A record $27.5 billion in ad agency accounts went into play in 2007, as clients elbowed one another to get chairs closer to the railing on the Titanic.
Those are some expensive chairs. Half of the total amount spent the year prior was up for grabs. The numbers, compiled by Adweek, cover accounts worth more than $20 million. You can imagine similar turmoil in smaller accounts. Or perhaps more.
Are clients looking for fresh ideas? New ways to engage with consumers? Interactive tools to propagate branding via distributed technology devices? Digital brilliance? Branded entertainment content, cool software tools, and inventive metrics for ROI?
Nope. They’re looking for customers. And to sell things to them.
That’s why all this chair rearranging feels less like a game that nobody can win. There are different people sitting in different chairs. Everything moving into different positions. Maybe a few new chairs added to the arrangement.
But the ship is still sinking.
It’s interesting that the five most active categories of industries swapping ad agencies are each racing headlong to become commodities: computers/software, telecommunications, packaged goods, automotive, and retail. It seems the more they try to differentiate themselves through the magic of brand marketing, the more they appear the same.
Yet that’s exactly what the $27.5 billion was spent on last year, and why the amount could well be surpassed this year, as more clients get more frustrated by the lack of any business results for their branding efforts.
I know that old habits are hard to break, but you’d think someone would start questioning the very premise of allocating such vast sums of money to a process that you could say sort of looks like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Consumer disinterest in the traditional approaches of marketing is not a problem that ad agencies can fix.
Technology, experience, economics, and a host of other factors have changed every aspect of how consumers learn about, choose, use, and repurchase products and services.
Advertising, or any marketing function…and any old or new media through which it’s delivered…doesn’t influence, and certainly doesn’t control, many of the ways consumers interact with businesses.
Brand matters far less than operations, customer service, product sourcing, manufacturing integrity, human resources and return policies, not to mention all of the third-party conversations, ratings, and inquiries swirling through the blogosphere.
It’s these functions and activities that drive sales.
So agencies can ‘experiment’ as much as they want, but they’re just busy finding new ways to spend money on an old approach to influence consumers. And busy spending client money.
What would be truly experimental would be for clients to take some percentage of the billions they waste on brand marketing, and give it to the rest of the organization, with the challenge of finding ways to influence sales. Don’t call it branding.
Call it good business. Relevant business.
Instead of rearranging the chairs, maybe the rest of the organization could help come up with a design for a new boat.
Original Post: http://dimbulb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/01/rearranging-the.html