Finally Marketing & Advertising have mastered the Moonwalk
...slipping backward, but maintaining the illusion of progress. The other

day I was talking to two advertising people and asked them "Do you think that

advertising and marketing have to change?" Both professions had their

absolute heyday in the 1950s/1960s and both have spent the past 20 years or so

trying to recapture that glory. Both businesses have spent Clients money like

quadrillionaires and have led Clients together with TV, Newspapers and

Magazines down a road of financial lunacy by thoroughly misleading us all,

after all isn't "Advertising Works" a totally misleading statement?

Ultimately the two advertising people agreed, advertising & marketing has to

change, however, and, rather surprisingly, this change has nothing to do with

new media but to do with the desperate need for accountability and ROI,

together with the desperate need to understand the word communication!

The 60s!Ah that was a glittering time, advertising people ruled the business

world...nobody was being at all difficult about their profession, nobody was

questioning the fact that advertising works, or does not as the case may be.

There was a sense that Advertising men were men of action together with the

fact the men were brilliant. The problem was that these men of action wanted

to act, but certainly they did not want to tell the Client that the advertising

job could not be done. Men of action want to act. They are paid very

generously to act, they have entered advertising to act. But they couldn't tell

anyone how difficult things were, that advertising was not as simple as it

appeared. So doubts were, and still are, excluded, and the facts were altered to

suit the theory. Advertising men don't just become prisoners of their

Clients. They also become prisoners of their errors. Advertising and Marketing

people never questioned the fact that advertising and marketing never worked

they just chased the illusion that creativity was the answer to all their problems

and just followed one expensive creative person with another as logic took

over from common sense. Make the buying of media more important.

Enhancing the theory that advertising works requires staggering amounts of

research with staggering amounts of money, the life of the current advertising

world suggests that that is easier wished for than achieved.

Because of the failure of advertising to understand the process of

communication they have damaged a totally good "old media" whilst, at the

same time, rushing onto the Internet not understanding

at all that the Internet is most certainly not an advertising medium at all!