Finally Marketing & Advertising have mastered the Moonwalk.

...slipping backward, but maintaining the illusion of progress.

The other day I was talking to two advertising people and asked them "Do you think that advertising and marketing have to change?"

Both professions had their absolute heyday in the 1950s/1960s and both have spent the past 20 years or so trying to recapture that glory. Both businesses have spent Clients money like quadrillionaires and have led Clients together with TV, Newspapers and Magazines down a road of financial lunacy by thoroughly misleading us all, after all isn't the statement "advertising works" a totally misleading statement?

Ultimately the two advertising people agreed, advertising & marketing has to change, however, and, rather surprisingly, this change has nothing to do with new media but to do with the desperate need for accountability and ROI, together with the desperate need to understand the word communication!

The 60s! Ah that was a glittering time, advertising people ruled the business world...nobody was being at all difficult about their profession, nobody was questioning the fact that advertising works, or does not as the case may be. There was a sense that the men were brilliant.

The problem was that these men of action wanted to act, but certainly they did not want to tell the Client that the advertising job could not be done.

Men of action want to act. They are paid very generously to act, they have entered advertising to act. But they couldn't tell anyone how difficult things were, that advertising was not as simple as it appeared. So doubts were, and still are, excluded, and the facts were altered to suit the theory.

Advertising men don't just become prisoners of their Clients. They also become prisoners of their errors. Advertising and Marketing people never questioned the fact that advertising and marketing never worked they just chased the illusion that creativity was the answer to all their problems and just followed one expensive creative person with another as logic took over from common sense. Make the buying of media more important;

Make the production of TV commercials more expensive; hire the current "hot" Hollywood Director; and so it goes on. Now the lunacy has spread to The Internet, and so it goes on. Never once admitting that we have all been led up a one way street of no accountability. And however independent the men may have started off, soon these men became owners of an error they cannot admit to, advertising doesn't work. And now even years later they cannot even in a fairly limited way admit to that. Enhancing the theory that advertising works requires staggering amounts of research with staggering amounts of money, the life of the current advertising world suggests that that is easier wished for than achieved.

Because of the failure of advertising to understand the process of communication they have damaged a totally good "old media" whilst, at the same time, rushing onto the Internet not understanding at all that the Internet is most certainly not an advertising medium at all!

And now Agencies are rushing onto Social Media ignoring the fact that, as in the past, people don’t want their advertising in whatever form. The difference here is that they can easily move away from advertising, you have only to look at the experience of Second Life, that was to be advertising’s salvation. That’s why the early adopters have moved on! And be warned, they still don't know how to monitize the Internet..but we do!

All these problems are discussed in my book "Television Killed Advertising" available at Amazon Books UK,and out now or, if you wish you can discuss it with me directly paul.ashby@yahoo.com

Please also visit:http://interactivetelevisionorinteractivetv.blogspot.com