How to Make Advertising Great Again!

A recent WSJ article by Suzanne Vranica couldn’t have been clearer—advertising is teetering on a dangerous path. The opening line said it all: "During an hour-long call this past week to sell investors on the virtues of a $30 billion merger of two advertising giants, data and technology came up a dozen times each. AI, eight times. ‘Creativity’ was uttered once."

Now this article is 75% about saving advertising from irrelevance at scale and 25% about my company, mktg.ai, which exists to help fix the problem. I'll put the 'about mktg.ai' 25% at the end. (The headline and image are politically neutral!)

As we are on the cusp of CES I was giving a fair amount of thought about a number of meetings my team has been in leading into the holiday season. I’ll chalk some of these discussions up to being provocative, but I can’t help but think there’s a tinge of belief from the people that I talked with that advertising as we know it is almost dead! I’ll be the contrarian here.

As the merger of Omnicom and IPG moves ahead, the sale by Publicis of Huge and the layoffs at major shops take place, I’m thinking about the state of advertising, marketing and brand building.

I am certainly one who greatly appreciates the innovation that we’ve seen in marketing over the last two decades, and at the same time, I’m someone who longs for the intellect and intelligence that used to go into crafting a message. I’ve been a lone voice for over a decade saying that this business has devolved into filling spaces with little regard for what fills the space itself.

However, I was driving up the West Side Highway the other day and saw an ad for Mike’s Mustard with a line that said "Practice Safe Snacking… Use a Condiment!" Wait…cleverness? Thought provoking? Creative!?!? It was as if the clouds had parted and a ray of sunlight burst through.

It was a funny and clever line. And I think many people in marketing today would use that phrase and simply say that was just a line.

When I look at that, I see a platform. I see a simple, yet BIG and funny idea, and I see it on television, I hear it on the radio, and I see it online, and I see it at a deli counter. What I just described is the essence of marketing and brand building.

But what has happened to the world of marketing is a de-evolution. We’ve lost any sense of patience, or organization.

I was on a call the other day with the CEO of the world's largest holding companies, digital arm. You can guess who it was. We were talking about marketing, and he asked, "do you think the fact that the platforms will start turning out thousands of pieces of creative, will that negatively impact your technology?" My answer was "I don’t care" to which he was shocked. My response should have been rhetorical; “Do you think the platforms churning out thousands of pieces of creative will kill advertising?” I do!

Has advertising become white noise and does AI simply exacerbate this problem? How do you recognize a good idea across every consumer touch point?

Following these meetings, I attended a conference on marketing at one of the world’s leading business schools. This event was 95% academics from around the globe discussing the impact of technology on marketing. The first panel included the head of digital for one of the world's largest snack producers and the CMO of one of the largest fan sites in media.

The discussion? The impact of AI on creative and advertising. They pointed to the notion that we are now able to produce 1000s of pieces of creative cheaply. AND they were excited by this potential.

I on the other hand was thinking, if you want to accelerate the irrelevance of advertising, start producing more shitty ads. Now, during a break, I approached one of the lead professors in the Marketing program and the discussion went like this:

KEVIN (Enthused): Many consumers view advertising as white noise. Do you think AI is going to render advertising irrelevant?

I thought this would spur a discussion and he turned to me and said:

PROFESSOR X (Engaged): Advertising is already irrelevant!

KEVIN (Shocked): Advertising represents 30-50% of marketing's budget.

PROFESSOR X (Scoffing): Advertising isn't marketing, marketing is about product developments and lots of other things.

KEVIN (Frustrated): OpEx is 15-30% of a marketing budget. The balance is events, hard materials, technology, research. Isn’t a major portion of a marketer’s budget advertising?

PROFESSOR X (Frustrated): I need to get back to the conference.

Throughout the conversation I could not help but be struck by the irony that I could see the Mike’s Mustard billboard ad on the west side highway outside the window of the conference hall. (TRUE!)

END SCENE

So I thought to myself, if you look so negatively upon advertising, why are you inviting marketers, or CMOs to speak? And if marketing is simply about creating new products, then how do you tell people about those products? I have the answer…ADVERTISING!!!

He is a leading professor of marketing at one of the more prestigious, world-renowned business schools. Whether he was being provocative or not, It's clear that we have a problem. We are not training the marketers of the future. And we certainly aren’t putting emphasis on creating a story or a brand. Just a sea of click bait.

It all feeds into the thesis behind mktg.ai and why we are spending so much time, money and effort to change this dynamic of the business. Our thesis is mktg.ai will reverse engineered how brands will be built, returning the business to the days of great ideas.

So imagine if that Mike’s Mustard ad was a banner ad online, where an enlightened marketing executive had the same vision that I just articulated for integrated marketing, and saw the positive reactions to that line, they could share it out rapidly across their marketing ecosystem to to build a much more emotionally resonant brand.

The vision of mktg.ai is to make marketing 10 times better than it is today. Today, you are alienating consumers and the thesis that producing more, we will alienate less. HAS THE INDUSTRY GONE MAD?

What we want to see is marketing re-emerge as a welcomed edition in the consumers media life. Let’s Make Advertising Great Again!