The only good impression is a lasting impression.
Mass market brand advertisers have a wandering eye. Their heads are easily turned by new fangled means, at the expense of old fashioned commercial ends. They would do well to remember that lasting impressions are the only advertising impressions that matter.
Plus ça change
Plus c’est le même chose.
The more that things change
The more they stay the same.
Five marks if you recognise the lyrics.
They come from the chorus of Circumstances, released in 1978 by Canadian progressive rock band Rush. If you got that right, you and I just carbon dated ourselves.
I was a teenager when this song introduced me to the concept of plus ça change, and the carbon dating is deliberate. I have nearly three decades of work on which to base what follows.
I started my advertising career in 1988, just as the notion that the commercials were better than the programmes in which they were placed became a truism. Newspapers treated great ads like celebrities. People, normal people, the kind of normal people Dave Trott talks about, were genuinely interested in what we did. In home counties living rooms I watched as focus group respondents became increasingly savvy about industry jargon such as “positioning” and “personality”, and production craft skills such as shot framing and post production.
Those were the days when advertising really was talked about. On merit.
These days, “We want our advertising to be talked about,” has become an empty statement of intent, usually on the part of brands who sadly want nothing of the sort when it comes to the crunch. But in the late 80’s and early 90’s it was true. Advertising was interesting per se to a mainstream audience.
Advertising was part of popular culture long before the Internet. Earned media was a thing long before the Internet. Widespread revulsion for the advertising form wasn’t.
It obviously helped that enough of the advertising was funny enough, original enough, or beautiful enough, enough of the time, for commercial breaks to offer mutual value to brands and punters.
Maybe it also helped that advertising breaks were part of the commercial television user experience from the outset. ITV didn’t get viewers used to an ad-free product to get its BARB figures up, then break their trust and break the UX with clumsy, intrusive sponsor messages.
The user experience of TV advertising and the content of TV advertising were both good.
And, my job, the job, for nearly two decades, was about brand ideas in broadcast media. The job was about capturing the imagination and creating lasting impressions. (For brands.)
I’ve spent the most recent nine years of my career in a specialist digital agency. I have learned a lot. Most importantly I can say with some confidence that the job for mass market brands hasn’t changed.
Lasting impressions, be they conscious or subconscious, are the still the only advertising impressions that matter. Plus ça change, plus c’est le même chose.
The media have changed beyond recognition. The job hasn’t.
Media impressions are merely the audience reach means by which we achieve our lasting impression ends. It doesn’t matter how cheap or how personally targeted the means are if they don’t achieve the ends.
Means and ends. Vanity and sanity.
The Internet made us forget this important distinction. The Internet is ridiculously high on means. It panders to vanity. It throws off vanity metrics with gay abandon. And many brands have gaily abandoned professional discipline chasing big numbers that mean very little.
The Internet breeds an obsession with reach because, for consumer brands, it isn’t very good at delivering it. Whereas, whilst you have to pay (handsomely) for reach on commercial television, you can pretty much take it for granted and focus on efficiently, for which read creatively, capturing the imagination.
The Internet does some commercially valuable jobs very well. It enables some commercially valuable jobs that weren’t possible before it existed. Sadly consumer brand building isn’t one of them.
The vast majority of Internet advertising and branded content is shit. And the clumsy, intrusive and frankly disturbing user experience of online advertising, a combination of ham-fisted formats and aggressively personal targeting, is fucked.
Most branded content is to the Internet what plastic microbeads are to the world’s oceans. Individually insignificant and ignored. Collectively a clogging pollutant. And, for far too many content marketers, the publishing imperative prevails over the capturing the imagination imperative.
Content marketing might serve a useful purpose if the Internet is your point of sale but not if it is your brand advertising medium.
For mass-market consumer brands the Internet isn’t a medium or a channel, it is the competition. It is a place where the advertiser mindset, based on putting controlled messages in front of consumers, isn’t fit for purpose.
The online audience is not made up of passive consumers. It is made up of the otherwise occupied. And, too often, the message of this medium in the eyes of the interrupted is that your brand doesn’t understand my world, disrespects my privacy and stops me doing what I really want to do.
Telly still rules ok for mass market brand building.
This is my carbon-dated, humble and not at all nostalgic opinion.
