Advertising is not going away, but it has very different strategies and
tactics, traditional "push/pull" marketing no longer works, and so are
highly-touted customer relationship initiatives. Smart companies are
those that are looking for marketing innovation as a new route to
marketing performance. Many adv planners are using their antique toolkit
that has long been outdated. Unlike advertising in the 70s, they
attracted the best and brightest. Today they were the people who just
want to hang on to the past. Marketing has moved on.
So how do marketers make interactive communications even more compelling than traditional communications? Today, if brands want to speak to lots of people, they have to do it digitally. It is 'speaking to' and not 'speaking at'. Speaking at people is what old media do. Social media allow brand owners to have dialogues with their customers, and allow them to speak to individuals and groups. It also means that brand owners and advertisers have less control over their audiences, and that the audiences can answer back. Today, three things matter: entertainment, interactions and information. This is where interactive marketing has the advantages.
Let me share with you here a brief history of modern advertising. Since the
emergence of modern advertising in the 1920s, and the shift from
text-based ad to visual adv followed by the use of psychologically
sophisticated messages created a very powerful cultural resonance for
ads among consumers. Madison Avenue represented the new and the modern
(Madison Avenue was since replaced by social networks and social
media), and ads helped consumers figure out what was needed to live
certain lifestyle. Consumers were eager to embrace the cultural
authority of Madison Avenue and the client brands. But by the late
1950s, they were feeling differently. Along with affluence and
increased security came the critique of corporate conformity in the
workplace. The contradictions of 1950s culture were beginning to
emerge, and one of them was the inordinate influence advertising and
sales appeared to have in our culture. .
The influential work by the Frankfort School, with Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer, whose classic 1944 piece “The Culture Industry:
Enlightenment as Mass Deception” started the core of this intellectual
movement for consumer critique decades ago. The imperatives of the
production side were central, and in both consumers were relatively
powerless, even “manipulated” and victimized by advertisers. In these
accounts, the powerful and active agents were corporations, not
individuals. Today, we can see this changing as the over supply of
everything and the growing influences of social networks. Finally the
power is switching over.
The "de-legitimation" of modern liberalism, paternalist state policy
and Keynesian economics combined to continue to undercut the consumer
critics. The growth of corporate power was accompanied by an ideology
that posited the reverse—it’s the consumer who is king and the
corporation is at his or her mercy. Even though we are all trained from
the earliest ages to be consumers and our identities are deeply bound
up with consumption choices although social networks are gradually
taking over as a reflector of our identities. This is the world we are
living in. A TV campaign can only go so far to build a brand, in fact
it doesn't build brands, it merely build awareness. Social media is
where brand engagement is being cultivated and interactions are taking
place. The power is shifting from mass medium to social interactions.
In 3-5 years, I expect the whole ad industry will be in crisis mode
just like the automobile industry today.
Michael Mendenhall, CMO of Hewlett-Packard, sees what's going on. He talks about how his organization looks at brand building, "Many companies continue to look at marketing in conventional ways -- from a mass-market point of view. Branding today is not about the media; it's about the idea. You need to dismiss the conventional way of thinking and start with an understanding of the value of each communication channel and how -- or whether -- it will 'engage' people. The idea should be the organizing principle, and it should inform everything you do to help consumers grasp your brand promise in whatever channel you're reaching them: the television, the blogs, the banner ads or the word of mouth."
