Marketing can thrive in the Age of Less

The last 20 years have provided an exponential world of opportunities for the marketing discipline.

Consumption and consumer spending, excluding only a few hiccups, has grown steadily throughout the last 20 years. Household spending in the UK is nearly double what it was in 1997. What’s more, advertising spend has gone up even more than that, by 133%.

At the same time, we’ve had the most extraordinary media revolution since the invention of broadcast, and time spent with marketing-enabled media has doubled. All kinds of new canvases have appeared, from paid search, to social video, to augmented and virtual reality.

That’s brought plenty of complexity with it, but also an incredible revolution in the availability of exposure data, performance data, personal data - and the tools to store, organise, interrogate and activate it.

At the same time, there’s more and more varied creative talent than ever, and the cost of producing technically astonishing assets has plunged at the same time as its capabilities have extended and exploded.

It’s been an era of more, more and MORE.

And at the end of that sugar rush, the marketing industry seems to be dejected, deflated, and in a state of grim introspection. 

Trust in advertising and in advertising partners is low. Self-image within agencies is low. CMO status and tenure is reduced. And by recent evidence, the marketing effectiveness of both the average and the award-winning work has been significantly reduced.

And if that wasn’t all enough…the first tremors of a new wave of even more threatening change are echoing in the distance:

1.     The sustainability agenda is finally tipping into a sense that product consumption needs to decrease.

2.     The worsening economic environment will likely accelerate the decoupling of adspend from GDP.

3.     Social norms are turning against the ubiquity of technology, which will cap media consumption – and people are more willing to pay for content they love.

4.     Personal data is becoming the subject of meaningful legislation and consumer restriction – and that will also begin to challenge many in the martech landscape.

Are we really pivoting from an Age of More to and Age of Less?

And is this going to be Marketing Armageddon?

I’d argue maybe yes to the first question, and almost certainly no to the second.

Perhaps the Age of Less could usher in a better era for marketing?

Let’s follow the thought experiment through:

1.     If consumption goes down, will that hurt marketing?

There is a broader question at work here of course – how does society as a whole become less dependent on the purchase and disposal of large amounts of ‘stuff’ as a measure of its economic health?

However, it is quite likely that this process will free marketing to do what it in fact does best – adding intangible value to products in the form of emotion, identity and utility that even outweigh the value of the thing itself.

If consumption of physical products decrease, the role of marketing will be to increase the price we are willing to pay for it, and to build the affection and loyalty that maximises market share. Which are a) the briefs most good marketers and agencies enjoy and which produces their best work and b) is what marketing is generally best at.

So, advertising and marketing may be an essential part of a more sustainable world, which is very much the argument Rory Sutherland put at this year’s excellent Nudgestock. Marketing can help us to enjoy less, more.

2.     If adspend does down, will that hurt marketing?

It seems pretty certain that adspend will be going down, because it has already untethered itself from tracking GDP, and now we are heading into a flat or recessionary economic cycle.

A slightly tougher one to find the positive in, this one, because there is no doubt that in the short term, a reduction in adspend will at least hurt many of the largest players that create the most value in the marketing ecosystem. It will most likely be bad for the annual results of broadcasters, publishers, and the massive advertising holding companies. 

However, is it bad for the practice and long-term health of marketing? Not necessarily.

There has been a certain drive during the years of More to see more as better – more weeks on air, more ads, more reach, of everyone, all the time, and it has been telling that the triumphant marketing philosophies of this era have been theories of abundance, whether it’s the blunt application of the Ehrenberg Bass ‘Laws of Growth’ or the slippery double-positive of ‘Personalisation at Scale’.

Perhaps the Age of Less will refocus marketing on being what it is – a human science based on creating powerful moments of attention, persuasion and action.

3.     If commercial media consumption reduces, will that hurt marketing?

Thus far, the ascendancy of paid subscription (eg Netflix, Spotify Premium), public service and adblocking has seemed to have a relatively limited impact on commercial exposure, because the gap has apparently been made up by the increases in total media consumption.

But that trend seems to be at its turning point. Firstly, ad-free media are going to keep accelerating – not to take the whole market, but certainly more of it, and the most valuable pieces. This doesn’t mean marketing-free media, but it definitely means a less conspicuous and more limited canvas.

And media consumption seems to be topping off – almost all the major online platform’s global daily usership is level-ish. And if social attitudes to public phone use continue to harden, these numbers may start to go down.

So, a relatively near future where the time people spend with marketing-supported media is very likely to reduce. The upside for marketing? Attention.

Assuming the industry responds to this in the right way it could be great. We need to embrace quality of content and context, improving the advertising experience, getting the investment to the people who have earnt it, producing brilliant commercial messaging – and then it’ll work better, and feel nicer.

Unfortunately, the short terms of the industry means that there is a lot of scope for this part to go wrong.

4.     If there’s less personal data, will that hurt marketing?

Well, to start off with, let’s be clear – there won’t be less data in total. There will be more exposure data, hopefully of a more reliable and transparent nature. There will be more and better supply and demand chain data, with the big benefit of 5G being the connection of more things rather than more people. There will be more transaction data. It’ll still be an age of more data and it will need a lot of wrangling.

What’s even better is that most of this data will be directly related to business performance and the customer experience, so it’ll be much more useful.

What there will most likely be less of is data that is attached, without your permission, to a single persistent identity that describes you. The slow death of 3rd party cookies, those things that follow you around the internet like a stalker, is the canary in the coalmine.

But that’s just the first stage of a regulatory and attitudinal backlash against personal data capture by anyone other than the business or publisher or platform you are dealing with at that minute, on any terms other than those you’ve explicitly agreed.

And will that be a problem? No, it’ll be great! Not only do I think it’s ethically essential, and I feel great about it as an individual, but it will also remove a massive distraction for marketers.

The last 10 years have seen an obsession with the mechanics of consumer targeting that is at once both massively disproportionate to its ROI value, and also massively underdelivered under the bonnet. Marketing will still be about relevance; segmentation still matters; personalised services are massively valuable, but you don’t need to log and capture every element of someone’s life to market to them – in fact it is a distraction from a deeper understanding of what really matters to them.

Tracking the Age of Less

There are some big calls here – the inventory of trends and effects I’m describing here run counter to pretty much everything I’ve experienced in more than 17 years in the marketing industry, and much (but not all) of what I’ve experienced as a consumer.

But I am increasingly convinced that some significant changes are coming, and that we should start grappling with the implications of an Age of Less. For people in the marketing discipline, it could be a huge opportunity.