Advertising, As We Know it, Really is Dead

The following is adapted from Friction Fatigue by Paul Dyer.

Every year, Big Advertising flocks to the French Riviera to celebrate itself in a festival known colloquially as simply “Cannes.” It’s a chance for agencies to pat themselves on the back for work regardless of whether it delivered business results to clients, and its iconic awards — the Cannes Lions — have achieved almost mythical status among advertising executives. It’s fitting that, set against this backdrop, Mastercard CMO and President of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), Raj Rajamannar, said bluntly, “Classical advertising is dead.”

Advertising as we’ve known it is perhaps the single most frequent cause of friction in our lives. Rajamannar cites a study from Yankelovich, Inc., which claims the average person is exposed to as many as 5,000 commercial messages each day. Our phones, commutes, radios, televisions, and entertainment experiences are constantly interrupted by advertising. Our local hospital has signs lining the walls proclaiming Your Ad Here! In fact, until very recently, advertising was as unavoidable as death and taxes. It didn’t matter if you had a $10,000 television set, you were still going to see the commercials. You could buy the most expensive front-row seats to a sporting event, and your line of sight was still going to be marred with ads plastering every surface and interrupting the scoreboard display. On airplanes, it didn’t matter if you were flying first class or coach; you were still going to be forced into watching commercials for the first few minutes on your headrest monitor. That all started to change with the rise of premium content subscriptions, though. NYU marketing professor and general industry curmudgeon Scott Galloway (the same Galloway who served on the Board of The New York Times) opined that with the rise of premium content subscriptions, “advertising is now a tax on the poor.” Indeed, for the hundred million people who can afford to opt out of advertising, they have done so.

The unfortunate truth is that in order for advertising to be effective, it needs to interrupt us. The explosion of advertising has led consumers to develop an innate defense mechanism known in the industry as “advertising blindness” with some studies estimating as much as 80 percent of ads are not really “seen” as consumers gird themselves against the onslaught. In response, advertisers have become increasingly forceful in their efforts to interrupt consumers with the “disruptive” advertising being celebrated in Cannes. The result for consumers is that advertising has become a constant friction in their lives.

I had a chance to ask Rajamannar, who has overseen the rise of Mastercard’s brand value from number eighty-seven to number twelve in the world, what he meant when he said advertising is dead. “People hate ads because ads are an interruption of the experience,” he said. He went on to explain, “there is a narrow window which the 3,000 or 5,000 ads are trying to get through and connect with each consumer, in a context where the consumer says, ‘I hate your advertisements.’ So how can the situation continue?”

Marketers are not the only ones taking note of the decline of advertising. Consumers have also become aware of both the ineffectiveness and the expensiveness of advertising, leading to what can only be called an ad-shaming trend aimed at marketers who underrepresent minorities and overspend on the ads. In fact, although calls for less airbrushing, more diversity, and more realistic portrayals in advertising have perpetuated for years, 2020 was the first year that consumer outrage toward advertising extended to the opportunity cost of wasting so much money on commercials.

Set against this backdrop of purpose-driven and advertising averse younger consumers, Budweiser, Pepsi, and Coca-Cola all announced they would NOT be buying Super Bowl commercials in 2021 with Coca-Cola fearing the optics of spending $5.5 million on thirty seconds of airtime right after laying off thousands of people, and Budweiser claiming they would be donating television commercial airtime to public service announcements for vaccine efforts. Although many applauded these decisions, social media forums also lit up with ad-shaming commentary as Anheuser Busch then ran celebrity-stuffed Super Bowl ads for four other brands besides Budweiser (overall, the company was the Super Bowl’s biggest spender at over $40 million).

Marc Pritchard is the Chief Brand Officer at Procter & Gamble, which is largely viewed as the most successful advertiser in the world. Pritchard is undoubtedly the most often quoted market ing executive when it comes to topics related to advertising and brand marketing. In a 2017 speech to the American Association of Advertising Agencies, Pritchard stated, “There’s too much crap…We bombard consumers with thousands of ads a day, subject them to endless load times, interrupt them with pop-ups and overpopulate their screens and feeds.” Pritchard should know. According to the company’s earnings report, he oversaw spending in excess of $7.2 billion worth of advertising the prior year.

Despite having correctly diagnosed the problem, however, Big Advertising’s greatest patron went on to describe the solution as “focusing on fewer and better ideas that last longer.” His message was that the company would focus on putting more money into media dollars and spending less on people hours, thereby demonstrating that big-brand marketers still had no idea how to live without advertising.

To learn more about the future of advertising, Friction Fatigue is available on Amazon.

Paul Dyer is the CEO of Lippe Taylor, an iconic digital marketing and PR firm. An expert in the technique of timing transformative trends, Paul has played a central role in securing and directing more than $100 million of marketing consulting work at top companies throughout the past fifteen years, including Johnson & Johnson, Red Bull, Intel, Nike, Pfizer, Warner Bros, Verizon, and more. He received his MBA from the University of Texas and currently resides in New York with his wife and their two daughters.