The Advertising, Marketing and Broadcast community currently reside in a tramline society, a society that has got used to its ruts and its blinkers and prefers its own ways, however dreary, to untrodden paths and new ways of looking at things.
An analogous story is of the Peruvian Indians who, seeing the sails of their Spanish invaders on the horizon simply put it down to a freak in the weather and went on about their business having no concept of sailing ships in their limited experience.
Likewise Advertising Agencies have absolutely no understanding of the communication process. Similarly they pay only lip service to the much-needed concept of accountability!
The huge changes about to engulf this community need not be painful, however these changes are inevitable because the old ways of marketing and advertising have gone…for ever.
They have been exposed as having failed the needs the whole community.
Marketing applies advertising to the selling of goods or services, so, what is advertising? It is nothing more than a form of learning, the advertiser is saying to his audience, learn about my product/service and then please change or modify your behaviour."
Well then, what is learning?
Most educationalists today say that real learning is about answering a question or solving a problem. The questions can range from the immense to the trivial, however when we have no questions we need no answers. Apply questions and an understanding of human behaviour to the marketing of products, then you start to have real communication taking place.
The questions do not have to be some kind of examination question, more often it is a sort of reaching for, an exploration. Learning is a discovery and people do want to learn about and discover products.
As we said earlier on, you cannot expect the consciousness that created the problem to then solve the problem.
Advertising & Marketing people spent hours and hours at conferences discussing the latest whiz in marketing and indulging in Group Think. A most dangerous pastime because like-minded groups have like-minded ideas and find it hard amongst themselves to project change in their profession, any meaningful change that is!
Study the English Marketing Trade Press, one would think that all was safe and calm within their industry, they constantly discuss the latest multi-million dollar advertising (waste of money) and how it fares creatively.
The current account changes and, all the while, never giving any indication that theirs is a profession undergoing critical examination and that the verdict is almost upon them…death of a thousand cuts!
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