The Decline & Fall Of The Advertising Empire

JIM: I have spent the Lion’s share of my adult life in the business of advertising. When I started in 1971, I was part of the third generation of modern day creative people. My mentors were the people who were taught the trade by the likes of David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach and Leo Burnett.

These were people who believed that solid sales messages presented in a creative and sometimes even unexpected way was the key to getting people’s attention. They spent a lot of time teaching their people the rudiments of this art/science hybrid. And they taught their people well, so by the time the lessons got to me and all the other folks of my generation, it was all pretty well developed and the accepted creative standard.

Advertising, for us, back then was a game. The game was simple. Be intriguing. Be unexpected. Be honest in your promise to the consumer and make them appreciate, not your effort, but the product or service that you had gone to all the trouble to craft advertising to sell them.

Granted, it was a much simpler time, There were only a few media, (radio, TV, print, and direct mail).The art came from creating messages that were easily adaptable from one to the other, so each medium would be a benefit to the other. It was called cumulative build.

And the cornerstone of it all was the brand. The advertising talked about what the brand offered and also what it stood for. It was formulized, but within the formula there was a lot of room for innovative thinking.

And it all worked really well until the advent of the Internet, and digital marketing. Then it’s slowly but surely all went to hell in a handcart. Because the metrics in digital marketing were all based on the number of potential impressions and not the merits of the brand or anything to do with depth of sale.

Sadly, this trend continued to grow, like weeds in a poorly tended garden, and today’s advertising, with relatively few exceptions, is all nothing more than show and tell and hopeful media placement.

On top of it all, a huge scandal has grown out of this trend toward online advertising which a guy named Bob Hoffman has been chronicling and lecturing on for years. In his opinion digital marketers are fleecing advertisers to the tune of billions of dollars that are being spent on ads that literally reach no one.

So my question to you is, do you think there is any hope for advertising going forward from the sad sorry state it finds itself in today?

PHIL: James, me boy, if you are talking about traditional print advertising channels (i.e., newspapers and magazines), the short answer is there isn’t any hope at all.  That’s primarily because print media are dead, or at least, are dead men walking.

Television and radio seem to be hanging on, but even they are changing rapidly. For instance, I and most of my acquaintances and friends are, these days, listening to curated music on digital channels, which usually offer a paid option to eliminate the ads. And we’re streaming video content under no-advertising options. In sum, the digital revolution in communications has, I think, rocked the world of traditional advertising — or perhaps more accurately, delivered the coup de gras. This past decade or so has seen, I submit, a growing dominance of digital marketing in general and social media marketing in particular, where “earned organic reach” competes pretty much on level footing with paid advertising.

You know, with all due respect paid to your advertising idol, Bob Hoffman — who is spot on with respect to the scam(s) run (primarily) by social media platforms with their misrepresentations of what constitutes a “view” — let’s not lionize the accomplishments of the “Great Age of Madison 
Avenue”. Granted, there was some iconic branding done. And yes, some great (for their novelty and originality) campaigns run. But really …?

Much of the grunting and grappling was essentially about protecting market share in areas like toothpaste sales. Oh sure, the advertising greats gave us the Michelin Man, the Pillsbury Dough Boy, Farfel the Nestle’s Quick dog, and Speedy the singing Alka-Seltzer tablet. But I, for one, do not grieve over the passing of that kind of “creativity”.

JIM: What we have here is the archetypal inside/outside view. I suppose it all comes down to what the average consumer in any given target group becomes conditioned to.

Right now, with a lot of direct and indirect history to guide me. I believe that the average consumer is in the process of being dumbed down. Not intentionally, mind you, but simply because the advertising that is created through these ‘new’ digital media tends to lack any real respect for the intelligence of the consumer. There is no intrigue because there is no attempt at it on the part of too many advertisers. As a consequence, there is no appreciation for it by too many consumers.

It’s all become a sad sorry game of show and tell. Buy this because I’m showing it to you more frequently and in more places than some other brand that’s telling you exactly the same damn thing.

When I was a young warthog back in the Neanderthal era of great creative advertising, there was a kind of code that we adhered to. The code was never to lie to the customer. But also dig around and find the feature or set of features or type of process that made your stuff better than your competitors. There was a little bit of education that these insights departed and we liked to feel that it made the consumers smarter and better equipped to make a good purchasing decision.

