I’ve long had this feeling that traditional advertising is walking around dead and doesn’t even know it.
Yes, yes, if you’ve read this blog, listened to my first podcast with Pete Monfre, or heard me speak on panels, you know that I have a bone to pick with most advertising agencies. Why? Mostly because I find most advertising to be boring, offensive, grating on my nerves, or worth skipping entirely. Advertising is what used to happen when I went to the bathroom. Nowadays, its what happens when the Tivo is going really fast.
And why is this? Because 99% of ads out there aren’t targeted at me. Living in America right now is like being at a 24-hour cocktail party, stuffed in a monkey suit, and having to listen to a bunch of people I don’t know or like telling me about their day and why I should be like them, eat like them, drink the same stuff they do, have the same kind of spouse, and watch the same kind of entertainment. Yeah, some of them might be funny or tell great stories, but after the 73rd time they repeat the same joke, I want to go postal on them. It’s like that comedian who bangs his head with the microphone–”heard that!”
Let me make myself real clear. When I pick up a magazine on photography or what have you, I don’t mind the ads. Why? Because I’m a nut about photography. I want to find out more about the Pentax K100D. Why? Because I own a whole line of Pentax stuff, and I heard someone say once that the Pentax K100D digital SLR will use the KA and KAF mount lenses from my old system.
You probably don’t care, but man, this makes my day. I can spend $600 on a digital SLR and still use my old lenses? I was going to go with Nikon (I’ve been drooling over various offerings) but now I think I’m sold. And since my first SLR was a Pentax K-1000 (no autofocus, a screw mount lens for cryin’ out loud, faulty light meter, etc) that I bought from my cousin for $20 secondhand (okay, third- or maybe fourthhand, really), you could say that the Pentax brand appeals to me.
But when I’m just walking around innocently (or as innocently as you can imagine me being) or watching TV, or going to see a movie, I don’t want to see advertising. It isn’t targeted to me. I’m annoyed by it. I go to great lengths to filter it out. Skip it.
Those guys don’t know that I stop everything to look at Tag Heuer watch ads. Nor do they know about my prediliction for Ray Charles and Big Band music. (Sometimes, they get lucky and I first hear about Ray Sings, Basie Swings via TV ad, when my Tivo trigger finger wasn’t quite so itchy. Something like this is the equivalent of winning the Powerball precisely at the moment, during a freak storm, that you’re hit by lightning and get a call from Spielberg asking you to be the star of his next movie. But somewhere in America, there’s an advertising fella saying, “Hey, it worked–it really worked!”)
At the same time, I am, to put it mildly, a capitalist running dog. I enjoy everything about free enterprise. I subscribe to like 10 small business magazines. I have google alerts posted on 15 different business topics. Every day, my email inbox is stuffed with ezines on business, sales, marketing, how to negotiate, and more.
And yes, I have to market my business to those of you who need or want my services. I try to do it in a way that will inform, educate, and empower you. I try not to be interruptive, annoying, or unspeakably cheerful early in the morning. I try, I really do, to make your life/day/business/whatever better after you encounter my messaging. And yes, I’m aware that Madison Avenue thinks the same way about the toilet paper/ipods/chevy tahoes/whatever they are hawking, but damn, does it have to be so loud?
So let’s just say two things: (a) given these two states of mind, I naturally feel like a man without a country in some respects, and (b) if anyone wants to come up with a better idea for getting the word out, let’s do it. Call a Mulligan, a redo, butter fingers, whatever.
Fortunately, this is America dammit, and you can’t fault us for plain Yankee ingenuity (and please, my Southron friends, when I say Yankee I don’t mean it in a “great unpleasantness” kind of way, but rather “John Wayne and the SeaBees making a still out of matchsticks” way). If there’s a way to be annoying, we’ll figure it out. And if there’s a way to avoid annoying, we’ll also figure that out, and give it a name like “nontraditional marketing.”
KNOW magazine has a recent edition devoted entirely to this topic. Here’s a longish quote from an article entitled The Marketing “Tipping Point” Might Be Just Over the Horizon by John Lewis.
Companies like ESPN and Apple are demonstrating how to pull both traditional and nontraditional levers to create a real buzz in the market. Of course, we have yet to reach the real “tipping point” in the shift to a new class of marketing programs: namely, the time when it becomes clear that developing a relationship with a consumer will not work solely through traditional advertising and promotion efforts.
When we reach this tipping point, we should expect that a substantial portion of the current $400 billion in advertising spending will be reallocated to new-era marketing approaches. We believe that the fundamental strategic question is not if this revolution will happen, but only when it will happen and which set of techniques will absorb the reallocation of spending. Like the rapid migration of consumers from vinyl records to CDs, when the tipping point is reached we expect this spending shift to be swift and irrevocable.
Good stuff. One thing I don’t like about some of the implications of the piece is that TV shows are just switching from traditional ads to embedded advertising and product placement. Okay, I think I can live with that, unless one of the characters in the murder mystery start talking about the relative merits of one manufacturer’s bullets over another.
Read it all here.
