Is Modern Advertising More Stupider Than It Thinks?

Fifty years ago advertising was incredibly simple.

A client would go to see some advertising people.

More often than not, he would be wanting to sell more of his product.

The advertising people would think about who buys the product, who might buy it, and if the people who already buy might be tempted to buy it more often.

They'd work out where they could best reach these potential buyers.

And then they'd look for things that might persuade the potential buyer to buy the product.

They'd find out as much as they could about the product, and the potential customer, and they'd keep thinking until they thought they might have some persuasive thoughts, or facts, or ideas.

Then they'd work out a way of putting that message across in way that would catch the attention of their potential customer, and communicate it to them in a way that suited the product.

If the advertising was successful, the potential customer might actually buy the product.

And if they were happy with the product, they might buy it again some time.

Heck, they might even tell a friend or relative about it.

Over time, if the product met their expectations, they might come to think of it, and the maker of it, as pretty good.

That's how most of the great products and brands we know today were built.

It all seems so simplistic, doesn't it?

How the modern advertising professional laughs at the very notion of such a basic and naive approach.

These days advertising is so much more sophisticated.

So much more clever.

Now we have brand marketing.

We have brand diagrams, some shaped like onions, others like pyramids.

These things are very sophisticated, because they've been considered long and hard by branding consultants and strategists.

They've been through three rounds of development, including one on an away day in Oxfordshire, with a pub lunch and free teas and coffees.

Then we have planning.

An entire whole new clever department was set up. Originally it had the simple and useful task of finding out more about the customer. But now planning is much, much more clever. It watches trends, it theorises about society, it taps into the zeitgeist.

And even better than that, it can create presentations that last for whole days on these subjects.

And it can write books, too. When you've spent that long thinking about things quite often you'll have enough things to fill a book. Or go on a speaking tour. Other planners will buy the book and go to see the tour.

This cycle continues until absolutely every planner knows absolutely everything there is to know.

Modern planning takes advertising to a whole new level of sophistication and cleverness.

So now the modern advertising person imagines what kind of relationship the customer might have with the product. What emotion they might associate with it.

Oh yes, also now the potential customer has a much more clever name, the target demographic.

How fucking clever is that?

And we don't really think of the product as a product anymore, that's simplistic thinking. The brand is what's important. What the brand has to say, what kind of conversation it might have with the target demographic. What emotions it would convey.

This is more sophisticated stuff.

When all of that has been decided upon, which of course can sometimes take a year, because of how incredibly clever and sophisticated it is, then it is time to unleash the modern advertising creative.

This sophisticated creature has a computer.

They know what a facebook is.

They have an amazing website called YouTube saved into their bookmarks.

They tweet, and they interact, which is a bit like talking, but without the boring old talking bit.

They watch a lot of new and clever techniques on their computers. Very clever things, animations and film techniques, photographic trickery.

They really do have their fingers on the pulse of what is new and sophisticated, and of course, clever.

So what happens next is that the sophisticated message that the planning people have worked out based on the sociological findings, trend-watching, and the brand onion, is made into a piece of communication by the advertising creatives using one of the clever techniques they have decided is appropriate.

The correct use of the latest technique can sometimes win the modern advertising creative a modern advertising award (these are very sought after).

Then, with almost absolute certainty, as a result of using the correct application of brand engineering, planning, social insight, the relevant emotional pulls and cues, and sophisticated creative communication techniques, the target demographic, enthralled by the conversation it is having with the brand, nips into tesco and buys the product.

Modern advertising is a highly evolved, highly sophisticated communication business.

Or is it?

Modern marketing and advertising professionals believe that the business has evolved into a much more sophisticated, more thought through, more professional and smarter business than it was say in the 1960s.

But how is it then that 99% of all advertising put in front of us is pretty much absolute shit?

Why do messages fall flat?

Why do they fail to connect with the man-on-the-street?

Why do people find advertising more annoying and less helpful than ever before?

Why does the advertising turn out to be so complicated that it is generally indecipherable, even if someone wanted to decipherable it.
Why, if advertising is so damn clever, is no one any the wiser as to whether a piece of advertising is actually going to work or not?

Why is a company that I know for a fact makes excellent, well engineered, well designed automobiles droning on at me about joy?

Why is a confectionary company trying to promise the very same thing, when all I really want from them is some delicious chocolate made from not-too-bad ingredients?

Why, if advertising is now so damn clever, is the stuff produced by modern ad agencies so consistently, terribly bad?

Could it be that advertising, in trying to become cleverer and cleverer, has actually completely forgotten what it is doing? That it has disappeared so far up its own sophisticated posterior that it can't even tell, as it gets even more and more complicated? That all of the systems, theories and approaches developed to make it more sophisticated, are actually the very things that are making it much less smart?

Will the modern, sophisticated version of advertising ever be a match for the simple discipline of smart, talented people in a room coming up with smart ideas to sell products?

The modern advertising business is locked in an irreversible cycle of nonsense.
It's actually incredibly stupid compared to the business fifty years ago.
But it will never realise it.