The death of advertising

Just last week, I had the privilege of acting as a judge for Dealmaker Media’s Under The Radar conference — listening to 6 minute pitches from various start-ups, asking questions and attempting to judge the value proposition of a product or offering — specifically in the Big Data category. I have not been an active conference participant or panelist since the Razorfish days, including facilitating a wonderfully crazy session on Web Services (yes, SOAP-based web services when they started becoming popular and were heralded as the next great thing that would unite our disparate technologies and business processes). This recent engagement with Dealmaker Media was the first after taking on my position at a leading digital marketing company in San Francisco, a couple of years ago.

The Big Data category is still forming — full of buzz and promise and fuzzy enough still that definitions of substance, business benefit, tangible return on investment, as well as differentiating capabilities are still at an early stage.

• Is the collection of the universe of tweets Big Data? — Yes!
• Is the ability to have user-defined chart generation with pretty widgets Big Data? — Yes! Really?
• Is the ability to visualize up-to-minuted edits on Wikipedia articles Big Data? — Yes!

Big Data would seem to be reflective of the need to create a new category of businesses, value propositions, services, platforms and venture funding in response to the sheer explosion of data that we are creating — after all, all our Facebook posts, and likes, and tweets and shares and everything else creates some data, and this data has got to be useful — Yes? Maybe? How is this different from traditional analytics? Don’t we have tons of data already around clickstreams and user paths and behavior — what is the big deal here? Just volume or is there something else to consider? And anyway, how does this relate to advertising?

Ads are of course the lifeline of our society — we would not have Television or Search Engines without advertising, and where would we be without these two pillars of our civilization? Big Data could mean that we now have deeper and bigger insights into the audience for an advertising campaign — is this what is transformational for the industry? What I mean by the death of advertising is the death of the prevalent culture of coming up with an advertising platform or message based on some inarguable human truth that is expressed through some creative concept.

Let me argue that the truly interesting change that is being brought about by Big Data is not the data itself, but the ability to understand what a person might be doing or thinking or feeling at a point in time. Editing a Wikipedia article signifies both a human state of mind and a human intent. Tweeting about a base hit to right field to knock in a run indicates not only something about a user profile but something about passion, preference and proclivity. The current process of coming up with a strategic platform or creative concept around advertising a product or service thinks that Big Data is just another analytical input to better understand the audience. I beg to differ — in the evolving online and mobile world that we live in, there is no place for advertising without context, and context is all about what a person is doing at a given time, not just who they are. Before jumping to implement the next http://www.facebook.com/ — perhaps an idea of where this page might fit into a person’s thought process, intent and preference for action might be a good thing.

One of the first questions in product development is “What is the unmet need that this product is going to solve?” — Unless Advertising starts to think similarly — “What is the unmet need of this person given we know what he/she is most likely thinking of or is doing now?”, it is dead … and thankfully so.