What I see now bears no resemblance to any of that. It’s all expository. Nothing that appeals to the consumer’s curiosity or real feelings about what they want.

Oh sure. There are always going to be little pockets of real advertising. Mostly from the smarter advertisers who understand that while the media may have changed the modus operandi of the consumer has stayed pretty much the same. They are looking for reasons to believe and accept as much as they are looking for reasons to reject.

The trouble is with so much unappealing bullshit out there, the consumer, for the most part, doesn’t really know what to think. And this has been the biggest boon for the well-established brands, simply because the consumer knows that they stand for.

You sell boats. But I would venture a guess that you sell off a combination of elements. Not just features and benefits. Because without a solid brand character which is primarily based on your successes, and your depth of knowledge and ability to understand your customer and what he or she is really looking for, the picture would be quite incomplete.

PHIL: Ya gotta be kidding, Jimbob! You traditional advertising types — let’s dub the class “traditional” since I can otherwise only summon up pejoratives — scrupulously avoided lying?  By whose standards? In those glory days, how many newspaper advertising copywriters would herald “This weekend’s BIG SALE with up to 80% OFF”… which meant that the retailer in question would have one item out of 300 at 80% off with the other 299 sales items discounted 10% or 20%.

Never mind inside view or outside view, the business of copywriting was to mislead, obfuscate, and shade the truth, although I grant you the explicit directive was to not outright lie. It’s not accident that, in those days, the mark of a “good salesman” (and that of a good copywriter) was to be able to sell bull chips in a plain brown paper bag. That’s how the agencies who sold toothpaste rolled because, after all, you could, in fact, brush your teeth with table salt to better effect than the mountains of Crest and Colgate purchased by brand-addicted consumers.

BTW, for the record, I don’t sell boats or yachts. Never have and now likely never will. As a marine marketer, I have ought to sell bridges to perceived and dreamt of lifestyles. And as a brand-builder, I’ve worked to build credibility for my clients and myself by delivering clear, accurate, and authoritative content in the defined sector.

In my experience, knowing too much makes one a bad salesman because only the lowliest vermin among us will intentionally lie or misrepresent. The rest of us only misrepresent when we don’t know any better. Which is why I‘ve always believed that the most effective salesmen (and ad copywriters) are those who actually believe their own blarney. To paraphrase a great figure of an advertising era gone by, Marshall McLuhan, today the medium has changed, but the message remains the same.

JIM: Maybe everything you have just said points out the cultural difference between Canada and the US. I worked in the agency business in Canada  for 20 years and then on my own for another 25, and never once in all that time felt any pressure to resort to the kind of hucksterism that you allude to. Maybe it was just the agencies and the people I was lucky enough to work with and for who managed to hold onto what little dignity the business had left after the real charlatans started getting called out.

In point of fact, it was very much part of the game for us to see how honest and forthright we could be and still house it in a creative proposition. And since I knew almost everyone in the industry (at least in Toronto) at the time I was in it, I believe majority of them shared that sensibility.

You can’t judge a whole flock by the minority of black sheep hucksters. But sadly that’s what happened to the advertising business, mostly during the 90s, when, not coincidentally, I started to feel uncomfortable about it, and decided that I could do better on my own to try and keep my clients honest.

I can’t disagree with what you said, but I can point out that I believe it really was a case of the tail wagging the dog.

The real death knell had little or nothing to do with the state of advertising affairs, so much as it did the cannibalization effect that online media had on the more traditional forms.

These are the real charlatans, who promised massive audience exposure and under-delivered to the point of fraud. And the weird thing is that they are still doing it.

There’s an old adage in my former business. ‘Every client gets the advertising they deserve.’ If the client is a con artist, the advertising they do will eventually reflect that. If the client is honest and making a good product, the advertising will reflect that too.

Just remember, no matter who created the advertising, there was someone else to created the strategies and someone else to approve it. The creative people were, by and large, stuck in the middle. And in a lot of cases their jobs depended on doing what they were told.

All I can really go by was my own experience, and I was fortunate enough to have good people either side of me. Many were not so lucky.

Well that’s it for this episode. Phil and I will try and pull together one of these a month or more often if the world starts going to hell in any significant way.