Advertising is Dead

I'm sure it's been said before, but it really is true. Oh, to be sure, the whole advertising industry in its current form isn't going to just lay down and die any time soon, but it will happen.

I increasingly find myself resenting a great deal of advertising these days, particularly commercials. So rarely are they related to anything I am interested in or would even remotely want to purchase, and I feel as if they are wasting my time when there is so much other culture I would like to be consuming.

When we think about the basic reasons why we have advertising, why it ever evolved, you can start to see why it makes less and less sense in our modern world. Advertising came into being simply to differentiate your product to sell it - either by highlighting qualitative differences, or if there weren't any significant ones, then by making your product conceptually different. From the latter branding was born, and we all went merrily along developing a culture whereby a great deal of our conceptual and abstract life was related through our consumption, we learnt to express our identity through our purchases. Then the information revolution happened, and suddenly we have at our fingers vast quantities of data with which to make those decisions about how we will construct ourselves through our consumption.

So in fact, I don't need a company to yell at me any more that they are good, or cool or what have you. If they have a product I think I want, I will find out for myself it's relative quality and coolness, in my own terms on my own time - I have no shortage of information with which to do that either. Advertising, the advertising that is dying, is push advertising that interrupts the narrative I'm watching to tell me I supposedly want cheese or soft drink (or worse yet, that I should think cheese or soft drink is cool). The advertising of the future is the sort that will sit and wait in numerous, easily accessible channels ready for me to find it when I want to know more, and I don't think that advertising, if it could even be called that, will look much like the brash, obnoxious ads we have today.

Social Media has to be about something

What fascinates me about all the companies that are rushing to have a social media presence is that many of them are simply overlook the fact that social media is a means to an end. The users of Facebook, or Bebo, or any other social network are not interested in Facebook per se, but rather their friends, or topics of interest, through Facebook, etc. Corporate marketing departments are obviously obsessed with the product they are selling, as they should be, but can forget that many of their customers probably aren't that interested. So even if they grasp the key concept of interaction, allowing the customer tangible input, which is vital to a successful social media campaign, they still often overlook the equally important question 'Why would the customer want to?' I recall reading some years ago that Coke set up a social network for customers to share their experiences and ideas about Coke, but why would they want to? I like drinking coke, but in day to day life I'm not that interested in talking about. This is not to malign Coke, this was before many other companies were even aware of social media, and obviously first movers are going to make some mistakes - I'm not sure whatever happened to that. Coke have done some great social media stuff since then, particularly some great viral videos.

If you have a company selling a product, presumably you have identified the market you're selling it too - ie the group of people whose wants or needs are being met by your product. Unless the product looms large as a cultural icon already, like an Apple iPod or Nike shoe, then people probably aren't going to want to spend much time talking about it. To successfully utilise a social media campaign to draw attention to a product then, you need to essentially identify a new 'social' product, something that meets a social need and which you can tie to your actual product, like the Ford Fiesta Movement campaign, giving 'social agents', people with a personal mission, cars and getting them to share the results of their endeavours via social networks. With this type of thinking you move beyond your core fans to get average people talking about your product - because you provide them with something in return. It's a tricky balance, finding the social media need to match your product, but it's the only way to be truly successful, and hopefully more agencies will take up this approach.