Can Making Drama End Advertising’s Current Crisis?

Written by Liz Hoggard | 26 June 2006 | in articles - evolution

TV commercials are becoming a turn-off and the advertising industry is nervous.

Is there a future for advertising in download content? With family members each doing their own thing today, and too many opportunities for consumers to say no to advertising, can anything tempt them all to gather round the box as in (g)olden times? Advertising execs have just been discussing what they can do about the current crisis at the industry's international festival in Cannes.

" We are all of us fighting for our very lives,'" admits Craig Davis of Advertising Agency JWT. Consumers increasingly see TV advertising as irrelevant to their lives. The days of passively sitting on couches is over. The rise of digital media and the sales of devices from iPods to TiVos and Blackberrys means they can control their own media world. What's more, consumers can make their own entertainment, from blogs to broadband videos distributed over the internet. As Davis sees it 'There are just so many ways to say no to advertising.' The most desirable consumer (the one advertisers all want) has a knack for choosing the good stuff as well as for blocking commercial messages. The solution, Davis says, is to study the 'big ideas' that have shaped pop culture. '

A new UK marketing body, Thinkbox, has even been launched (funded by ITV, C4, Five, Sky and Us media giant Turner) to try to bring ads back to TV. Tess Alps, its new chief executive, believes passionately that if broadcasters are forced to look for money away from advertising, the quality of free-to-air programming may plummet.

This means a new bar has been set for advertising, says Davis. Not only must their output be fresher, cleverer, edgier, but ads must become an art form in their own right, or at least move closer to the entertainment space. 'The challenge to us is to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in,' he says - or 'make coitus interruptus the real intercourse,' as Huffington puts it bluntly. That means goodbye to internet pop-ups, which drive the consumer mad, and more investment in '360-degree' communication strategies - emails, text messages, flyers, chatrooms and podcasts which the consumer chooses to view. Customers are now co-authors of a brand's 'story'.

The full article about the dilemma faing advertisers can be found in THE OBSERVER

Written by :

James MacGregor