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How advertising distorts brand marketing

“Only when television managed to emancipate itself from the economic construct of advertising was there a real emancipation of story.”

So said David Simon, creator of the greatest piece of art that has ever aired on television, The Wire – speaking at the Edinburgh TV festival last month (about in an interview with Charlie Brooker.

Similarly, brands – companies, organisations, whatever – need to free themselves from advertising as the core of how they communicate, how they practise marketing.

So do agencies (in fact many of them are already).

Advertising, to most people, *is* marketing. Since the 1950s at least, the TV ad has been the hub, the centrepiece of how marketing gets done. It’s where the money is, where a lot of talent goes.

Anyway, I was thinking about this last week prepping for a presentation at NMALive called “Influencing the Influencers”.

The title set me of on three trains of thought:

  • 1. How advertising as an “economic construct” distorts marketing and therefore business more widely.
  • 2. We need for models of communication that target both traditional influencers (media, celebrities, experts) and “accidental influencers“.
  • 3. Networks are inherently unpredictable (because they complex adaptive systems) – we need to avoid illusions of being able to predict and control behaviours and focus on “How to be lucky” as brands.

Here’s the presentation…

How to Be Lucky (Influencing the Influencers presentation from NMALive Sep 09)

Back to advertising vs. marketing. Advertising, TV advertising, distorts marketing in the digital age in lots of ways. The business models and the economic imperative still pulls in disproportionate amounts of budget, talent and attention from brand owners and marketers generally.

Just as The Wire was the result of TV being set free as a medium from advertising-only business models, organisations will benefit from being set free from the distorting influence of the advertising only model.


Antony Mayfield
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7 responses to “How advertising distorts brand marketing”

  1. Richard Stacy Avatar
    Richard Stacy

    Advertising has shaped marketing by making The Proposition the holy grail of marketing strategy. That’s because you needed something with this level of focus to make a 30 second ad.

    They also allowed basically identical brands to chisel out some point of (spurious) differentiation which they could then dramatise the life out of with 30 second theatre.

    Propositions don’t work in social media because you can’t have a conversation from them – 30 seconds and you are done (useful when 30 seconds was all you had, pretty hopeless when you have to sustain a conversation). That’s why the basis of marketing in social media has to be the story (easy to drive conversations from, hard to tell in 30 seconds).

  2. Advertising – product advertising | Point Article News Feed

    […] Brands breaking free from advertising | Open (minds, finds …6 hours ago by Antony Mayfield  Only when television managed to emancipate itself from the economic construct of advertising was there a real emancipation of story. So said David Simon, […]

  3. Advertising – advertising promotion | Point Article News Feed

    […] How advertising distorts brand marketing | Open (minds, finds …18 hours ago by Antony Mayfield  Only when television managed to emancipate itself from the economic construct of advertising was there a real emancipation of story. So said David. […]

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  5. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Dude. Great stuff. I’m sure you’ve read our stuff on this – e.g. this award winning article from last year…http://herd.typepad.com/herd_the_hidden_truth_abo/2008/11/free-gift-influence-and-how-things-really-spread.html

    And my numerous blogposts on the subject for the last 2 years…(yawn)

    Very pleased to have someone else raising the flag of evidence (vs. what we’d like to believe)

    Yay!

  6. Antony Mayfield Avatar
    Antony Mayfield

    Thanks, Mark – I’d not read that post, but have read a lot of your work, which is brilliant. Should have, and will do, reference Herd und Herdmeister in future discussions around this topic, for sure…

  7. dan martin Avatar
    dan martin

    I think this is a great article along with the presentation, it reinforces the point that you are making with Social Media. How in affect anyone can be an influencer that is trusted within a group.

    I have been working on SEO projects but have started to look at the value of Social Media on a brand.

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