Insightful articles, opinion and commentary about mobile and web.

By Simon van Wyk

Bob Garfield may be the most high-profile advertising sceptic at the moment, but he’s by no means the only one.

Guess who said this? “The advertising business is going down the drain. It’s being pulled down by the people who create it, who don’t know how to sell anything, who have never sold anything in their lives …. who despise selling, whose mission in life is to be clever show-offs and con clients into giving them money to display originality and genius.”

Believe it or not, that quote comes from advertising icon David Ogilvy. And that was before the World Wide Web was invented. Along with Bob Garfield, others have more recently added their gloomy predictions on the future of advertising.

In his book “Advertising is Dead – Long Live Advertising”, Tom Himpe points out that 20 years ago an advertiser could reach 80% of the American population with just three television commercials, while today it takes more than 150 (I’m sure the figures are similar for Australia). “Advertising is suffering because of the sheer amount of it, the lack of innovation within traditional advertising formats, and the power that media fragmentation and technology give to consumers to tune out the noise,” he says.

Eric Clemons, a professor of management at Wharton, a top American business school, wrote an article for TechCrunch earlier this year, “Why advertising is failing on the Internet”, that has generated 846 comments and nearly 2,000 tweets and re-tweets.

Here are a few excerpts:

• “Pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites.”
• “The net will find monetization models and these will be different from the advertising models used by mass media, just as the models used by mass media were different from the monetization models of theatre and sporting events before them.”
• “The idea that content has a price and net applications should find ways to earn a profit without providing free access to other people’s content gets explosive reactions; when virtual reality pioneer and tech guru Jaron Lanier suggested in a New York Times Op Ed that authors deserved to be paid for their content he actually received death threats. But other models are possible.”
• “It is frequently argued that the advertising industry will provide sufficient innovation to replace the loss of traditional ads on traditional mass media. Again, my basic premise rejects this, suggesting that simple commercial messages, pushed through whatever medium, in order to reach a potential customer who is in the middle of doing something else, will fail. It’s not that we no longer need information to initiate or to complete a transaction; rather, we will no longer need advertising to obtain that information. We will see the information we want, when we want it, from sources that we trust more than paid advertising. “

Eric Clemons also devotes a lot of space to ways he believes companies can make money from the Internet, which I don’t have the space to go in here. It’s well worth reading the full article, including the hundreds of vehement comments both for and against.

Tim Leberecht, blogger for CNET and VP of Frog Design, writes: “The web, and the social web in particular, reconciles artificial scarcity with relevance, and that’s why more and more branding dollars are moving online. It is the ideal forum for creating an abundance of scarce moments, thousands of small great ideas instead of one great big one. These small great ideas come to live in brief moments of attachment with customers that are personalized and truly relevant for them.

“‘Advertising is failure,’ says Jeff Jarvis, and he thinks ‘media only get in the way of customer relationships.’ And indeed, how will you make more friends at a party? Showing up with a big banner around your neck that says ‘I am a great friend’ or engaging in a handful of conversations with strangers, listening to their stories and detecting affinities whilst accomplishing a sense of privacy that gradually becomes intimate? Right. In the end, that’s what we should be doing as marketers to build real, sustainable brand equity - creating publicity through intimacy, loyalty through decency.”

William McEwen, author of “Married to the Brand” and “Inside the Mind of the Chinese Consumer”, writes: “Agencies must recognize that advertising is neither the outcome nor the objective. Advertising’s job is to set the stage for an actual customer experience. Then, the company’s performance, the quality and consistency of its products, and its human brand ambassadors will determine the company’s sustainable growth and enduring success. There is absolutely no value in making a brand promise, however memorable it might be, if a company cannot or will not keep it.

“If ad agencies want to regain their position as valued contributors to a company’s success, then they must also help their clients focus on promise delivery. If agencies only care about making the promise and not about helping ensure that the promise will be kept, then they are shirking their brand-building job. It is, after all, the synergy between promise and performance that represents ultimate success — and that’s true for the agency and the client.”

So is advertising dead/dying, or merely having temporary breathing problems? Interested to hear what readers think.

Tags: Advertising, Bob Garfield, digital media, Media