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We need to think more about advertising


I am not a fan of intellectuals.

People who complicate, theorize, pontificate and pose. With little impact on the real world.

Marketing is a simple business. Wear what you want to make yourself feel important or smart, but marketing is basically about ordinary people. What they do, what they need and what they love.

However, I adore people who think. Really think. And people who can drive that thinking into our actions and output.

Unfortunately, few people in marketing really think.

Maybe we can’t afford time to think in an age that demands we shoot before we can aim.

Maybe marketing itself is so old-fashioned that the big thinkers have gone somewhere more interesting.

Maybe marketing was never really thought through.

But the result is an industry that lacks any real form of philosophical care. Industry is only interested in what can be done rather than what should be done. And an industry obsessed with the short term, be it output, technology or business performance.

Even though we like technology, we don’t really think about it. We’re persistently obsessed with last year’s shiny new but bored dumb preoccupation.

Take Web 3. Web 3 will be the defining technology of our time, the ultimate realization of a human-owned Internet. But do we think about it? Of course not. Last year we briefly got excited about the “metaverse” and NFTs, but this year we switched to AI.

And before we really think about artificial intelligence and the profound implications for humanity of a life form that is smarter than us, we find something else to concern ourselves with.

Which is handy because it means we won’t have to think about any of it.

We love marketing outputs, be it sponsorship, influence, promotion or advertising. But we don’t really think about them. Not about their collective effect, not about consumer acceptance of what we’re doing, not about the regulation that’s right for us to move forward.

And if we ever think about regulation—the basic social contract between marketing and society—it’s always a rear-guard action. Behavior that makes us enemies of society, not allies.

While we bemoan ad avoidance or the absence of marketing permissions in otherwise powerful databases, we do little to try to create a product that people love to invite into their lives. About collective standards and the quality of our outputs.

Because we just don’t think.

Of course we love business. Whether we’re setting up cash registers today or identifying sources of growth for tomorrow, this is our daily work. But we don’t really think about the economic context in which our businesses operate.

Maybe there is a consumer confidence chart in a regular update from the stat department and maybe when austerity warnings are fed into our sales we can run a ‘value campaign’. However, there appears to be very little concern about the real economy and the long-term impact of the economic downturn on our customers’ lives.

We can position and reposition our brands as we please, but in the final analysis we need economic growth to thrive. Discount retailers may have taken a chunk out of Britain’s supermarket industry in 15 years of economic stagnation, but ultimately they too will need money to put into people’s pockets to thrive.

Yet I haven’t heard a single client express concern about the financial gap facing 2.4 million people as they move out of fixed-rate mortgages over the next 18 months. Or what it can do to their business when their customers are crucified on the seemingly ineffective strategy of fighting inflation with interest rates.

We really need to start thinking more about the economic reality that underlies the performance of our businesses, and not just the response of those businesses to a downturn.

Because if we thought about things a little more, maybe we could do something about them.

We could decide how best to use new technologies and where and whether they should be used.

We might be able to ensure the sustainability of our industry by curbing its excesses and especially encouraging harmful or destructive behavior.

And we could collectively exercise some influence over the course of our economy, rather than being buffeted by global headwinds that are too great to fight and national politics that are seemingly powerless.

Getting things done is the most important quality in the marketing industry. But thinking coherently, collectively, and properly before doing any of it comes pretty close.

It’s time to welcome thinking, time to think, and people who can get back into marketing.

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