dumping everything else. Those that advocate change or rethinking on this basis aren’t the best guides to the future.
JP Getty is supposed have said:
“No amount of sharpening the drill or changing the bit will help you strike oil if you are drilling in the wrong place”
Marketing’s key ideas and practices are not like the rules of mathmatics - eternal and unchanging; they are just the product of a particular time and place (mid Century Mid West USA). And we know a whole lot more about how human beings are and how their behaviour is shaped than we did 50 years ago. To be honest, what we have thought we know has turned out to be plain wrong (w-r-o-n-g)
Stuff like:
- our minds are emotionally (not rationally) wired
- our minds are approximate (rather than precise calculators of utility)
- our minds are lazy (we seem to avoid thinking as far as we can)
- our opinions seem to come after our behaviour (rather than before)
Oh, and my beef: individuals do not make decisions on their own. Each of us does what we do largely because of the influence of others (even if this is hidden to us).
So you could just try and squeeze all this into the existing way of thinking (good luck)
Or you could ask yourself how this changes our assumptions, practices and our definitions of what marketing needs to do.
The challenge to all of us right now - as the old and new models both struggle - is to do the heavy lifting of reinvention…
Hi Mark.
Just to put things in context, i work in Draftfcb Portugal, one of those “traditional” ad agencies. Nevertheless i constantly evangelize on digital marketing and the huge potential it offers to brands. What happens most of the times is that it’s not only up to us agencies - it’s also about the clients, the suppliers, the whole value chain.It seems a bit unfair to blame advertising for the slow adoption of our (bloggers) point of view, forgetting that every market doesn’t live solely on early adopters but rather grows until it reaches a more mature status.
We’d all be better blaming big corporations (such as Viacom or NBC) for not talking the walk - i’ve never heard of ad agencies issuing take down notices of commercials …
As for the reinvention mantra, that goes for all of us - for marketing, for technology, for bloggers, for whoever believes in innovation - it’s a state of mind and a not a state of industry. You can be Kodak or Leika, IBM or Dell, Microsoft or Google, being in the same industry but with a completely different path towards entrepreneurship and innovation.
As for me, while not happy with the state of the industry - read my posts (1,2 and 3) on Advertising 2.0 - i’ll go by the old saying: If you can’t beat them, you’ll better join them.