Miami Ad Schools: Agency Tours (Part 2)
Continuing the theme of the last post, we spent the week after graduation (March 24th-27th) visiting agencies all over NYC. As I listened to various senior level Planners talk about their company philosophies/cultures, their work, their approach to planning, etc., I began to notice some major themes:
1) The shift from AUDIENCE —> PARTICIPANTS. Agencies are starting to realize that they need to get people INVOLVED if they want them to buy into the brands they are building.
2) The shift from DIALOGUE —> MONOLOGUE. Agencies have come to understand that the days of shouting at people has passed; we need to encourage a conversation.
3) The shift away from TV spots as the central hub of communication. R/GA said that, “The digital periphery is now the core.” I don’t completely agree with this, but I do think that the days of building every communications campaign around a :30 second spot are over.
In my opinion, the future of advertising doesn’t have a centralized soapbox to promote your product/service. Instead, we’ll have a series of super-targeted communications spread out amongst various channels to build a “brand story” that will engage consumers.
4) The shift from Advertising solutions —> creative Business solutions. When I used to work in the lending business, Mortgage Brokers would rarely tell their customers they could get a better deal from their local bank. Direct lenders, on the other hand, would rarely recommend a Mortgage Broker. Why? Because each side was trying to preserve their own self-interests instead of focusing on what was best for the customer.
It’s the same thing with Advertising: if you go to an Ad agency with a problem – surprise! surprise! – an Ad campaign will be the solution 10 times out of 10.
While some companies have begun to make this transition, others, like Naked, have built their business on this media-neutral method of prescribing business solutions.
5) The shift from logical/rational decision-making to emotionally-based choices. I’ve been noticing more and more Planners talk about the importance of understanding peoples’ emotions and behavioral economics, suggesting books like Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational” as Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “The Black Swan“.
When I worked in sales, I learned that “selling is the transference of emotion.” The same is true in the Advertising world. If you want to get people to act a certain way, you’re not going to get very far by trying to logic them to death. You just can’t underestimate the power of influencing people through emotion to guide their actions.
To anyone who’s been reading the Advertising/Marketing/Planning blogs, none of these themes are new news. If you’re new to these concepts, however, it’s important to familiarize yourself with them because this is the future of the business. Not only that, you should know WHY the industry is going through these shifts, since “past is prologue.”
