Well boys and girls, the unthinkable has happened. MadisonAveNew is migrating to a blog platform and expanding its editorial footprint to include other voices besides mine. Obviously since nothing around here happens overnight we will be running on two platforms simultaneously until we get the content mix right. But the big news is that you will have a better opportunity to interact with the ideas and opinions expressed on these pages and make your own voice be known. This Week's Question: The ways we communicate are changing. Is advertising keeping up? Kurt, you have no idea. |
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All of which means that Madison Avenue, which has always been waaay behind the curve, will find itself even farther back in trying to keep up with the outside world. Even as speech recognition technology tries to keep up with the velocity of language and fuzzy logic tries to make sense out of misspelled text, we are struggling with the rapid emergence of pictograms that cross the language barrier to communicate the most simple information, clearly and succinctly. Pictograms can often transcend languages in that they can communicate to speakers of a number of tongues and language families equally effectively, even if the languages and cultures are completely different. This is why road signs and similar pictographic material use pictograms as a global standard expected to be understood by nearly all. So here we are with this torrent of ever-changing datalingua pouring into our respective in-boxes with no idea of what it means or signifies. And when “OMFG” shows up on a Gossip Girl billboard campaign, Google lights up like a Christmas tree just to sort it out for the hoi polloi. TOMORROW: Less words. More pictures. Obviously as bandwidth increases we will be able to show rather than tell. Pictures will be worth thousands and thousands of words, but the sources for those pictures will get narrower and narrower. The royalty-free fire truck will become the universal symbol for “need it right away” as opposed to ASAP. Acronyms will will give way to Acropix and the speed of communications will ratchet up another notch. The real use for words will become their use as modifiers for pictures rather than captions. So the firetruck with the words "Visa Due" will mean "pay your credit card bill in 24 hours or we will cut it off". As language simplifies, so too will the means of transmission. Refrigerator magnets will give way to SmartMags that will transmit 24-hr coupons keyed to the contents of your refrigerator as determined by the scans at the self-serve grocery check-out dock at Ralphs. But the real impact will be in television. There are already moves afoot to ease up FTC rules on format and time duration of images. Once those antiquated regulations are broomed we will begin to see the emergence of ADDTV. Faster, shorter everything. TODAY: Talk Is cheap. The need for us to start considering language issues in advertising has to do with the ever-increasing clutter factor. With the advent and proliferation of the blogosphere and other forms of user-generated content the noise level is constantly rising. And rising right along with it is our growing ability to Tivo-out everything that is not immediately identifiable as meaningful to us. Advertising is at the top of most people’s “ignore": list. Hence, advertising immunity should be this industry’s number one concern. But it’s not. Type the words “advertising immunity” into Google. The first thing that comes up is www.madisonavenew.com/mad92.html. That’s just ridiculous. The impact and velocity of language evolution is just one more thing that will bite us in the ass, if we don’t find the bandwidth to deal with it. Or just chalk it up to one more example of the challenges that will provide you with an opportunity to smoke your competition as they sleep at the switch.
Keep Thinking.
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