This week’s cover headline on Advertising Age reads “Cannes swept by PR, integrated, internet winners” with the subhead “Tally suggests ad age is over–or, at least, it’s evolved to higher plain.” Setting aside my issue with the subhead’s overuse of commas, this still reads like a textbook example of a classic journalistic mistake: burying your lead.
The headline should emphasize that advertising is “evolving to a higher plain,” instead of continuing to forward the whiny, helpless hand-wringing that’s become endemic to our industry (“it’s over–everything we’ve ever known is now wrong!”). Yes, social networks are a critical platform that our industry needs to address. Yes, the media landscape has changed radically. And yes–most critically from my perspective–advertising alone is not enough anymore.
But here’s the thing: it never was. For advertising to really work, it has always needed a great product or service, attractive design, and engaging street and retail programs. But somehow, the simple fact that the advertising environment has become exponentially more complicated over this past decade has led some people–including apparently, the editors of Ad Age–to subjectively dismiss the foundation of our industry: generating creative messaging in paid media. And that fries my bacon, that salts my shorts, that makes me pigbiting mad…
Because here’s a newsflash: advertising works.
Please read that sentence again. Better still, let’s read it aloud together, shall we? Advertising works.
Television? Still works. In fact, that audience is bigger than ever. Radio? Still works: we may court disaster by texting in our cars but all that commuting time is still filled by AM/FM radio. And print? It may be changing radically, but answer this question: would you rather have your name mentioned in the online version of the New York Times or the actual paper?
It’s time our industry corrects itself from this odd fever of self-loathing. Because the facts don’t support all the wailing and gnashing of teeth. In the June 22 issue of Adweek, Mark Dolliver wrote a story unfortunately relegated to a short item on the Adweek Media page. In it, he cites an Adweek Media/Harris Poll recently fielded that concludes that yes, indeed, people are still swayed by ads.
Is advertising alone enough? Of course not.
The real innovation our industry needs is the strategic melding of creative messages distributed through a coordination of both paid and earned media.
It’s not one. It’s not the other. It’s both.