OPEN

Image: Mad Men – a drama based on the zenith of industrial mass advertising

John Hagel, as promised, is considering the future of advertising. It’s a confusing picture, he says, mainly because of the number of different shifts – including people’s online behaviour, the superabundance of content and services competing for individuals’ attention, the massively more compelling case for effectiveness that online advertising presents, among others – all at a time when recessionary pressures are making themselves felt in the economy:

Here’s the danger: we may become so focused on the recent growth in online advertising that we dismiss any short-term slowdown in spending growth as a purely cyclical phenomenon. In the process, we may miss the longer-term, and ultimately far more profound, impact of the diminishing returns that online advertising is already beginning to experience.

The basic paradox of the Internet can be framed very simply: The very platform that makes advertising both more relevant and more measurable is the same platform that longer-term will challenge and ultimately undermine the basic role of advertising in communicating with customers.

This is an excellent articulation of something that’s been troubling me.

I was part of a panel discussion on BBC Radio 4’s You & Yours programme on Monday about Jeremiah Owyang’s Fan-Sumer concept. It was interesting to be introduced as being from a global advertising firm. Whilst that it is in part an accurate description, I felt it was one of those moments when it was easier for people to explain what I did as advertising: because advertising was – and still is for most people – the prime expression of and a synonym for brand marketing.

But that’s not how it is going to be forever.

Advertising, from the world of the Mad Men to recent times, ruled because in the age of industrial / mass / channel media it was the most effective way to sell, to communicate with the mass audience. But it is being displaced as the lead discipline in marketing – and I’m not sure that anything will take the same role in the age of networks.

John Hagel says it like this:

Will advertising go away? Hardly, but it will move from the core of marketing to the edge, challenged by diminishing returns and more robust options for engaging people.

I moved from traditional PR because I wanted to understand digital more deeply, but I was not leaving PR behind so much as taking its principles with me into a new place. PR’s emphasis on and instincts for understanding networks and earning attention in networks where what would be successful in a world where online networks become more important than channel / broadcast media.

This thinking gave rise to one of the core principles of the strategy we’re developing at iCrossing UK:

Attention online cannot be bought it must be earned.

Even when space online has been paid for, it is only the opportunity to earn the attention of people that has been purchased. And the only way – stop me if you’ve heard this one before – to earn attention in online networks where people have a superabundance of content to choose from, is to be useful to them (with information they want, entertainment that is attractive, and usually by not assaulting their attention with sales messages when that’s not what they want).

A lot of people think this is just about relevancy and context. Online ads become less effective because they aren’t tailored to individuals closely enough. Get the personalisation right and the ads will work perfectly well, the logic goes.

Well context is going to help, but it isn’t the whole story. Ads still carry nuisance value and the more of them there are the more nuisance value they collectively carry and the more adept people will become at zoning them out or blocking them altogether.

John Hagel also points to an article by Esther Dyson about the future of advertising in which she puts it like this:

This market will get more competitive, and users will be barraged by ads to which they will pay less and less attention. Call that public space, a world of billboards and cacophony. Even though the ads will be more “relevant” than ever, users will increasingly tune them out.

I highly recommend reading and thinking about both of these articles. If you’re moving in this direction already with your business you’ll find it, as I have, a thrilling endorsement of your strategy and a continuing challenge to avoid complacency and slowing down in your reinvention how things work.