Are we at all surprised that the current advertising crisis has come this far?

Let's be honest: the warning voices have been around for a long time, the fact

that these warnings were consistently ignored has now brought about the near

collapse of the system.

We live in a schizophrenic world and we will be held

accountable for our sins.The reasons why the writing on the wall was ignored

has to do with the denying of inconvenient truths and also because nobody really

felt responsible or capable of action.The advertising/marketing bodies

either lacked the authority or the competency to deal with the challenges of a

global advertising system that has gone horribly wrong!

Furthermore, individual advertising agencies have not shown the initiative to address a

fundamentally flawed and restrictive process of communication together with a

total lack of accountability. Additionally none of the advertising agencies

and the media have shown any evidence of long term vision. Additionally the

regulatory functions, such as they are have been abused by many within the

industry, consciously or unconsciously to the great detriment of Clients and

their Customers. The professional role of Marketing and Advertising

Management has been undermined by the total lack of true accountability and

other problems that link this management to the short-term interests of the

advertising agencies themselves.

Maximum profit seeking has increasingly taken precedence over long-term accountability

together with a complete misunderstanding, and implementation, of the communications process!

Markets work best when consumers are well informed about the products they are

purchasing and companies are genuinely incentivised to compete for new business

on the basis of transparent products that perform in the marketplace. Sadly,

this hasn't been the case with the current Marketing and Advertising available

because of a number of factors, clutter, lack of interaction, no accountability,

no exchange of information etc etc. Radical reforms are needed to build an

accountable commercial commercial programme with consumers interests at its very

heart. The bubbles that always exist in every market. One of the most

famous bubbles in the advertising world is the Saatchi & Saatchi bubble

which nearly convinced every one that they, and they alone, were responsible for

the election win of Margaret Thatcher, they were not. Nevertheless they had

Clients flocking to them in the quite mistaken belief that they, the Saatchi

brothers, could increase their sales. Now, along comes another bubble, The

Martin Lindstrom bubble. Lindstrom is the so called guru of Neuro-marketing

which makes the whole process of selling sound so simple. Utter rubbish yet

more Clients will be persuaded to part with millions of dollars before they too

will see this as nothing but another bubble. His very existence proves yet

again that our current methods of marketing are inaccurate and very very

questionable. The article on Lindstrom is headlined "Now the buyer must

beware". The sad fact is that "the buyer" has always been aware, they are

turning away from the clutter, and meaningless chatter of current advertising in

their millions, a very similar bubble occurred a few years ago, this particular

bubble was called "subliminal advertising" and was a complete farce and hoax!

Neuro-marketing is an even bigger bubble and hoax.