The advertising industry at a dead end. Greg Stene, Ph.D. Mass Communication Idaho State University Pocatello, ID 83209 208.282.4539 [This is the Forward only. I'm seeking a publisher for the whole book.
NOTE: The basic book was developed in 1996. Aside from a worn, but still interesting concept called positioning, advertising really had no central theme guiding an overall understanding of it. I developed a concept I called Identity Theory. Today, some of the positions I outlined then in Identity, are what people seem to be talking about when they mention brand advertising (I say "seem to be" because the notion of brand seems to change with each person you talk to). I remain convinced, however, that branding ultimately fails because it is not consumer centric, which is the central theme of Identity Theory.] getting ... Forward There's a war going on in the advertising industry. The suits against the creatives. It's a war that's been going on for years. But the suits seem to have launched a quiet offensive over the recent years. The suits, the account executives, agency owners, marketing directors ... even clients ... over the years, they've been trying to move the business and social understanding of advertising into something of a science. And the suits are winning, folks. Which means that the creatives (the copywriters and art directors) are increasingly being controlled by what the research numbers say. We're moving away from the act of communicating in advertising, to making advertising that meets marketing goals. And we're all going to have to put up with a lot more bad advertising assaulting all of us because of it. A lot of the advertising coming at you these days is run-of-the-mill. Stuff you want to run from. If you were teaching it, you'd discover that the introduction text books generally have little to say about the creative endeavor, or the fact that advertising is a process of communication. Instead, they fill the students' minds with visions of market segmentation; recall, recognition, and attitude testing; and the typical marketer's diarrhetic output of charts and graphs which turn human behavior into nothing more than a mechanical plug-n-play system, with not a thought about what's going on inside the buyer's head. Concepts and the creative people who bring them to life are increasingly assaulted and marginalized with testing techniques that even the suits acknowledge are questionable. Clients demand accountability for the dollars they're spending, and in the process of trying to be accountable, agencies are paying more attention to the numbers (47% of the people like the ad, plus or minus 4% ... just what the hell does that really mean?) than they are to the people they're trying to communicate with. You. And me. But we're people. Not numbers. And we don't fit into graphs and charts and the suits in the agencies and the clients who hire them have forgotten that truth. The war has spread. It's not just between the suits and the creatives in the agency. The damage has spilled out into our society, and each one of us is involved in the advertising coming out of that war. It touches us with the advertising we see when we turn on the TV, open a magazine, or try to hide in the Internet. We're all combatants. I know communication theory. I worked hard for that Ph.D. in communications that I've got. And I deal in theory that appeals to common sense and leans hard on experience. Doesn't seem to be much of that out there. This is not rocket science. Too bad. Because rocket science is a piece of cake compared to understanding the human mind. And doing meaningful advertising. Advertising, in terms of communication, is not a science that can be reduced to numbers. Take a look at how it plays out in common-sense terms. Meaningful advertising and flying both developed around the same time at the turn of the 20th century. Since those first crazed, fitful hops at Kitty Hawk, we've tossed men and women into space, landed on the moon, successfully lost a space research vehicle just as it was about to probe the glories of Mars, landed another successfully, and we have at least two vehicles pushing their way to the edges of our galaxy.(1) Now, in contrast and over the same time period, what have we done in advertising that's so damned scientific? Well, we have yet to figure out what motivates a kid to buy a stick of gum. We have yet to figure out the assumed science behind the creativity of an ad. We have yet to figure out why an ad apparently affects someone the day after it has apparently not affected him or her. And we're still not sure what an "effect" really is. Finally, in this listing of the reasons why some people who study advertising mistakenly believe that the field is a science (these creatures being mostly marketing professionals and scholars whose livelihood depends on shoving numbers at you, because if you're a marketer and can provide your client with numbers, you can "prove" effects; and if you're a scholar and you can call it a science because you've got numbers, you can get research grants), I suggest we take a look at the failure of businesses in this country. A high percentage of new businesses fail.(2) Let's think about this for a second. If both business and advertising work scientifically, and if the research has any sort of meaning at all ... it would seem logical that all a new company would have to do is apply certain "scientifically proven-effective" business and advertising principles and it would survive. Even if you've got some greed-head cooking the books, or some idiot who can't keep them. But a large number of new businesses do go down the toilet. Sucked deep down with that nasty wad of toilet paper. And we can't blame the failures strictly on the part of elements outside of advertising ... say, bad management. Consider how many new products introduced by the major companies like Procter and Gamble(3), who probably have every advertising research data-bit at hand in some computer ... consider how many of these new-product introductions by companies with scientific management expertise at hand fail. There is no advertising science of any predictable kind going on here. Anyone who says so is just plain horribly mistaken. Or worse. Sometimes, it will be good to look at the common sense behind an advertising concept. To see what works and what doesn't. Those times will be titled: ------------------------------
