Dystopian iBeacon intrusion is a wake-up call for advertisers.

From my monthly column in the Guardian

From the early days of cinema, to the family watching the TV, to desktops, laptops, smartphones and now wearables, we’ve got ever closer to ever-smaller screens, which we look at for less time and in more personal environments. What does this mean for advertising?

For all the abundance of change spoken about in advertising, for all the millions of R&D money, for all the new technology companies, we’ve actually not innovated outside of better targeting. We’re in an evolutionary funnel towards slightly better ad units, but there are no paradigm shifts. Platforms such as Instagram allow clickable links and Pinterest becomes shoppable. All apps from Twitter to Facebook to Snapchat morph to become places to host video ads, the same units developed in the 1950’s.

Given this it’s easy to imagine how the Apple Watch and a plethora of wearables will become the next canvas to monetise, will we soon see micro banner ads, shorter, smaller pre-rolls? Will ads become card like print ads that take over the page before we see the time? Will our arms vibrate endlessly and become paralysed by iBeacon delivered pulses to help in our selection of milk in the grocery store. I don’t think so – I certainly hope not. I think the challenge of this new canvas, the absurdity of how it could end, could be the wake-up call the industry needs.

Advertising has roots in branding, it was intrinsically linked to the notion of a trademark and logo, a way to demonstrate quality in a commodity market. Advertising was the element used to both convey brand values, but also spread news of new products. In the 1900s there was simply no way to tell the world about the quality and existence of your new soap or drink except with big ad money ,and one of the best things about advertising in this era was that it was expensive. There could be no stronger indicator of a companies confidence in the quality of a product than they fact they paid money to tell people about it.

We still need this, we can’t rely on content marketing, PR, social media or any other tactic to tell the world about a new product, but the balance has changed. We now have such dwindling attention spans and such a paralysis of world-class content that we’re constantly finding ways to tune out 99.99% of the stuff that surrounds us. We’re not actively seeking out content as many brands seem to believe. The expression “I’m bored” isn’t really uttered these days. Advertising is less important than experience or others’ experience.

Do we really take the word of a ￡100m campaign to tell the nation a hotel chain is friendly above a few dozen Yelp reviews? Do adverts for airlines service count more than our own experiences? Advertising will always be around. It will remain a multibillion-pound industry. It will be vital for brand building, product news, for sales conversion and promotions, but “advertising thinking” will become a whole new world of enterprise for us to explore.

Advertising thinking not advertising, creates better product experiences.

What the Apple Watch, the smartphone, the laptop and the smart TV really bring about is a whole new way that people experience brands. We’re seeing companies such as Sonos realise that product design is more about the experience of using products and about software design. From Phillips Hue to Withings to Uber, we’re seeing the customer experience become the product. What makes a hotel chain better than another may be the seamless fast check-in, or the way to unlock rooms using your Apple Watch. What makes us upgrade our rental car may be a simple swipe-once mechanism delivered by an iBeacon. What makes one airline better than the other may be that it tells us which is the shortest security line and precisely when to set off for the gate.

We may think that our relationships with grocery stores or fashion retailers or banks are down to what they sell and what their branches look like, but things are changing. The touch points from banks are likely in the functionality of their apps, the experience of fashion retailers may be be affected more by parcels and delivery people, the grocery experience is more about the line we needed to wait in.

Advertising thinking could reinvent the future of our clients and our industry. How can we apply new technology and new ideation to make each and every one of our brands experience better? You do that, and social media, our friends, product review sites, blogs, influencers, do much of the job.

In the post-attention age advertising still matters, but that need not be the beginning and end to where we add value.