TV advertising, the silent movie of the

October 18th, 2004

Do I feel I’m missing out? That’s the question I asked myself when I saw the new Guinness commercial.

And the answer is: I don’t feel I’m missing out. It’s a great piece of film that (unfashionably) has a strong morally uplifting message woven into its fabric, its beautifully shot and it is unquestionably a ‘nice’ ad’ but I don’t feel I’m missing out.

But missing out on what precisely? Missing out, because I’m not a Guinness drinker.

We’re seeing a shift away from being defined by the brands we consume to being defined by the brands we don’t consume: advertising and media companies are contributing to this shift. The old image based advertising model, the one that took us from 1950′s washing powder commercials right up to Guinness’s ‘Surfer’ (2000) has gone ? John Grant’s ‘After Image’ forcefully makes a claim for the end of image advertising. But what has replaced this model?

Whilst Grant and others see a brave new marketing world where words like ‘relationship’ have replaced ‘advertiser’ and ‘consumer’, in the mind of the customer, the new world looks pretty much the same as the old world. An advertising message in the form of a TV commercial is tasked with creating ‘awareness’ in the (largely mistaken) belief that at some point down the line, our attention will translate into a positive action ? usually, that someone goes out and buys the product. But now that doesn’t seem to happen so often, why do the agencies still persist?

At best, we admire the film, as in the Guinness ‘Mustang’ example. In the main, we don’t even remember the commercial, and if we do, we remember it fleetingly and then soon consign it to the dustbin labelled ‘advertising’. It ain’t working, but we keep on plodding away, reciting examples from distant memory to make us think it could still work in the future.

We’re trying to sell silent movies to an audience that has seen and heard talkies. Even if we were great sales people – and we’re not – it wouldn’t work. But still we persist.

And that’s the point, its not because the advertising is good or bad, it is because we have become too familiar with the process of being advertised to. Advertising in the main does not move us, and in the rare occasions that we are moved, we’re not attributing this emotional response to the brand – we’re attributing it to the advertisement. We’ve disconnected the ad from the brand. So when we’re moved by the ad’ (albeit occasionally) it no longer connects back to the brand. Why should it? We know that is how we’re meant to respond.

The problem is the customer nowadays wants to be involved in the marketing process. We’re looking for a relationship with brands that are involving and that reward us for the time we spend interacting with them.

We still know that we’re being ‘sold to’, we don’t mind because the reward is greater than the sacrifice. We’ve moved on; we’ve stopped believing in brands that just dangle an image in front of us then expect us to buy it. Marketing still works, it just works far more effectively when it involves the participation of the customer.

Contributed by a strategy director at a large media agency.

Additional reading: The Death of Mass Media
Gone in 30 seconds. Marketing 2.0
The revolution will not be televised

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