Surely it is time we conducted a thorough examination…

Of the very principals that govern the existence of advertising. Advertising has to modernize and change – dramatically.  The current model of advertising was developed in the Sixties when product choice was much more limited and people were easier to stereotype into categories like income, sex and class.   It was much easier for advertisers to target people and bombard them with sales messages.    Today’s marketplace is different and all the old certainties are gone. To be effective in your communications it is sound advice to start with the premise that you know nothing about the people that you believe your product is aimed at. Advertising has become too parochial, too introspective, too convinced by its on hyperbole. Two or three thousand, what would be described as, creative people, dominates advertising.   However, a major change is afoot and advertising, long regarded as the ultimate weapon in marketing – particularly the once mighty television commercial – is seen as complacent and increasingly ineffective. Additionally your customers are sick to death of being treated as mere abstract numbers.   Advertising has dehumanized and depersonalized the whole process of communication – there just never was a mass market!They are also sick to death at the rampant corporate dishonesty all around them, again more evidence of Management being totally unaware of the real world and the communication process.  Evidence of their ability to dehumanize and depersonalize the process of marketing. It would appear that customers cannot trust anything or anybody these days.    There was a time, for example, when we trusted our banks to look after our best interests and play fair with their charges.   If so these days are long gone.   The bond of trust has been broken, and not only in banking, people are rightly suspicious.    And all the advertising in the world cannot help you solve that problem!As marketers, we are professional observers and communicators of our product message.   All the technology we use is nothing more than a set of tools.  All the messages we produce are simply by-products (written, recorded or videotaped) of what we hope has been a successful effort in telling others, many others, what is important about our product.Ironically, when we think about or describe two people talking with each other, the focus is on two persons interacting.   The view is a behavioural one, focused on human activities, not on the medium of communication or on the literal messages produced.    Perhaps this is because no machinery – no invented technology – is interposed between the two people involved in interpersonal communication.However, when we shift from the simplest form of communication – two people engaged in a thoughtful conversation, to the more complex forms of mass communication, somehow our attention is distracted.   We focus on the technologies interposed between the sender and the receiver and the sudden multiplication in the volume of messages dispatched.These unfortunate distractions divert our attention from essential elements of the communication process.   While technology and multiple messages are necessary elements in mass communication, they are far from sufficient for any actual communication to take place.Communication results from an interaction in which two parties expect to give and take.   Professional communicators, who ignore the characteristics and orientations of the audience members, do so at the peril of actual communication or information transmittal.In other words, mass communication, if it is to be successful, must take on many characteristics of interpersonal communication.   Audience members must be able to give feedback.    Media practitioners must be sensitive to the information contained in the feedback.  The give and take can result in understanding or real communication.Advertising agencies need to change their limited definition of communication and media and see themselves as specialists in a range of techniques.And we need interactive communication- right now!