A Question of Common Sense #1: Intel and Dancing Bears INTRO: Intel's(*) 1997 crop of TV spots selling the power of its technology kind of reminded me of that old sideshow/circus attraction ... dancing bears. With the Intel spots, we had spaced-age engineers and technicians dressed in androgynous and anonymous uniforms and head coverings reflecting some pretty-colored lights. Dancing. To some seriously funky music. PERSONAL COMMENT: The first spot in the series had a great tune. Wild Cherry's, "Play that Funky Music, White Boy." But you won't hear that "white boy" part of the tune in the TV spot. None too P.C., I suppose. It's a tune done back in the days of disco madness, where the funk was what mattered and no one slapped a lawsuit against anyone for using the term "white boy" in some music lyrics. There is no racism in that song. Back then, no one seemed to have too much of a problem with this. What the hell's happened to our society that we've got to re-write a disco tune out of P.C. madness, for god's sake? THE CRITIQUE: Do dancing, neatly lighted engineers in plastic suits have anything to do (positively or negatively) with the quality of a PC chip? A while before these ads were aired, Intel was brought up on the public carpet for producing it's new Pentium chip with results which admittedly were not perfect. Ah ... mistake comes up once in a blue moon, paraphrasing Intel. Not a real problem for the average user (and the problem did in fact, appear to be way beyond the concerns of the average user). But then IBM locked into this and said it actually happened in use a lot more frequently. The sniping and bad attitudes between the heavies continued for a while ... meanwhile, the customers who'd bought the chips with the error problem asked about replacement chips ... Intel stonewalled for a significant length of time, then finally caved in (apparently) to some seriously nasty public relations problems and began replacing the chips for the general user. Then in May, 1997, there was word about the new Pentium II chip ... that it had a once-in-a-blue-moon flaw. And shortly after, we have dancing engineers making MMX Pentium chips. Selling fun. Not reliability. Or trust. Go figure. They sold well, though. Americans, as someone wryly observed, are a people without a history. What happened in the past doesn't matter a whole lot to us. And, it would seem we have little choice in the matter. Intel's got a monopoly on the chip market, anyway. Right? Well, it seems there are alternatives. One, for example, is the AMD K6 chip series (***). With competition, it'll be interesting to see how long the fun part of computing remains Intel's mainstay in its advertising. I have nothing against Intel. It's just that as I looked at dancing engineers on my TV screen across the room ... I could only think of dancing circus bears ... and remember the horrorshow in quality concerns a few years ago when the Pentium first came out. If Intel had remembered its own history and let it guide them, these TV spots might not have seen the light of disco madness dancing on their lab uniforms. LATE DECEMBER, 1997 Ah, you've got to love the marketing whizzos and the American public. It seems, according to the newscast I saw this on, that the American public's response to the multicolored dancing Intel chip makers was so great, that someone has now come out with a doll of them. Go figure. JUNE, 1998 Four days before launching its new Pentium II Xeon chip, Intel announced that the chip had "errata" under a particular configuration. Simple terms ... under certain conditions, the chip would do something naughty. Intel is not, at this time, saying what that something is.(4) PC Week Online said it was a matter of the machine spontaneously rebooting.(5) It does not appear that the problem is causing anyone any real problems, and Intel says it will have a fix in place soon. MAY, 2000 Nothing drastic happening at this point in time, other than the fact that AMD has continued to grow and become a major competitor of Intel, and they actually beat Intel by a few days at the public showing of the first 1 gig chip. Now, if only Intel would bring back those dancing clean-room technicians, I'm sure AMD would just fall way back in the competitive environment. LATE SUMMER, 2000 Intel has the not-so-unique honor of having to recall its new Pentium III 1.13 gigahertz chip for a technical problem which could crash some computing operations.
------------------------------------------- * All noted Intel, Pentium and MMX are understood to be registered TMs. ** All noted Cyrix is understood to be registered TMs. *** All noted AMD is understood to be registered TMs. ------------------------------------------
Now, some people are going to try to define advertising as a paid form of sending a message, like buying space in a newspaper. You see that kind of definition in almost every text book on the subject.(9) That's idiotic. It's not enough. What your friend has done to your mind with his shoes has sold you more on Nike than any paid TV spot ever will. But that's just a look at what happens in the real world ... the ever-presence of advertising. I use that fact as justification for one of the calls issued by this book ... if we have to live with advertising everywhere around us ... some people claim we're exposed to 400 ads per day .... we ought to start demanding that it be great work. This book calls for both the client and the agency to invest more in intelligence, creativity and common sense in producing quality work. The words in this book get brutal at times, but not nearly as brutal as the lack of respect for us consumers and the outright insult that bad advertising really is. So while this book does propose a more reasoned way of looking at the theory behind advertising and how it may become more effective, the final goal of these pages you hold is to make a call for a better advertising environment. Like the air we breathe, advertising is everywhere around us. And like the air we breathe, when it is bad, advertising can foul our moods ... make us sick to death of what we have to take into our bodies. And I firmly believe that the insult of bad advertising can make us sick from a nameless anger growing in us, directed at the suits who demand advertising by the numbers, or the creatives who are incompetent or lazy or intimidated by the suits and create the bad stuff. And it seems like we're helpless to do anything about it. There's the real killer.
Why'd you kill the advertising guy? asks the judge. The madman pulls back in his chair and gets ready to launch into his tirade, while his defense attorney gets the four-inch-wide duct tape ready to slap over his mouth the instant anything incriminating is said ... and the madman looks up at the judge and says, 'Hey ... you ever heard that radio spot that ad geek wrote? It's a damned good reason for killing.' And the defense attorney relaxes, not hearing a single incriminating word.
