Advertising Week 2015: Does Advertising Lack Insights Into Culture and Context?

It's another year and I keep wondering if #AdWeek will have to rename itself in another year. What does it really mean in a world where we make decisions more and more around word of mouth influence?

Recently I read a 2013 article entitled "We Aren't The World" in which a small segment of social scientists are disrupting the way others approach analyzing human behavior and culture.

I encourage you to read the article and the conclusions drawn from it. I believe there is a lot marketers can learn from this study since what we truly do isn't as much about awareness or selling as understanding the motivations of people.

So it got me thinking. Is 99.9% of advertising and marketing bunk because it rarely takes culture into consideration? Can we as marketers also learn from the Joe Henrich anthropological study?

More and more people keep telling me they feel they cannot connect with companies because companies don't personalize their communications. They don't put emphasis on relationship management and instead put the majority of their focus on blanket statements and talking at mass groups of people rather than with them. Marketing and advertising also upholds the company is better than its employees mythology. What companies and brands fail to understand is if they don't uphold the people who work at those companies than what will they ultimately be? A company or brand is only as good as the people who work at it and the products, services and thought leadership those people generate. The more diverse a group is, the better the ideas they can showcase. This is another reason why diversity and design thinking is more important than ever in the world of business.

Advertising and marketing needs to pivot quickly to take into consideration these three factors because it rarely does:

• When multi-national communications are designed for an international company or service, are they designed with the world in mind beyond the United States and the cultural drivers of those countries? Europe is a very different place from the United States yet so much marketing seems to originate in the U.S. with the thinking it can be simply translated into many different languages and still be related to.
• Does your engagement take into consideration that people share with a group when it comes to decision-making? This is important in B2B worlds where marketers fail to understand that many people at a company have the final decision as a collaborative unit, not simply one. We've tailored and targeted our communications toward usually one person because of mobile but we should tailor it toward a small group of people who influence one another within a particular context or setting.
• When thinking about context and how people discover information (what devices they use) how are your communications designed with cultures in mind? Where will they live? How will they travel both within and outside the social web?

Curious for your thoughts on this subject matter. Let's engage both here and on Twitter to continue the discussion.

Geoffrey Colon is a Group Product Marketing Manager of Search Advertising Products at Microsoft. Follow him here on LinkedIn or on Twitter @djgeoffe He is the weekly host of "The Disruptive Marketer" and "#AdHacks" and author of the upcoming book "Disruptive Marketing" out in 2016 on AMACOM Books.