Ordinary Advertising

It feels like I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time over the last year reading about the imminent demise of traditional media (which I suspect may turn out to be like the reports of Mark Twain’s death), coupled with a simultaneous paean to the rise of non-traditional media. Every time I turn around there’s another article about the minuscule increases in TV spending (albeit off a very large base) and the dramatic increase in Internet advertising (albeit this time off a much smaller base). And along with this, there’s the daily outpouring of new media vehicles that have advertisers all in a tizzy: “Hey, we can put ads on cell phone screens”, “Hey, we can make podcast ads”, “Hey, we (at TiVo) can put little logos up in the corner of the screen and annoy people while they’re fast-forwarding past the ads.”

All of which brings to mind the old Johnny Lee song “Looking For Love (In All The Wrong Places)” because that’s what it seems like these advertisers are doing. Instead of attacking the root cause of their problems–most of their advertising is ordinary–they’re looking for novel places to put more ordinary advertising. Seems a bit daft to me. But then, there’s an even bigger problem associated with this quest for the Holy Grail(s) of media vehicles.

The entire marketing world, advertisers and agencies alike, appear to have suddenly discovered “accountability”. (Where they’ve been for the last 50 years I hesitate to guess.) But now you have articles in The Wall Street Journal quoting WPP chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell as saying: “There is no doubt in my mind that scientific analysis, including econometrics, is one of the most important areas in the marketing-services industry.” So important that two paragraphs later one learns that WPP’s MindShare unit has increased the number of employees working on econometric models by 750% over the last five years. (By what percent WPP has increased the number of employees charged with doing better than ordinary advertising over the same period is not discussed.)

Then, you have another WSJ article in which a representative of a different WPP unit, Fiona McAnena of Kantar Research, says: “In a world where traditional outlets like TV are proving less effective and where promotions at the retail level are taking on more importance, advertisers are seeking more information about how to tackle such things.” And finally, there was this doozy of a headline on the first page of the Journal’s Marketplace section last Friday: “Summer’s Flops Spur Movie Studios To Reassess TV Ads” followed by nary a mention of the fact that many of the movies released this summer just plain stunk.

What’s missing for me in all this discussion is any mention of the quality of the advertising being run– traditionally or non-traditionally in its carriage. WPP can increase its staff of econometricians by 7,500% and it won’t necessarily lead to one less ordinary ad. “Promotions at the retail level” are swell, providing anyone’s ever heard of the brand being promoted. And shifting more movie advertising to the Internet, the poster child media vehicle for the “accountability” movement, might actually be a good idea since people are fairly likely to invest some time in seeing what’s new at the movies.

But all of this overlooks a very key question: What is the primary purpose of mass-market advertising? It is to build and grow brands. BMW films on the Internet didn’t attract interest because they were on the Internet, they attracted interest because BMW is a very powerful, well known brand (which didn’t get that way via podcasts and cell phone ads, I hasten to add). In fact, I’m hard-pressed to come up with any big brand that got that way via the Internet except for Internet businesses themselves. And somehow the ghosted image of the logo of a business no one’s ever heard of stuck up in the corner of a commercial we’re madly TiVo-ing past does not strike me as the quickest path to getting to ring the opening bell at the NYSE.

I’m all for accountability and I find econometrics fascinating. But I think if advertisers and their agencies are “looking for love” they’d be far better off improving the lovability (or even likeability) of their advertising instead of devoting so much energy to finding new (and maybe “wrong”) places to put it.