Fame by association, or even transient celebrity would appear to be far more attractive than hard work!
The reason some of the young people enter advertising these days is not to sell their Clients products, heaven forbid! Selling? Ugh, how awfully common!
Young people these days are not seeing advertising as a place to sell, they see it as an opportunity to get their hands on a good show reel, and, hopefully, to be associated with huge media coverage.
However the connection between hard work and celebrity are hard to fathom for these people – and all advertising suffers as a result.
Strong words indeed, however we still do not pick up the scent of vitally necessary change…oh sure we’ve got the word “digital” and we’ve also got Web 2.0
Despite these…still no change!
Let’s face it we need to discuss the future of advertising to ensure its very survival.
And advertising’s future is inextricably tied, at the moment, to broadcast T.V. And the problem with current TV is that it is peopled by smart, educated, media-savvy people. And they know exactly how to press all the right mass market buttons.
However it is an acknowledged fact that these bright young things are out of control!
And the tabloids encourage such lunatic antics, by encouraging them to keep the trash going – and then by continuously providing massive coverage.
Advertising used to attract smart, well-educated people, because, among other things, it was very well paid. However the Financial Markets have lured these people away from Marketing/Advertising by providing massive salaries together with huge, and I mean huge, bonuses!
The similarity between television and advertising bright young things is remarkably similar in one huge, vitally important area, neither of them know what communication is! And that has caused, and will continue to cause, great damage to the cause of advertising.
So let us take a look, once again to the process of communication.
Advertising and Media people, newspapers, magazines, TV and radio lovingly call themselves ‘the communicators” and say they “are in communications.”
They are not…never have been… all they do is prepare messages and then send them…they most certainly not communicators.
They are totally unaware of those delightful words cognitive dissonance; selective exposure and selective perception. Wonderful words that, however, profoundly affect the meaning of our message and we ignore them at our peril!
However it is the ego that chooses to ignore the word communication, the ego and that other overworked word ‘creativity’, hence the rush to hire, at greater and greater expense the latest creative genius that is going to sell all those wonderful goodies! Utter rubbish!
Certainly in this day and age of commercial clutter creativity alone is no longer the answer, as if it had ever been, to the commercial needs of marketers. Creative genius is not the sole criterion to the success or otherwise of the marketing campaign.
Our minds are conditioned by the past, not the future. So we want to keep doing things the way we always have done them, even when results become ever more disappointing. But every now and then, the ground beneath us shifts so dramatically as to make much of what we thought we knew so wrong it becomes clear that we have to forge new beliefs or fail.
These are such times in marketing. In the today’s more subjective-mined marketplace, the behavioural proclivities of consumers as individuals must be the determining factor, not exotic maths even though it will obviously continue to be a critical tool – but not the main tool.
Sergio Zyman, former Chief Marketing Officer, the Coca-Cola Company had this to say about “The end of marketing as we know it”
“Simply put, the problem with marketing today is that for the twenty or thirty years, marketers have become increasingly caught up with the trappings of marketing. They have been wowed by the glitz, the celebrities, the awards presentations, and the jetting off to do a ‘shoot’ on some tropical isle, and they have forgotten that their job is to sell stuff. As a result they haven’t done a very good job of selling stuff, and they have tried to hide their failure to deliver results in a black box labelled ‘Marketing is Magic.’
So, to put it bluntly, we need the proper execution of interactive marketing communication, totally accountable, totally effective and very, very cost effective!
