How marketing performance took a turn for the worse in 2007. And how it might be turning around.

At this time of year, retrospectives and year-end reviews are popular. My thoughts are not of 2024 but of 2007. That's when something happened that ushered in a dark period in Ad-land. Before that, things seemed to be improving, but then the positive spirals turned. Why did this happen?

Was 2007 a particularly bad year? A quick search on the internet paints a picture of a year like most: a hodgepodge of good and bad.

Yet when I read marketing communications research, 2007 kept coming up as a turning point when things suddenly started to go wrong. It could be a coincidence that it happened then, but I see a pattern.

But I may have gone wrong in my search here and started seeing ghosts. The brain tends to exaggerate significantly the existence of something you have just become aware of. For example, you might think everyone drives around in the car model you dream of buying. Or you can see the year 2007 here and there. This is called frequency illusion or the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

I also must be careful not to confuse correlation with causation or chance with a cause-and-effect relationship. For example, if you get it wrong, you can easily believe that fatal motorcycle accidents are caused by eating sour cream—just because the curves coincide.

Have you read Dan Brown's bestseller Angels and Demons? Did you get the feeling that the secret society of the Illuminati might run the world? For you and others caught up in conspiracy theories, here are some insights into the period just after 2007 that you can connect to a sinister web:

- The impact of advertising campaigns began to decline after several years of growth.

- Investment in brand building fell from a reasonably stable level.

- Media budgets began to shrink.

- Short-termism in marketing communications began to increase sharply.

- Creative messages shifted to appeal to the 'left brain' (with rational rather than emotional messages).

- Anger, fear, disgust and sadness began to increase in journalism, while joy or neutrality began to decrease.

Is all this a diabolical conspiracy or just a coincidence? There may be a third explanation for how it all fits together:

Around 2007, social media, led by Facebook, took off. At the same time, smartphones took consumers by storm, and some media consumption shifted to scrolling and clicking.

Soon after, the financial crisis hit, causing a recession. The demand for quick financial results increased. This short termism still lingers in marketing and advertising.

Social media and search advertising were the perfect saviors. They could demonstrate rapid impact with exciting data. Business leaders loved it, and around this time, Google advertising started to take its first bite out of the marketing budget.

The focus on activating consumers to make quick buying decisions was fueled by the fact that consumers could now be in buying mode on the bus and in bed. Therefore, Online advertising was characterized by quick, rational messages that did not wrap the ad in complicated emotional messages like post-text ads did in newspapers.

Other channels, such as TV advertising, which had traditionally been used to create more lasting effects with broad reach, were infected by the new way of communicating with more rational messages and direct appeal, and the use of humor in advertising declined.2

Furthermore, purpose-driven messaging started at this time, leading marketers even further away from the topics driving business effects.

As a result, marketing communications' impact and effectiveness declined.

The nature of the new channels also led to changes in journalism. Phenomena such as 'clickbait' and 'viral' emerged as traffic became the new currency of the media. Sensationalism and negative journalism took over. Who wants to click on something positive?

Many marketing departments shifted their focus to their own channels, hoping to create viral communications that would spread themselves—free reach. However, the result was the opposite—reach and impact decreased.

All in all, this was the beginning of a dark chapter in the history of advertising. Perhaps not a conspiracy, but at least a correlation. Perhaps even causality?

But now there are signs that we are emerging from the dark ages of this effect. It looks like the curves are starting to bend upwards.

Peter Field (one of the brains behind the famous 60/40 rule) and econometrician Grace Kite have shown examples of advertising's impact starting to rise again. They say the reason is that we are learning how to use online advertising better.

There may be some truth in that, but I have a couple of additional hypotheses:

The most crucial factor is that advertising has become more based on video in the last few years as technology has made it possible. As linear TV viewing declined, the reach of video advertising was challenged, but now video is back in several digital and online arenas.

Video can create strong memory effects by spending much more time in the viewer's attention span. It also offers the opportunity to tell stories, use humor, create emotion and engage more of the senses with movement and sound.

Many people stuck in online communication have got their creative toolbox back.

At the same time, many are starting to buy media based on where they can capture the most human attention. Advertising fraud and low-impact channels will be challenged.

All with more significant impact as a side effect.

So, 2025 might be a good time to consider your channel flora and which messages and communication efforts have the most impact.

So, who knows, maybe in a few years, I'll write a similar retrospective column and point to 2024 as the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment in Ad-land.

No, actually, I'll leave that job to AI.

Originally published in Swedish in the marketing Journal Resumé