Blurred Lines: Advertising, Marketing, Products, Services and Business

TLDR crowd : Just read the Bold

I’VE BEEN STAYING UP LATE AT NIGHT

Lately, I’ve been staying up late at night thinking about the overall function of advertising for businesses….okay that’s a lie. I’ve actually been staying up late at night because my 3 ½ month old daughter cries every 2-3 hours and also thinking about who is going to eventually get the throne on GOT…

THINKING ABOUT OUR INDUSTRY

…but I have been thinking a lot about the future of our industry and how the different components have evolved. From the days of David Ogilvy’s emphasis on the “BIG IDEA”, McCann Erickson’s wildly successful “Put a Tiger in Your Tank” campaign to the time when big creative brand ideas were the single touchpoint to reach consumers. For a long time this used to be consumers only perception of a brand until they actually interacted with a physical product or consumed a service.

AND HOW CONSULTANCIES ARE TRYING TO FILL THE GAP

As advertising has evolved we’ve seen the rise of specialist agencies and departments within branding, marketing, direct marketing, digital marketing, media and so-on and so-forth. But what this is doing is “siloing” work under the umbrella of “Advertising” and “Marketing” and leaving huge, gaping holes for the holistic understanding of what our industry needs to become which is a facilitator of the holistic customer experience. In turn consulting agencies have caught on and since they have traditionally had the C-Suite conversations, they have moved in on some of these areas under the guise of “Business Transformation”, “CX” and “Digital Transformation". Now that doesn’t mean the work that we are doing will go away….but it does mean a lot of it could become project based and explain why sometimes we may feel more and more like vendors instead of partners.

BECAUSE OF THE BLURRING LINES BETWEEN “ADVERTISING” AND “BUSINESS”

Why the shift? Well if you put your consumer hat on you’ll see that with the evolution of technology the touch points you have with a brand have grown exponentially. This means a brand message blurs into a service experience, or digital content becomes a shopping experience or even most physical product purchases now come with digital services attached. All these things that you come across as a consumer are a part of a larger ecosystem with data being collected. So instead of advertising and marketing just being a message about a product and/or service it’s now a part of the product and/or service you actually buy and you expect the brand you're buying from to use the data you're providing. For our clients that starts to close the gap between measuring advertising effectiveness and attribution to revenue.

SO LET’S STOP “WORSHIPPING AT THE ALTAR OF CREATIVITY”

As exciting as big creative ideas can be and as sexy as they are to us and some of our clients we as an industry have to move beyond believing in their influence as standalone powerhouses and embrace creating holistic business strategy. We should do this by leveraging our creative driven history and deep knowledge of human behavior. So, for me being an employee of MRM//McCann and MW I think about our inspiring and relevant motto, “Truth Well Told” and think about it as not just telling an ultimate truth per client but telling that one truth at every touchpoint, message, experience and service for that client in a way that drives their business goals.

AND START DISRUPTING TODAY

The only way we can actually tell that “truth” across services, products, messages and brand touch points is by expanding our knowledge base through learning, acquiring and hiring for the skills needed. This means diving deep into customer data, connecting the dots between operations technology and customer facing experiences, aligning to our clients business goals and using our unique power of creativity to craft a new version of business strategy that’s currently widely embraced by many of our clients disrupters.

BY BECOMING UNICORNS

In our industry unicorns are those strategists who can understand creative briefing, speak to User Centered Design, know when their data partners should use Naïve Bayes vs Decision Trees, write the business requirements for AEM, work with a content planner to create an editorial calendar in a connected ecosystem and translate all of that into a concise story for our CMO client. It’s not impossible, it’s the new baseline skillset for tomorrow’s “Mad Men and Women”.