Changes in the Advertising Industry

There has been a great deal of evolution in the advertising business. Some change has been driven from inside the industry; some has been driven by customers and clients. Our industry gets yanked, pulled, and morphed by whatever is happening around it. In the last five or 10 years we have seen some major shifts. On the strategic side of the business, we continue to see an evolution in the thinking behind advertising. Ten or 15 years ago it was all about the “unique selling proposition” that said one thing about a client or a product that would really get someone’s attention to make them buy it. That has since evolved into the discipline of positioning, figuring out how to get a share of your competitive markets. That was enhanced by the discipline of branding, where companies were worried about their identity and their share of mind. We have seen first and foremost a real evolution in the thinking behind advertising. One of the things we are concerned about is taking that thinking to a new and more provocative level.

On the creative side, the evolution has really been in the channels through which messages are communicated. Ten years ago, we would talk only about advertising; today advertising is only one of all the various channels available to communicate. More than ever it is less about advertising than about how you create the most meaningful messages and how you send them out through advertising, direct marketing, Internet, and one-to-one sales engagements. On the creative side, the biggest challenge is how to use all the access points that are available, because it is no longer solely about advertising.

In the future, marketers, companies, and clients are going to scrutinize more carefully what they spend, what they say, and where they say it. Particularly with the rise and fall of the dot-com era, a lot of disciplines and ways agencies helped clients—and ways agencies believed brands could and should be built—were proven wrong. Frankly, I do not think our industry has reflected long and hard enough on how bad a job most advertising agencies did during that period of time.

In the future, all communications are going to have to earn their way into a customer’s life. With the advent of TiVo and EchoStar, just because you created a television commercial does not mean anybody is going to want to see it. An overarching trend, then, is that just because you make it does not mean that anybody will want to hear it. Advertising is going to have to make the communication desirable. The 30-second spot could become obsolete. It will become harder to get it to somebody. If something is harder to get to somebody and harder to show them, that form factor will change. In the short term, we will continue to use the 30-second spot, but in the long term it could become obsolete.

We will also see a major backlash in content, particularly in the broadcast environment. Some research shows that reality television and violence—although compelling and interesting to the viewer—are terrible programs during which to remember advertising. They are also the most expensive segments on television. A backlash will occur when advertisers realize the most expensive places in broadcast media turn out to be terrible places to run commercials because viewers are not taking in the messages.

Finally, people are going to look at communications now more than ever and assume it reflects the leaders, the company CEOs. We are not doing commercials on behalf of some retail chain; we are doing them on behalf of that retail chain’s CEO. The reflection of corporate leadership in communications should get a lot of consideration moving forward.