Revisiting the age-old discussion about the future of advertising in a converged and Google dominated world, it was interesting to look at the impact of the growing mainstream adoption of convergent technologies and the expanding might of Google. Of course, this being advertising, everybody has a view, and so do I.
A key axis of advertising is the long-term v short-term continuum. Advertising plays a role in the immediate term getting you to actually buy stuff – at the point of sale, through coupons and offers, or at least initiate the buying process through “calls to action”. At the other end Advertising seeks to create awareness, bring a brand and its values into your consciousness and create aspiration. Now, it can be argued that this is not about creating purchase but about creating aspiration. But can you really divorce advertising from purchase intention totally?
It’s a bit like the weird offside rule in football – arguing that a player standing 1 meter in front of the goalkeeper and obstructing his view is not interfering with the play. (apologies to non-football types). At best you can argue that advertising can seek to influence your decision in the short term or in the long term. Or that it can influence you directly or indirectly (by influencing people around you, for example).
In fact, I would argue, that the reason brands spend so much money on creating awareness and brand values “for the long term” is for two big reasons. First, because they historically have not been able to reach consumers effectively at the point of sale – because there isn’t an effective way of getting to consumers at that point. And second, because consumers typically go into a purchase with a short list of brands and products and it’s important to be in that short list. The first reason has changed, the second hasn’t.
So what’s the influence of Digital Convergence on this, then? My view on this is that we are going to see a telescoping of the AIDA cycle – the classic Awareness, Interest, Decision or Desire, Action stages of how we buy products. Thanks to convergence we will move much quicker from awareness to action – and there is no better example of this than using the Shazam on a smart phone. You can hear a song that you’ve never had before, like it, and use Shazam to find out what it is. (If you didn’t know, you just hold up your phone so it can “hear” the song, and it samples and submits it to a central service, which then performs some complex algorithms to tell you what the song is. This takes about a minute. You can then buy the song from your iTunes account which takes another minute. A final minute for your song to download – and you can go from never having heard the song to owning it in 3 minutes.
Of course not all products are not downloadable to a phone. But in this case, you can argue that with the spread of smartphones (and smartphone owners having higher incomes on average) will mean that music advertising will move from simply telling you about an album (on TV, print, posters etc.) to actually getting you to hear the song. As a marketer of a large record company would you not look to spend more money getting people to hear a song in as many places as possible – malls, movie theatres, in offices, on radio etc. and less on “traditional media based advertising”?
What of other products? Toothpastes, cars, home furnishings, consumer electronics? Well all of those will make a move on the long term – short term axis, they will spend a little bit less on traditional “brand building media” and a little more on “action oriented advertising”. That action can be as simple as encouraging people to look on a website, or seek more information or order a free catalogue.
Here are some specific reasons why this will happen:
- Emergence of smartphones – truly converged devices which do voice, data and video and are “always on”, location-aware and personal. This makes everywhere a point of sales, as with permission, you can be reached with context sensitive offers and calls to actions you can respond to.
- The power of Television advertising is waning because of ad-skipping and time shifting behaviour. Also because emerging platforms are showing up traditional media for the paucity of effective metrics.
- Worth noting that the shift isn’t simply to “online advertising” – the shift is really from “interruptive advertising” to “search”. In a nutshell, rather than getting people to notice you while they’re reading or watching something else that you hope to distract them from, you want to pop up at a time when they’re actually looking for something your brand has a relevance to. It’s still not clear that they’re looking for products, but at least they’re looking for similar information.
- Universal connectivity and growth of broadband – with ever increasing broadband and connectivity everywhere, people are accessing data services everywhere and the incidence of dual-screen experiences at home is on the up as well. Combined with media fragmentation – it’s ever harder to attract and retain attention. The “attention economy” is a term that’s been used a lot of late.
The economic downturn that coincides with this at present provides conflicting directions. On the one hand, the tendency to stick with the tried and tested is high. On the other hand, the “long term” has become ever more elusive – who knows what will happen in 10 years or even 5? Ask companies like GM – if they had created less aspiration and more short term sales through their advertising – would that have served them better?
Coming up: the Impact on Media Businesses
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