Tuesday 25 September 2012

The financial crisis has transformed the global marketing world...

and, at the same time, discredited many of the ideas regarding advertising, marketing, consumers and society, that were taken for granted in the pre-crisis decades. Here nobody appears to see the crisis as an opportunity to build a new form of capitalism. Nobody seems to see that the future can be – and most certainly should be – better than the past.

Without a doubt the institutions discredited by the crisis can be replaced with something better, not merely patched up and restored. Corporations see the crisis entirely as a threat to established ways of life and modes of thinking. Nobody is presenting a vision, or even a credible thought, about how the crisis could produce a better tomorrow. The best that has been offered is a promise to clear up the mess created by previous corporations

. Without a doubt the new forms of advertising and marketing that must emerge from the crisis must be very different from the systems that were so badly damaged in the early 1980. The transformation will not just be a matter of rewriting some rules or replacing some incompetent people. It will mean changing the relationship between markets and consumers that has defined each successive version of marketing.

It is time to engage with citizens' anxieties about the profound problems of pre-crisis marketing and advertising suddenly revealed in 2008, the creation of an over informed society, clutter, lack of accountability, the Internet, Social Media and so on. Like all those packaged-up bundles of bad debt, contemporary advertising has no fundamental value. It was misplaced faith in future economic growth that drove up the values of 30-second TV commercials!

The Clients spent so much money on advertising because they believed that they were living in the best of times and that it was all just a one way street - upwards! We all now know all this wasn't true. In the years to come this advertising will be seen as the ultimate symbol of the economic fairyland we have been living through in the past fifteen years or so, an era in which the world lost touch with its sense of value. These were not masterpieces of advertising, they were the icons of idiocy.

By thinking seriously about such fundamental reforms, business leaders can engage with their customers' anxieties about the profound problems of pre-crisis marketing. The crisis has blown away the simplistic belief that the markets automatically produces the best possible outcomes and that we must always accept whatever social consequences market forces dictate.

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. Discover more on http://interactivetelevisionorinteractivetv.blogspot.com or http://effectiveaccountablecommunication.blogspot.com You can contact Paul on: paulashby40@yahoo.com


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