"We're in the primordial soup," said Alan Wurtzel, president-research and media development at NBC Universal.
Despite all the evidence pointing to advertising failure there are still many people within the industry that want to maintain the status quo . Broadcast networks want to maintain their position as mass-audience delivery vehicles, especially since "scatter" ad pricing is weak and their traditional TV ratings continue to show signs of erosion. As of Oct. 15, the four biggest broadcast networks showed declines in live and same-day audiences between the ages of 18 and 49.
The real problem is a total lack of understanding as to what communication really is plus the fact that the entire marketing community is still confounded by ROI and accountability. We are all searching for answers and coming up with solutions. The answer has been available to them for years...the sad fact is that they have chosen to ignore it whilst they pursued creativity. You cannot then expect the consciousness that created the problem to then solve it!
The failing agency relationships.
Leapfrogging agencies to work directly with media companies is, it seems, an appealing prospect for some of America's mightiest marketers.
Nor is that the only option that appeals to the nation's chief marketing officers, in session last weekend at the Association of National Advertisers' annual conference. Some participants revealed that they seek to fix an agency model they see as broken. "What's lacking in agency relationships now is speed to market”.
"I don't think any of these [agency] relationships are satisfactory enough that we would continue them without having some degree of experimentation”.
"We've been experimenting with different agency relationships where we're looking at agency partners and vendors in ways that connect them loosely with each other. We're looking at models where we have everything with one of our key partners. More and more the agencies are almost in the way sometimes. Additionally there are still doubts that [on line is] as effective at telling a story as TV or has the reach.
The key is what viewers do once they see a marketer's ads. "Anyone can add up every time a screen is on and do a little head count of how many people are around, but that doesn't constitute a viewer, and it certainly doesn't constitute a viewer who can then be measured to see if their viewing behavior correlates to sales,".
One idea that could save the day is measuring viewer behavior over a long period of time. By monitoring viewers with hand-held devices that track their consumption of content, buyers and sellers might have a more reliable picture of how and when ad messages make an impression. However it's rarely very easy or accurate! Within some agencies the feeling is that Clients need to back off their "quantify everything" mantra and accept that intuition and gut feeling are a form of measurement, too.
Agencies are arguing that what they really need to do is to reach a better understanding about what is and isn't measurable? And why the hard-to-measure things are still very important even though they are, well, hard to measure?
Talentless Advertising
The advertising management’s silence over the constantly emerging evidence that advertising does not work speaks far too loudly.
Glaciers are melting more speedily than the ability of advertising to become accountable. What is surprising is that a global commercial organization such as advertising can operate like this.
Advertising agencies act as if it has no need to answer to their Clients! Advertising Management has been tested and found wanting. What all this is showing is that the Senior Management, those at the top of the Agencies, are not working. There is a communications and management failure within advertising agencies.
Everyone is saying it (or, to be more accurate, whining about it). The advertising business is in a state of upheaval. Everyone is blaming it on technology and the rapid rate of change it is causing. Hello -- it isn’t the technology, folks. The technological change is simply making it easier to diagnose the real challenge. The one that has been around since the dawn of our industry but that, thankfully, we've been able to side step.
The decline of moral responsibility has damaged the advertising and marketing industry, it is the real flaw behind the advertising crisis. There has to be a complete change of thinking and regulation of the world’s marketing industry. Certainly Clients cannot risk again the degree of unaccountability as have be practiced up to now. Advertising agencies need to change their behavior, they need to re-establish relations with their Clients and gain a better understanding of the communication process.
In the past British advertising was based on protecting and looking after the client’s interests as well as their own. Advertising agencies should not be ashamed to return to these principals.
I am amazed at the spinelessness of British advertising people in defending the lack of accountability, the gross commercial clutter. They appear as parties to a conspiracy to fleece monies from marketing budgets under the futile guise of creativity.
There have been few outspoken admen, those that do speak out as to the inefficiencies of advertising are mocked and reviled never receiving a satisfactory response to their, valid, criticisms.
Consumers are complex. And more important, persuading said consumers to do things is really complicated stuff. You actually have to study things like psychology, neuroscience, discrete choice and more. You have to do something other than just create and run ad campaigns for a living if you want clients to trust and value you. You have to study human nature and humans. And to make it all really fun, the humans refuse to co-operate.
In my book “Television killed advertising” to be released in November 2008, I detail just how much more effective Interactive communication is when compared to conventional advertising and details the results of a research investment in excess of £5 m.
Having invested over $10 million in independent research, Paul Ashby is ideally suited to present the case for the widespread use of interactive marketing communication. The research investment has proved conclusively that one exposure to an interactive "event" is far more effective in all key measurements, than traditional advertising. Paul made this investment because his company, Effective . Accountable . Communication is predicated on being totally accountable to its Clients. You can contact Paul at: paul.ashby@yahoo.com
Discover more on http://interactivetelevisionorinteractivetv.blogspot.com
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