Is advertising more than selling a dream?

"Advertising is based on one thing: Happiness. It's the smell of a new car. It's the freedom from fear. It's a billboard that screams the reassurance that, whatever you are doing, it's OK."

These are the words of Don Draper, creative director of Sterling Cooper in the TV  series Mad Men - or "boxed set" as current jargon now describes the format. It is a 'definition' from the sixties where Madison Avenue created consumer desire and aspirational heights that extolled the virtue of products from cigarettes to presidential candidates. Advertising portrayed a happy world, a permanently sunny upland which could be accessed through the purchase of these desirable products.  Advertising was about manipulation through great creativity.

Of course in the b-2-b world we had less glamorous products and much smaller budgets. However the advertising creativity today would be judged just as politically incorrect as Sterling Cooper extolling the benefits of cigarettes. Our target audience was largely electricians, the white van men who read the SUN newspaper and bought their products from electrical wholesalers. At the wholesaler's counter were copies of our free newspaper which moved the Sun's 'Page 3' girl to the front page with a full page image of her caressing a fluorescent light fitting, or luminaire as they are now called. Trade magazines carried their fair share of advertisements featuring models gazing longingly at, or draped across various electrical products. Many of the products were basically boxes with a label on. As a product manager the photo session could offer a pleasant change to the usual daily fare!

But even for Madison Avenue the limitless expense account fuelled lifestyle of an advertising agency is long past. As Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP has put it, today it is 'Maths Men' not 'Mad Men' in an increasingly digital world driven by data and digital publishing platforms.

The book of the blog

As a spin-off from this weekly marketing blog, a book is now in production, in so far as the text has now been handed over to the publishers.

Why a book? Sometimes a book is just easier to handle - flick through pages, bookmark references, share etc. OK,  so all these features and more are offered with digital versions, but somehow a book is nice to have. May be it's a generation thing having spent all my life with books there is a great familiarity with the format.

The book is divided into 3 main sections starting with a quick review of the rationale for marketing and why the sale of goods and services is not just a simple relationship between supply and demand. Section 2 looks at communication methods where here the digital options blend in with the traditional and are evaluated against marketing benchmarks. The third and final section is part of an on-going conversation, review and ideas of a still evolving digital marketing landscape.

 Over a period of up to 8 years I have experimented with a number of social media platforms to see how they operate and to help make an informed judgment of their value. This is an on-going experiment, the social media tools are constantly evolving, but their business models now depend on advertising revenue. It might be argued that financial success relies on advertising dollars and they have lost their ‘cool’ amongst the younger generation who have migrated to more edgy apps such as Whatapp, Soundcloud and Ello – the latter a rebellion against advertising.  I  set up and ‘road tested’ a few of the leading social media platforms which offer publishing online platforms that can be used for marketing content. The resource allocated to building and maintaining a presence has to be evaluated as you would for traditional print media. Questions such as, does the publication reach my target market, what is the investment and does it work?

 In short it's a constantly changing picture and the book will accordingly continue here - online.

The rise and rise of small businesses

The enterprise culture is being driven forward by small businesses in the UK, not big business it seems.

Two different  items that came my way this week highlighted how small business was contributing to the recovery of the economy. Lord Young reporting to the Prime minister noted that the last report into small business was the Bolton Report back in 1971 which concluded the small business sector of some three quarters of a million businesses at the time was in terminal decline and doomed for extinction. Today that pessimistic view is transformed with 5 million small businesses, 19 out of 20 employing less than 10 people, are leading the growth in jobs. Large firms he says are still important, they employ a third of the work force but thanks to technology they too need less people. Lord Young makes another interesting observation that the skills needed to work in small firms are entrepreneurial, while teamwork is what large firms need.

The second item was a card dropped through the door with the headline - " Your other office" -  promoting funkbunk - "the alternative workspace for people who work from home. "  Funkbunk (I  know - don't ask) is a workhub with "hot desking" facilities and meeting space. They claim 13% of people already work from home with 60% of employees forecast to join them in the next decade and they are providing a base for those who don't like the isolation of working alone and are better motivated in the entrepreneurial workspace they have created.

Big business meanwhile is getting bad press all the time - tax avoidance being the current worry. This does not even mention the still large public sector and the legislators in the European Union who write the laws for employment along with everything else!

So what does it all mean for marketing? Perhaps it is time to take a fresh look at where businesses are headed, who runs them, where they are and how marketing can accelerate their growth and success. 

More content posted but less engagement

With marketing teams churning out more content a report suggests this has resulted in less engagement.

A problem previously highlighted on this blog is that with the diversity of user contributed content, particularly through social media channels, there is a thirst for more volume of content published and published more frequently. It doesn't necessarily follow that there is more news of interest to the consumers of this information.

Turn the clock back a decade or so and and the PR person usually held regular meetings with the client to tease out news stories.  It was not uncommon in the b-2-b world for the client to start with the statement that 'we haven't got any news'. The role of the PR person was to probe recent projects that had some unusual features, the use of new technology, major contract wins, new appointments, exhibition plans and the rest to draw up a list of potentially interesting stories. Then to research the story and produce a few deemed worthy of a press release. After all the necessary reviews and approvals the final version and accompanying glossy photograph were mailed to the editors of the relevant trade press. And they dropped most of them in the trash. Approximately one in twenty went forward for publication.

Back to the present. The editorial waste bin no longer weeds out the junk news from the genuine stuff - the problem is now finding enough
to fill the growing options for self published news. The thing is the same old issues remain - there is not a lot of exciting content any more than there was before. But now there is nobody to bin the trivial stuff. Instead the consumer becomes the ultimate editor and soon learns to switch most of it to the junk box.

The report by Track Maven discovered that between the start of 2013 and end of 2014 marketers increased content by a whopping 78%, but engagement measured by clicks, likes, comments, retweets, favourites etc fell by 60%.  Even more telling 23% of content received no engagement at all! And 43% received less than 10 interactions.