A Brief History on Modern Advertising. And if You Think Mass Advertising Builds Brands, Think Again

by on 11 November, 2008 - 11:53

by: Idris Mootee

Advertising is not going away, but it has very different strategies and tactics, traditional  "push/pull" marketing no longer works, and so are highly-touted customer relationship initiatives. Smart companies are those that are looking for marketing innovation as a new route to marketing performance. Many adv planners are using their antique toolkit that has long been outdated. Unlike advertising in the 70s, they attracted the best and brightest. Today they were the people who just want to hang on to the past. Marketing has moved on.

So how do marketers make interactive communications even more compelling than traditional communications? Today, if brands want to speak to lots of people, they have to do it digitally. It is 'speaking to' and not 'speaking at'. Speaking at people is what old media do. Social media allow brand owners to have dialogues with their customers, and allow them to speak to individuals and groups. It also means that brand owners and advertisers have less control over their audiences, and that the audiences can answer back. Today, three things matter: entertainment, interactions and information. This is where interactive marketing has the advantages.

Let me share with you here a brief history of modern advertising. Since the emergence of modern advertising in the 1920s, and the shift from text-based ad to visual adv followed by the use of psychologically sophisticated messages created a very powerful cultural resonance for ads among consumers. Madison Avenue represented the new and the modern (Madison Avenue was since replaced by social networks and social media), and ads helped consumers figure out what was needed to live certain lifestyle. Consumers were eager to embrace the cultural authority of Madison Avenue and the client brands. But by the late 1950s, they were feeling differently. Along with affluence and increased security came the critique of corporate conformity in the workplace. The contradictions of 1950s culture were beginning to emerge, and one of them was the inordinate influence advertising and sales appeared to have in our culture. .

The influential work by the Frankfort School, with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, whose classic 1944 piece “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” started the core of this intellectual movement for consumer critique decades ago. The imperatives of the production side were central, and in both consumers were relatively powerless, even “manipulated” and victimized by advertisers.  In these accounts, the powerful and active agents were corporations, not individuals. Today, we can see this changing as the over supply of everything and the growing influences of social networks. Finally the power is switching over.

The "de-legitimation" of modern liberalism, paternalist state policy and Keynesian economics combined to continue to undercut the consumer critics. The growth of corporate power was accompanied by an ideology that posited the reverse—it’s the consumer who is king and the corporation is at his or her mercy. Even though we are all trained from the earliest ages to be consumers and our identities are deeply bound up with consumption choices although social networks are gradually taking over as a reflector of our identities. This is the world we are living in. A TV campaign can only go so far to build a brand, in fact it doesn't build brands, it merely build awareness. Social media is where brand engagement is being cultivated and interactions are taking place. The power is shifting from mass medium to social interactions. In 3-5 years, I expect the whole ad industry will be in crisis mode just like the automobile industry today.

Michael Mendenhall, CMO of Hewlett-Packard, sees what's going on. He talks about how his organization looks at brand building, "Many companies continue to look at marketing in conventional ways -- from a mass-market point of view. Branding today is not about the media; it's about the idea. You need to dismiss the conventional way of thinking and start with an understanding of the value of each communication channel and how -- or whether -- it will 'engage' people. The idea should be the organizing principle, and it should inform everything you do to help consumers grasp your brand promise in whatever channel you're reaching them: the television, the blogs, the banner ads or the word of mouth." 

Original Post: http://mootee.typepad.com/innovation_playground/2008/11/a-quick-history-on-modern-advertising-if-you-thin-mass-advertising-build-brands-think-again.html