Advertising is simple and more exciting than ever. A rant.

If you're a Marketer on a mass market CPG / FMCG brand. Your role and the advertising world probably hasn't changed as much as you think.

Like we are not buying Cheese in a radically different way. It’s not a world being killed by Dollar Shave Club for Cheese. We should not expect to soon see shoppable digital outdoor ads that offer cheese via vending machine.

We are not seeing the world of bread massively changed by “Uber for Bread”. There is not a VC funded bread incubator threatening to undermine everything you built.

If you market Shampoo, you will not find that “Millennials are killing shampoo”. They have hair, they like it clean, and they are a group of 2.5bn people so wildly different in nature that we have to stop calling them one group. If you have 2 kids, your 8 year old may be totally different to your 11 year old. That’s how dumb demographics are.

If you make really nice soup. I don’t think you need to think about 3D printing or Drones that much, influencer marketing isn’t going to propel your business into the stratosphere. Native advertising is nice, but we used to call it advertorials and it wasn’t the most exciting thing then either.

If you make a really nice Orange Juice, I’m not sure how much AI is going to change your world for the next 5 years, you probably don’t need to work with IBM Watson to place programmatically ads served on slightly warmer days. Make some really nice ads for juice, stand for something, make great juice. Make the packaging good too, like you always did. 

If you make a Beer, maybe a progressive beer, one for optimists who like art and want to be part of the zeitgeist or whatever those words on your brand onion are. You will find that the role of brands in peoples’ lives hasn’t radically changed and this sort of need people have to express themselves with choice of beer has all the same opportunities today as in 2008. In 1990 it was different, but things haven’t changed that much since a post Stella world. 

If you make a really good hair gel, the Amazon Echo is indeed a interesting thing to try out, but i’m not sure you need to worry that in the future people won’t care about your brand. Brands are vital ways for people to be reassured of quality, to make decisions that allow comfort and self expression, voice won’t change that for most brands.

I’m not sure that many people want to download an app for a Pasta company, I don’t know how much potential AR has for cooking sauce companies. Or VR for spirits, I’m not sure I want to tour the fields of wheat where your Vodka’s come from, if I’m going to stick a headset on me, I probably want a beach or boobs or a mountain and a glacier and a sunrise.

Now I’m not saying the world isn’t changing, it is, but not always as dramatically as we think. We need to spend more time focussing on what isn’t changing too. 

The weird thing is, if you make cars, or bank accounts or have an airline or a hotel, or offer insurance or an electricity tariff, quite a lot of my dickish observations above are true.

We have this sense in advertising that we’re in a crisis, that people aren’t watching TV of if they are, that they hate ads. People have similar feelings towards ads today than they have since the 1960’s. They don’t really like, or watch or want ads. This defines the problem. 

We have this thing where we assume life is really complex because people put out these bloody lunascape things to show that life is complex. That's how people make money, from claiming you need help. It’s actually more simple. We used to have TV and Print and Radio and Newspapers and Terrestrial and Cable and the internet and mobile and social. Broadly speaking it’s got more similar. We have 3 black rectangles, a phone, a TV and a computer sized screen, and on each of them, in different contexts of consumption, we have ads that can move, have sound and be clicked on. Social is just another portal to the internet. It’s not a media channel. Advertising has never had more commonality or been conceptually more simple. 

We assume that Millennials's are different, they are not. We assume they have money, they don’t ( compared to the over 50’s), we assume they hate ads, they do not.

We offer ALL the things above as solutions to problems that don’t really exist. Native advertising is nice, influencer marketing is great, content marketing can be lovely, but we are not in crises. We can spend money on video style ads, and it work.

I’m not saying new technology isn’t amazing and exciting, or we should ignore it. I feel the opposite, we should chatbotting constantly, using Siri, ARKit, going to conferences on AI, experimenting with real time optimization, speaking to people who get blockchain ( if only someone actually did) . But only as due diligence because we may want to say no to many of these things.

Generally speaking the changes in media are good news. I think this is the best time ever to work in advertising. 

• We consume more media each and every year, but we’re maxing out now, and the curve flattens.
• We watch a lot more ultra short form content, but we also watch a lot more long form content
• We tend to buy more things online each and every year. It's not that different to catalogue shopping from the 20th C
• Online is fairly quickly moving from non-mobile to mobile as the access point. Who cares?
• First magazines and newspapers became internet supplied, next it will be TV.
• The line between TV and Video is blurring.
• The people we in adland care about have too much on in their lives, too much content, stuff, choices,

Pretty much 90% of the effort in advertising should be spent doing something we totally ignore. We need to look at how people behave on mobile and desktop/tablet bases internet and digitally supplied TV and we need to be seduced into realizing how great the canvas is for advertising.

We need to make far shorter, far more beautiful, far less irrelevant, far more premium, far more persuasive, far bolder, more interesting ads. Maybe we can’t click on them. Maybe they move as our phone moves, maybe they are served sequentially, maybe they are served to people who are not in the target audience. Maybe that doesn’t matter.

Maybe we should aim to make great ads again, and for all screens and contexts.