Advertising is Dead… Long Live Information?
April 3, 2008 – 8:59 am
I’ve been putting a fair amount of thought recently into the idea of advertising as a medium that’s changing to adopt to the new standards of communication. Beyond what we’ve seen on the internet my personal opinion is that we’re in the midst of a change cycle in the industry where marketing is shifting from gut based decisions to more mass scale data directed marketing with advertising and marketing decisions made in real time. Internet ad targeting systems are a good example of data directed marketing. Targeting is not basing placement decisions on the knowledge and insights of a media planner, in fact these systems take the planner out of the equation entirely. Instead, ad targeting relies on identifying individuals to see the advertising not audiences. While this is a quantum leap forward from where we sat just 10 years ago, there is a lot more room to grow.
As an industry we’re on a pretty aggressive evolutionary path to not just targeting individuals with advertising that’s more precisely targeted, but we’re also on a path to targeting individuals with advertising that’s more nebulous. By that I mean that the advertising transcends the idea of being marketing messaging and instead becomes valuable information that contributes to the viewers life experience.
We’re already seeing this is a very basic way in the search marketplace. I’ve conducted research studies with searchers only to find that the sponsored links are not perceived as advertising, instead they’re perceived as valuable information. Google is arguably an ad seller, however while most people hate the idea of advertising, eschew it as annoying and repulsive, those same people express little concern with Google’s sponsored links. No wonder people love Google, what they represent is a living breathing example of the type of advertising people are willing to accept: relevant, targeted and full of information.
So this gets me to the title of my post. I’m fully on board with the idea that advertising will evolve but the pace of that evolution is up for grabs. In a recent Dave Winer post on scripting.com, (Making money with ads? Not much longer…) he summed up the concept beautifully:
“When they finish the process of better and better targeted advertising, that’s when the whole idea of advertising will go poof, will disappear. If it’s perfectly targeted, it isn’t advertising, it’s information. Information is welcome, advertising is offensive. Who wants to pay to create information that’s discarded? Who wants to pay to be a nuisance? Wouldn’t it be better to pay to get the information to the people who want it? Are you afraid no one wants your information? Then maybe you’d better do some research and make a product that people actually want to know about.”
The real question, and one which Dave doesn’t address, is how will brand marketers get to the same place? How will Nabisco be able to increase awareness of their products outside of the traditional marketing channels - channels consumers love to hate? It’s unlikely that mass portions of the web are searching for crackers. Could you argue that knowing that “kids love crackers” is information? I think a large portion of the ad haters out there are blissfully ignorant of this challenge. I think Dave’s post hints at his obliviousness:
“In the future, the flow of ideas for products will happen everywhere, all the time, and products with small markets will be worth making because we’ll be able to find the users, or more accurately, they’ll be able to find us. “Targeting” customers is the wrong metaphor for the future. Instead make it easy for the people who lust for what you have to find you.”
He’s coming at the argument from a technical perspective, an assumption that product development = software development. I agree, it would be a better world if the product development process was as nimble as software or hardware development. Unfortunately that’s not the case with most big advertisers. It’s unlikely that we’ll see Honda, Kraft or P&G firing up production plants to produce micro products to match up to micro targets. This is the fundamental challenge: big advertisers businesses are built to scale big, not small. As such, their messaging needs to appeal and be thrust upon unaware and uninterested audiences in the hope that they’ll build the scale to justify their start-up and production costs. That’s why people who don’t really care about the latest flavor of Mac n’ Cheese, or the newest model from an automaker are being barraged day in and out with ads; they’re being persuaded to give it a try.
I’m not sure what the solution is, and I’m not convinced that you can turn all advertising into information that viewers crave. The only way I can see that happening is to confine all of your marketing to the searching experience. I’m curious what the ROI would be for an advertiser that took this tact. Anyone know of a CPG brand that put the majority of their marketing dollars into the grocery store? In theory shopping in a grocery store is the one time that CPG product information is most relevant. It’s the one time I’m looking for information about products to purchase. Perhaps the grocery store experience is sub-optimized for marketing?
All in all I still think we’re at a crossroads in marketing. Maybe advertising will evolve to information and we’ll all happily consume more products - I think it’d be a shame if it didn’t. As of right now I don’t have any brilliant ideas on how to evolve the process and I don’t think I’m alone. So I think we have a couple years before we see some change. Until then I’m happy to have the FF button on my DVR remote.
Photo courtesy of Annie Mole via Flickr
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Tags: advertising, advertising people, Annie Mole, crossroads, data directed marketing, dave winer, google, Honda, Internet ad targeting systems, media, micro products, search marketplace, software development, targeted advertising, targeting
