Inevitably, as companies start to grow, they are often confronted with having to spend more and more on marketing, particularly advertising. And as this investment increases so too does the need to ensure a good return and top quality service.
One has to be careful in selecting advertising agencies, public relations companies and research organisations, not that there are a lot of charlatans in these industries but rather, it is a question of finding someone who understands your business and your goals.
Companies need to be aware of some of the big challenges facing the advertising industry right now, particularly those involving its image and its efficiency.
A lot of money is being wasted on advertising in South Africa as a result of some advertising agencies being given too much leeway to experiment, or clients not briefing them in sufficient detail.
With the average consumer being exposed to something like 10 000 marketing messages a day, the whole issue of getting the attention of readers, listeners and viewers is becoming a source of increasing deliberation.
Just taking South Africa as an example, over the past two decades the average citizen has been inundated with added time-consuming distractions. More TV channels, more radio stations and most of all, more business and leisure time technology. E-mails, internet browsing, social media and cellphones chew up hours of the modern consumers’ time and it is this time that used to be spent not only devouring conventional media but the advertising that came with it.
There was a time when the people who produced mass media newspaper ads and TV commercials, for example, were told they had two seconds to get the attention of the reader or viewer after which they had simply lost the opportunity.
These days that time has reduced to less than a second. And increasingly, not at all due to fewer and fewer consumers watching TV commercials or reading newspapers.
The information economy as we knew it has become redundant due to the information highway becoming so clogged nobody bothers to use it any more. Now what we have the attention economy. And in advertising terms, this means not only applying a lot of thought and creativity to ensuring consumers actually see an ad but that the ad manages to grab their attention until the message has got across. Frankly, to an increasing degree, this is a pointless exercise as more and more consumers are searching online for what they want rather than waiting for ads.
So many TV commercials and full page ads are completely wasted today because they are simply too complicated, too subtle or just plain too long. They’re winking in the dark
It is a continuing and massive challenge for the advertising industry to persuade its creatives to move away from shock tactic or Hollywood-type works of art into something a lot more efficient.
They need to change from supplying information to consumers to meeting consumer demand for information when they want it and where they want it.
There is no question that the anti-establishment, arty brigade who make up so much of the ad industry’s creative departments are going to have to start understanding the consumer a lot better. They are also going to have to become a lot more businesslike in their mind-set because advertising is becoming far too much of an expensive business to take chances on.
Equally, the whole industry is going to have to have a long hard look at its own image if it wants to be taken seriously in boardrooms.
Right now, many non-marketing people see advertising as something trivial and self-indulgent from a corporate point of view. Boards still tend to indulge their marketing people rather than understand them. They try to find some sort of return on investment on their advertising but end up simply assuming that sales increases mean the advertising is working.
This dangerous perception of advertising as something trivial and perhaps even mystical is exacerbated by the advertising industry’s obsession with winning awards. In essence, not a bad thing in terms of motivating those who produce the ads, but very often misleading to those who actually pay for the ads.
The ad industry regularly explains that when they hand out awards to each other, winning ads are not necessarily successful ads. But, while this might make sense to someone in the advertising business, it certainly doesn’t make sense to an accountant who would wonder at anyone rewarding failure.
A classic example of this was the multi-million dollar Budweiser ‘Wassup’ campaign in the USA.
Not only did this win awards all over the world but was acclaimed generally by the industry as a breakthrough in attention-getting, motivating, marketing communications.
But, in the period after this campaign ran, Budweiser sales dropped 8.3%, market share went from 4% to 2.5% and the campaign was generally regarded by the Budweiser people as not only a complete flop but also damaging to the brand.
* Opinions expressed in posts published on The Media Online are not necessarily those of Arena Africa or the editor but contribute to the diversity of voices in South Africa.
Chris Moerdyk (@chrismoerdyk ) is a marketing analyst and advisor and owner of Moerdyk Marketing with many years of experience in marketing and the media as well as serving as non-executive director and chairman of companies.
