Advertising’s workhorse, the 30-second commercial, is fading as a means of hawking products and services. Ad executives will be busy in 2006 trying to figure out what to put in its place.

Good luck to them: Audiences are splintering off in dozens of directions, watching TV shows on iPods, watching movies on videogame players and listening to radio on the Internet. All these activities cut out the usual forms of sponsorship and take place when and where consumers — not media executives — choose.

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[Originally published 3 January 2006]

No rules. No formulae. No best practices. It’s a new world and no one has a clue.

That’s the take Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts puts forth in a presentation made in his keynote address to Ad:Tech. He sees us living in an age of screens where SIght, SOund and MOtion (SISOMO) have converged to create a new advertising landscape; “good stories well told, emotion, humor and music–in other words, sisomo.” (See an excerpt of his presentation here.)

While he packages it nicely, what Roberts sees as new are timeless principles in a shiny new wrapper. Calling for making emotional connection in advertising is about as edgy as me telling my 3 year-old to “use your words.” (instead of sounds and pointing)

He makes an important: we’ve moved from permission marketing to attraction marketing. ASKING consumers to please give us their time (permission marketing) is a quaint notion rooted in an era when we HAD time to give. In the compressed age we’re living in, ATTRACTING consumer attention means giving them a more appealing idea capable of preempting the one they have now.

Here’s a hint: the idea they’ll find more appealing is not about you.

“Advertising was once a simple mass-market media buy; now it is a dialogue between a seller of soup, sneakers or cellphones and a particular media outlet’s narrow audience. That media outlet is just as likely to be a computer screen or a mobile device as a television set, media buyers say. As a result, advertisers are starting to treat TV more and more as just one conversation among many.”
—Brian Steinberg, Wall Street Journal

Like sales, advertising is a conversation between two people. Effective advertising doesn’t speak to anyone, it speaks to every ONE it reaches. When you stop advertising and start conversing about what matters to customers, you will have begun serving a tasty meal that sticks to consumers’ minds.

Three stories of imposing red brick, McIntyre Elementary School was a small town classic. Towering windows, chalkboards that seemed a mile-long, green walls and black tile floors, it remains the picture that pops in when I hear the word school. Is your school still in you? Are you still in school?

Marketing is the continuing education of observation; labs are campaigns. When the student in you is ready, the lesson always arrives. Today it comes courtesy of Bavarian Motor Works–better known as BMW.

After pioneering the era of “branded entertainment,” BMW has popped the clutch and left it behind. Advantages are always fleeting and seldom is there a better example than this: BMW practically creates a category. Others rush in to copy. Demand explodes. Prices escalate. Value diminishes. BMW exits.

AdAge reports, “The primary reason for BMW’s new backseat approach: Branded entertainment is just getting too expensive. According to executives close to the client and experts in Hollywood, BMW doesn’t have the marketing dollars to ink entertainment deals at a time when integration fees and marketing requests from film or TV partners are escalating.”

Like poker and used cars, knowing when to get out is almost more important than getting in.

Here’s the lesson: Don’t love marketing campaigns that can’t love you back. BMW saw the party was over and moved on. You should too. When advantages diminish, depart. Better yet, when it seems they are about to–be the first one out the door.

Like BMW, you can create just as much buzz ending something as in beginning it–provided you do both boldly and smartly.

There’s another lesson in this story. Go read it now and then click to continue…

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