The
Battle For Coca-Cola
Rages On.
Ain't
Nothing Like
The Real Thing, Maybe.
I
Don't Mean To Say
I Told You So, But...
Are
Consumers Smarter
Then We Are?.
The
Four Great Myths
Of Global Branding.
Mr
Bevis Butts Heads
At Mitsubishi
The
Best Laid Plans
Of Mice And Men.
Dare
to Be Great:
The Mad Genius of "The Matrix"
Mitsubishi's
New Marketing Boss
Out Of The Frying Pan.
Concept Is Stronger Than Fact.
Value
Perception In A World
Gone Mad With "Cool"
The
Future of Advertising
The Brand
The
Future of Advertising
The Targets
The
Future of Advertising
The Grid
The
Future of Advertising
The Swarm
Technology
Making The Message
Meaningful
The Only Business That Matters Is The One You're In.
What
Ever Happened To The
Big Idea?
The Post-Advertising Era Is Here
Confessions Of A" Liar For Hire"
Good, Bad and Ugly At the Moment of Truth
A Post-Advertising "Big Idea".
The Value Of A Paying Pustomer.
Emergence Of the "Empire of One".
All customers Are Created Equal
Playing God An Other Atrocities
the
City That Spawned
The Age Of Advertising..
Fear And Self Loathing In Advertising.
The Greatest Success Metric Is Sales.
Foot In (Word Of) Mouth Disease
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In the Beginning, There Was The End. Welcome to the first attempt to define the the practice of advertising in the Post Advertising Era. For the last six months my business partner Angela Glenn and I have been actively engaged in the research and development of different forms of communication that we believe have the potential to fix what is broken in contemporary advertising. This has proven to be a far more ambitious endeavor than either of us realized when taking it on. Through a generous grant from The Institute For Advanced Practices In Advertising, a public policy think tank, we were able to poll a significant sample of the American advertising audience as to what it was that made them so disenchanted with what currently passes for advertising in today's media. |
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Our findings were not surprising in the least. An overwhelming majority simply found that the messages conveyed by contemporary advertising were meaningless to the ways by which they were leading their lives. Our respondents could not relate to the casting, the scenarios, the strategies, the product demonstrations, the brand preferences or any other part of the multitude of elements that went into making up the various forms of advertising they were exposed to during the testing period. Testing for awareness, memoribility, or any form of recall produced disastrous results. Persuasion scores were practically flat-lined in pre and post interviews. Commnications values were not enhanced by executional criteria at all. |
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I miss all of those great ads you guys did. what ever happened to Double-Think? –Robin R. Bristol, England I miss that too.–hw |
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So called "Creative" executions faired no better than "Traditional" executions. After a short period of time it became painfully apparent that the entire category of brand advertising had slipped so far below the perceptual radar of the typical American consumer that it was no longer able to be effectively measured or quantified. In just a few short years, advertising has become irrelevant to a wide spectrum of society, if our test sample is any indication of the norm. Armed with this data, we then set about the significant task of attempting to analyze this apparent lack of efficacy in marketing communications. Our objective was to find out what, if anything was meaningful about advertising, and if so, at what point in the engagement continuum did it gain/loose its relevance. To our surprise, we found that an overwhelming number of our respondents were quite knowledgeable about the process of advertising. They were aware of the role played by qualitative and quantitative research. They were aware of the relationship between advertisers and sponsor-driven media. They saw advertising as a "necessary evil" in their ability to access "free" entertainment in their homes. Advertising was "tolerated," but not in any stretch of the imagination, "accepted." Advertising was an "outsider" to the daily routine of its audience. From all indications, the only way to view the findings of our research was that for our statistical sample of 3227 individuals, the effectiveness of advertising as a means to communicate the benefits associated with one product over another was at an end. 23 months ago, Jim Stengel, Global Marketing Officer at The Proctor & Gamble Company stated in front of an audience of agency executives at the American Association of Advertising Agencies, Media Conference, "I believe today's marketing model is broken. We're applying antiquated thinking and work systems to a new world of possibilities," Everything we encountered in our research confirmed that his premise was absolutely correct. So what now? Do we go down to the nearest pub and cry in our beer? Or do we take what we've learned and use it to our best advantage. Personally, I'm a big fan of taking action rather than talking about it. So we took what was left of our grant money and conducted another survey. This time the subject wasn't advertising. This time the subject was the consumers themselves. What would they choose to watch or listen to if given a choice? How could we gain their interest? How long could we keep them interested? What would they remember after we captured their interest? How long would they remember what interested them? Was there a way to migrate their interest towards an intent to purchase? Well, after two months in the field, we made some significant progress in determining the answers to those questions and a whole lot more. We learned that the key to interest is excitement. To get consumers to give us their attention, we had to take their breath away. Once we had the premise, the execution became the focus of our activities. We knew what had to be done in the Post Advertising Era to regain the consumer interest that had left traditional means of marketing and advertising in the dust. We had to make them Gasp. And so, that's what we set out to do. We initiated The Gasp Company. The First Agency of the Post-Advertising Era. Stay tuned.
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