Jim Murray

4 years ago · 4 min. reading time · 0 ·

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Has Advertising Lost Its Way In The Digital World?

Has Advertising Lost Its Way In The Digital World?

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This is not a rant but is definitely an editorial piece, which means it is just my opinion based on the stuff I have seen and heard over the years. You can agree or disagree or whatever. I’m not a journalist, just an ex-agency guy who observes the industry from without.

I grew up in advertising in 1970s, long before any of the current nonsense ie the Internet, was even dreamed up.

Back then it was relatively simple for anyone with a couple of functioning brain cells to figure out what made the product or service unique and hammer on it.

It was called the USP or the unique selling proposition and it made life in advertising a lot more fun. It also gave the prospect, be they consumers or buyers for businesses, a great product story if you did it right.

This product story was the thing that brought the product down off the lofty perch of ‘aren’t we great’ to the more reachable branch of ‘aren’t we useful’.

People have never really bought products or services that didn’t have both a USP and a great product story. This was the tail end of the era where iconic brands could be built on the strength of their attributes and the ability of the clients to go along with the idea that a product story in any of several different ways, and anchored by the USP, would appeal to both sides of the consumer’s brain. To wit…hearts and minds.

Around about 1990, just after I left the ad agency business and went on my own, and became more of an ad agency observer than a player, I started to notice a change. I was just over 40 at that point, relatively the same age as a lot of my peers and friends in the business, of which there were a lot, and many who were quite brilliant.

The change was a simple one initiated by the clients, several of whom were quite large, who decided that agencies should be compensated based on performance.

Seems like a little thing but it created a huge shit storm from which the agency business has still, I would opine, has not completely recovered.

As a consequence of this decision, many agencies became risk averse in the extreme, unwilling to take chances on big ideas or duke it out with the senior creative people like me and a lot of my friends, who would yell and scream and make life unpleasant for anyone who got in the way of developing solid ideas and edgy execution.

The result was simple. A substantial number of senior creative people were let go, some of whom freelanced for clients directly, others of whom formed their own boutique shops and pitched the accounts that were too small to make big client demands and therefore represented good creative opportunity, and still others took the money and ran off into other businesses.

The agencies, desperate to hold onto their profit margins, replaced the senior people with cheap labour and told them exactly what to do, which was basically create boring, predictable, in-your- face selly advertising with no soul. A whole lot of sledgehammers to the heads of the customer. All head. No heart.

I’m not sure of the extent to which this was happening in the US, but as I watched what was going on, (because I never freelanced for major ad agencies, just boutiques), I thought, wow, this is the true end of an era and it went out with a pretty sad sounding whimper.

Actions Have Consequences

After all of this happened, the general level of advertising creativity fell off substantially, and when that happens clients need to have more frequency, which meant spending more on media, which kind of ended up negating all the cost saving they were trying to bring about through pay for performance.

So the agencies still made their money, just in a different way, plus they saved money on personnel overhead by hiring two kids to replace one grown up creative person for about half the cost.

This situation continues to this day. The main difference is that the number of media involved has grown from print, broadcast and direct marketing to a bunch of electronic and digital choices.

The agencies that service the big clients, are still making money hand over fist. The pay for performance idea has been muddied like crazy by all the bullshit and ‘marathon-not-sprint’ posturing that digital media represents to the clients.

3326cc06.jpgBut over the past couple of years especially, there has been a lot of serious investigation into the core credibility of digital sources, both as advertising media and marketing tools.

One of the leading proponents of the abject bullshit and fraud in the digital advertising industry, much of which is controlled by ad agency satellite companies, is a guy named Bob Hoffman, who actually travels the world and talks to ad agency groups about this.

Every week he sends me a newsletter with some new crap he has uncovered about the amount of fraud and fakery being foisted on clients by the digital advertising industry. And also how little the advertising industry is doing to police themselves and quit cheating their clients out of billions of useless advertising dollars.

So Where Does This Take Us?

Well, I may sound like a reactionary old fart, but IMHO, it takes us right back to the good old days. Because, believe it or not, the companies using ‘old school’ media are simply carrying on business as usual. Achieving more or less the same results and building their brands as effectively as ever before.

Certainly they have a digital presence, but it is really more a utilitarian one (for the downloading of apps, or coupons etc.), as opposed to one they primarily depend on to really showcase their USP and tell their story.

Bottom Line

There is a lot wrong with digital media. It has been over-promising and under-delivering for several years. It has built whatever reputation it has on bots as opposed to driving sales, and it is a complete and utter dead zone as far as the actual creative product is concerned.

So to anyone who is seriously contemplating online advertising, I would strongly advise them to do their homework, and check out what the real critics of this media have to say.

Bob Hoffman is one of the most knowledgeable of these critics. You can see a lot of his stuff here:

https://www.bobhoffmanswebsite.com/newsletters

jim out

02191437.pngJim Murray is an experienced blogger, copywriter and art director and former professional photographer. He has run his own business (Onwords & Upwords), since 1989 after a 20 year career in Toronto as a senior creative person in major Canadian & international advertising agencies. He is specialized in creating communications for businesses working to make a positive difference in the world.

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Comments

Jim Murray

4 years ago #3

#3
Jerry Fletcher...Greed is the big ole Catch 22 of our business. Every business for that matter, save a few.

Jerry Fletcher

4 years ago #2

Jim I opened the doors on my consulting practice in 1990. I left the corner office (CEO) of the largest B2B agency in Portland, OR. The devotees of the "pay for performance" approach were thick as flies on dead skunk in the High tech community that we did a lot of work for. I found that the only way to deal with them was to make sure we were dialed in with the senior management while taking on "little miss Marcom and her slippery CMO bosses by forcing them to quantify their perceptions. Then we ran old fashioned split tests using the so called new media. (We wanted to run Multi-variable tests but the "best digital agencies" couldn't devise a way to do it.) Good creative staff plus solid strategic and tactical follow up beat them every time. Very quickly we got the reputation of being a buzz saw of a competitor. Thank whatever deity you subscribe to for folks like Bob Hoffman. At lunch with a digital agency owner the other day he reported that one of his biggest problems is lack of experience in the people hiring his shop with inflated demands for greater performance without "using the high priced creative talent." And so it goes.

Pascal Derrien

4 years ago #1

I think creativity has been sacrificed on behalf of metric efficiency

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