Advertising has gone through many disruptions. The radio disrupted the poster, the magazine disrupted the radio, and television disrupted them all. However, these new mediums did not change the core method of advertising: persuasion.

Before 1960, advertising had not evolved much since the start of its proliferation. An ad was written by a copywriter and then was handed off to an art director who made it look visually appealing. This all changed when the industry began putting these two people together, sparking a creative revolution.

Since this point advertising grew more and more meaningless and the message more and more irrational. This futility reached its climax in 2007. Markets around the world were shattered, trillions of dollars evaporated, and crazed consumerism seemingly collapsed with it. In the wake of the crash something happened to the advertising industry. The digital revolution went social.

The digital revolution had been going strong ever since the advent of the personal computer. The technology alone was unable to create real change in the way people determined the values of products or an organization’s message. It wasn’t until social communities started to form through mobile devices that the dynamic started to change.

This not only changed the medium advertisers had to target, but it also changed the whole process. This disruption democratized and dissolved a product’s message by allowing the audience to interact and shape it. Persuasion was left in the dust and engagement was crowned king.

The digital revolution has changed the way people interact with traditional media. The gap between the web, TV, and print has become closer through complimentary applications that allow you to engage with content.

The power behind digital media is in the voice it gives to its user. It pushes engagement rather than persuasion, experience rather than insecurities.

The future of advertising will be characterized by the end of advertising. The advertising agency will become obsolete in its current form because the product message will be user-centered, instead of message-centered. Hysteria around consumerism will ease, and people will take an active role in shaping products and determining values.

The agencies that survive will be the ones that are able to build communities around brands and empower people to take an active role. The agencies that fall the fastest will be the ones who continue to try to force a message down an emboldened audience’s throat. The agency that approaches interactive media as just another medium will soon realize their worthlessness. In the future advertisers will see a new meaning to the word obsolescence, only this time it won’t be applied to products, and they wouldn’t have plan it. It will be the advertising agency that shares the same fate of the forgotten products it once pushed.

Books like How To Win Friends & Influence People will be replaced by The Lean Start-Up, charisma and salesmanship will be replaced by objectivity and user-testing, and appeals to the irrational will be replaced by fostering meaningful human values.