Putting the Cart Before the Ox
The awful truth about marketing is that “it broadcasts messages to people who don’t want to listen.”
That according to Doc Searles and David Weinberger of The Cluetrain Manifesto fame. They describe the downfall of marketing communications, from its origins as conversations held over an ox cart full of goods to today’s one-way barrage of messages that constitute putting “an axe in our heads.” Lamenting the lack of exchange between seller and buyer, they rejoice in the advent of technology that will re-enable such communication – the virtual handshake, if you will.
Fine. But serious mass marketers have long understood the shortcomings of their craft. Thus the never-ending quest to make advertising entertaining, educational, and, yeah, even interactive. It’s also why sales promotion emerged: to transcend the limitations of mass media and mass message.
That reference to “sales” promotion is intentional. Those ox-cart vendors were selling. Peddling. Pitching. Pressing flesh, if you will. For them, success was measured not in terms of share or attitude or awareness, but in sales.
Sale being a four-letter word, however, it became necessary to coin increasingly more sophisticated descriptions of eyeball-to-eyeball marketing activity. Guerilla Marketing. Presence Marketing. Retail-tainment. Semantic permission for promotion people to divorce themselves from the icky notion of – egads – selling. They wanted to be perceived as socially acceptable, enlightened, more like advertising people. More like Procter & Gamble.
Apparently, even “promotion” is now on the spit list. Editor Breen, in the June issue of promo, reports a disturbing trend for promotion agencies to “deny the industry from which they came.”
Before succumbing to denial, dear reader, consider that maybe, just maybe, advertising people might yearn to be more like you! It’s possible. Clearly, Procter & Gamble is increasingly going to market in the streets, in the stores, and on the Web.
According to a recent Advertising Age story, the much-emulated master of mass is even deploying theatrical troupes to promote Cheer in Canadian grocery aisles. Disguised as civilians, actors suddenly break into a mock fashion-show skit, engaging shoppers in eyeball-to-eyeball contact, even pressing them into participation.
Nothing new, you say. Nineteenth-century medicine men used entertainment to attract a crowd before pitching their elixirs. Ah, but the Cheer activity was invented by the venerable Leo Burnett agency, so it was reported as a sophisticated new idea called – ta da – “Performance Advertising.”
Perhaps therein lies a solution to the promotional inferiority complex. With heads high at cocktail parties, former promotion people can now announce that they are engaged in the “performance advertising” industry. “Hi Mom? Tell Dad I’ve been promoted to director of performance advertising.”
Word of caution: Remember that P&G is also the company proposing a modern method of agency compensation, one based on that ancient measurement of advertising performance: Sales.
And that’s the truth.
In the ultimate snub of advertising believability, the Women’s National Basketball Association has launched a promotion. The prize? Airtime for commercials actually written and produced by fans.
What better way to bring real street-style authenticity to the hand-held camera look so in vogue with today’s producers. Dubbed “What You Got Spots,” the effort once again proves that limited funding doesn’t have to limit creativity. Kudos to the WNBA’s in-house agency.
Expect to see this idea emulated, but only by the most self-confident of regular agencies.
