Once upon a time...

...there was an advertising man who recognised that the rise of mass media opened-up a whole host of opportunities to sell things to unsuspecting prospects. He was smart enough to see a great opportunity. If he could interrupt these prospects repeatedly in their day-to-day lives when they weren’t expecting it he could influence their behaviour, and make them buy his client’s products – often even if they didn’t really want to, or need them! That man was Leo Burnett, the father of advertising. He built a global empire which was extremely good at influencing mass market behaviours.

After Leo Burnett came a tsunami of great advertisers - David Ogilvy (Ogilvy & Mather), James Walter Thompson (JWT), the Saatchi’s and countless others, each of them bringing their own style & flavour, and each of them building on the ideas of Leo Burnett.

The basis on which each of these organisations operated has been in essence the same since Leo Burnett began this kind of advertising; to produce eye catching ads, which through the platforms created by mass media attract people’s attention, and influence their behaviour (usually to purchase). And, since Leo himself first wrote copy for Cadillac in 1917 the techniques employed by advertisers have worked, and worked well.

These proven techniques have informed other types of marketing and promotion – and they have all been based on the same premise. Talk often enough to a large enough group of people, in ever more creative ways and a proportion of them will listen to what you have to say.

Of course there will be those who argue that this isn’t the case, and the dynamics of direct mail, advertising, evens and direct sales are fundamentally different, but there’s not. They are all based on the assumption that a portion of the people to whom you are trying to talk aren’t listening, or actively don’t want to listen, and that this wastage is inherent in any campaign or marketing strategy, and that this is part of the cost of the campaign itself. And until recently there’s been no believable alternative market model for how to promote products and services.

The problem with this old model is not that it doesn’t work, just that we can no longer make it work because that natural wastage has become so large that campaigns are not financially viable in the way that they used to be.

The reason for this is that the amount of choice available to the audience to just too great. Hundreds of TV channels, thousands of radio stations, millions of websites, billboards, hoardings, door-to-door flyers, direct mail, email, text messaging, mean that there are simply too many avenues. Too many avenues for the audience to bear, too many avenues for us to manage. No longer can an advert in the back of the Sunday paper guarantee to bring anything home. Despite the profiling of the readers/listeners/views/traffic, it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work for two reasons.

i) the internet has enabled each of us to be individuals rather than one of a crowd. Yes, the global village is a much used term, but the fact remains that if you are passionate about something, no matter how obscure, within the global village there will be plenty of others who are passionate about the same thing. And you only want to know about things that you care about.

ii) the audience has become really good at ignoring our messages. Can you remember your favourite ad on TV at the moment? Probably not. Can you remember all the ads you drove past on your way to work? Probably not. That’s because you tune them out. They’ve simply become wallpaper.

The reason that you choose to tune these ads-out is because you have higher expectations, you want to have ads which are of interest to you, showing products which you do want to buy from brands that you do care about.

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