In memoriam: Thoughts on the Death of Advertising (As We’ve Known It)

I’m sure that many people will deny that advertising is dead. Just look at all the ads that are still all over the place. This is a huge industry, right? To those who deny that advertising is dead, I would remind them that according to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s seminal work on dying, “The Five Stages of Grief,” the first stage is, in fact, denial. We all want to believe in the status quo, but the reality is that things are changing so rapidly that the old ad model has, as John Cleese might have said in the Python’s parrot sketch, “Gone to meet its maker,” “Passed on,” and “Would be pushing up daisies if you hadn’t nailed it to its perch.” The main culprit is new media technology combined with rapid changes in how we interact with each other and the world, which is closely tied to generational shifts in the use of this media. Advertising based on interrupting someone’s entertainment or news gathering experience is going away quickly.

Instead of advertisers spending a fortune to reach for customers the old way, they are making content on websites that is genuinely of value to just the right people, who subsequently reach for them via Google – all at a fraction of the cost of the old way of placing ads. David M. Scott’s excellent book, “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” has plenty of examples of why this phenomenon is today’s marketing reality, so I won’t go into huge detail here. But I will say that, even as an “advertising” professional, I still experience unbridled glee when I TiVo past dumb car commercials when I’m watching Mad Men or Lost.

Here are reasons why I think the death of the old way, and the birth of the new way, represents a wonderful and exciting opportunity:

Great storytelling is more important than ever. You can put a video on YouTube or your website that tells your company’s story in a way that’s moving and exciting. Or make a podcast that unfolds with the power of classic radio drama with Orson Wells.

Your website is your channel, so you don’t have to pay to put your story on someone else’s channel – unless you want to. We’ve gone from 3 major networks, to hundreds of cable channels, to millions of websites. Every one of these websites has the potential to be its very own channel, which means you can reach an audience at extremely low cost. This is especially relevant for B2B marketers who need to appeal to a niche.

Fun is king. Comedy videos are watched more on the web than any other kind. Infusing your marketing video with comedy helps leverage your customers’ viewing habits for your competitive advantage.

Global reach, without the global reach costs. When I pledged to eat my shorts on YouTube if my agency didn’t win a solar account, I was struck by the fact that within an hour – literally one hour – of posting the video on www.solarshorts.com and sending a notice out to my LinkedIn groups, I received emails from solar industry professionals from around the world, from Australia to Germany (and we won a solar account, by the way. Thank God – those burnt shorts smelled awful).

More connecting. Real conversations. Less shouting. I remember when I was starting out as a junior copywriter at McCann in New York back in the 1980s. The agency had big accounts like Coke and AT&T. The work was, frankly, dull as dishwater. The agency used a lot of jingles, so while the official motto of McCann was “Truth well told,” the joke around the company was that it should be “Truth well sung.” Despite all this, the advertising worked fairly well, as far as I could see. Why? I suspect it was largely due to the fact that the clients spent vast amounts of money on media spending. They kept shouting their messages to a relatively captive audience using TV commercials, and if they shouted the same shit often enough it stuck. Today, if we do our job right, a video or some other web experience gets people talking about it on Twitter or Facebook, and email links spread the word for us. Sometimes it’s only a whisper, but that’s all it takes.

So, we’re having this party – a wake for the advertising we knew so well (October 29th). But it’s not an occasion to be sad. We’re celebrating all the great things advertising was, and more importantly looking to the future. Let’s get together and hoist a few Guinness. We will sing Oh Danny Boy. And through it all, as we grieve for our old friend, we can console ourselves with the knowledge that today, Advertising is in a better place.