Advertising Transformed

I approached Fons Van Dyck's book on the "new rules for the digital age" with some trepidation: there's been a great deal of hype about the way that advertising will be transformed by the new media ... there always has been, and yet nothing seems to have changed in over twenty years since the birth of the (commercial) Internet.   But the author makes a very good case that the nature of the market has undergone a radical change, but that most advertisers (and marketers in general) simply haven't caught on yet.

In essence, the digital age is one of transparency, whereas advertising is a practice that counted on opacity: the belief that the advertiser was the only source of information about his products was never entirely true, but was a serviceable perspective given that the mass media was funded by advertisers.   Consumers had very little opportunity to get objective information about products from those whose intentions were anything other than to wheedle them into purchasing, and had very little recourse or opportunity to warn others about false claims.   All of that has changed.

But that doesn't mean that advertising is dead, merely that the rules have changed.   In the present day, the advertiser is merely a voice in the crowd, and cannot spread disinformation or prevent the unfortunate truth from being spoken by anyone else.  The majority of information about their product reaches their desired audience from voices more credible than their own.   Neither, in competitive markets, can they count upon customers to come begging or tolerate their imperious take-it-or-leave-it attitude when there are many other sources that are more accommodating.

However, it is not strictly true that marketers have lost the ability to disseminate information - they still can, but do not have the same level of control.  Consider that Apple, which receives great word-of-mouth from legions of rabid fans, still spends about $1.1 billion per year in advertising to teach their loyalists what to say to others.    It's also been shown that the most communicative individuals in social media do not originate information so much as they pass along information they have received from the mass media, and the one percent of social media users who create original content are often heavily inspired by information they receive from traditional advertising.

It should also be considered that the burden of research has shifted to the producer.   That is to say that they cannot count on customers to undertake the effort to learn about their product, but must themselves undertake the effort to learn about their customers.   Rather than count on customers to discover them, they must be aggressive in communication that their brand offers a good price/quality ratio, inspire confidence, make their brand reliable and trustworthy.

In fact, the only reason an advertiser should be fearful of digital media is when it is their intent to be dishonest - to lie or to attempt to hide an unflattering truth.   Social media abhors dishonesty, will not tolerate impostors, and will inevitably expose them: but this is true of anyone who lies - critics as well as producers - and when a brand is unjustly denigrated, it can count on having many defenders.

Thus considered, honest advertisers likely need to do very little to accommodate the new rules of digital media: keep using traditional media to spread the word, and count on social media to spread it even further.   As to dishonest advertisers, there is no advice for continuing that practice in the face of an informed and communicative public who will recognize and squelch hype and disinformation.  And that's likely a good thing.