More than just a disruption
Things are getting ugly for traditional advertising and marketing, but there’s a new order coming from the chaos, as Simon van Wyk writes.
People have been chronicling the disruptive influence of the digital media on traditional media and advertising ever since the World Wide Web first appeared. But no one has articulated the effect so comprehensively or so bluntly as Bob Garfield, ad critic and columnist for Ad Age.
After publishing a piece on the future of media entitled “The Chaos Scenario” four years ago, the curmudgeonly critic became a poster-boy for the doomsayers. Here was someone who’d worked closely with the advertising industry for 25 years (albeit as an observer, not a participant), someone whose livelihood depends on the success of traditional media, and he was using his column in the advertising industry’s bible to declare that advertising was in its death throes.
He has now turned that column into a book – one that balances the bad news with a prescription for surviving the chaos, including examples from around the globe of companies that have successfully embraced digital marketing.
As to Bob’s bluntness, in a video presentation connected to the book, he says the book has two parts, and the message of the first part is “You are doomed.”
“I say doomed,” Bob drolly tells the camera, “because ‘totally and completely f***ed’ didn’t fit on the slide.’” Here is a man who tells it like it is, and he told it like it is in this month’s HotHouse podcast
Tags: Advertising, Bob Garfield, digital media, Marketing, podcast, The Chaos Scenario, traditional media
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