Why Businesses Neglect Advertising (and why you shouldn’t)

Why do people think they don’t need to spend money on advertisements?

It’s a great question and as one first posed to me in the new year; it felt like a calling to answer it.  Why don’t businesses readily advertise??

Strap it, I’m going to criticize us all.

Two reasons

1. The internet has led a generation of professionals to think that ‘online’ is inherently different from offline; that the internet has magically made advertising there different from advertising offline, the only difference is that it’s easier to measure and it’s possible to monetize the ad space in different ways. “Online Marketing” being a distinction from just “Marketing” is one of the greatest economic challenges of the last 20 years…. marketing is still marketing, it being online or off doesn’t change the fundamentals.
2. To some extent because of the first point, people simply don’t know how to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising. It isn’t being taught in schools anymore. It isn’t being mentored nor experienced in employers anymore. Everyone is racing to the lowest common denominator: Web Analytics > I can run Adwords or Email and measure if it works. If that doesn’t, how possibly could advertising??

Why do people think they don’t need to advertise yet Coca-Cola, Yeti, auto manufacturers, and more still spend billions in advertising? Why do people think they don’t need to advertise and yet the Super Bowl is increasingly becoming nothing more than a show for Advertisements???

Because our division of Online from Off broke what people understand of marketing and how to effectively develop a business and create customers.

There is some speculation that we’re seeing the end of NEW major brands… that Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and the like will define the brands of the distant future. Why??

The speculation posits that it’s because a more global economy is more competitive. The speculation posits that it’s because venture capital isn’t as comfortable with risk any more. The speculation posits that it’s because we’re seeing a tipping point in innovation, reaching a peak where new innovation will come from existing foundations; less net-new and more mere iteration of what exists.

The speculation is moronic.

The fact is that finding someone who really knows how to develop a market these days is exceedingly rare. The internet split the world of marketing, and not for good; dividing online from off as though being “digital” or “interactive” marketing was better or different. The reality is that it split because traditional marketers, and older marketers without exposure to the internet, simply didn’t get it; and in not getting it, they couldn’t help new, younger, internet savvy marketers absorb good old-fashioned marketing tenants while so as to apply them both on and off.

Drucker (Economist in the 70s and 80s), noted that only two things create value in business: Innovation and Marketing. But notice what’s happened since the internet…. people don’t necessarily believe (or understand) that anymore. We now have Chief Revenue Officers, Chief Product Officers, and the like… those responsibilities used to be the purview of the CMO… but the CMO’s job was called into question when CMOs who didn’t understand online, failed to be effective, while CMOs who were really only experienced with Online Marketing, handicapped businesses.

We failed ourselves.

We don’t advertise because we generally don’t really have a clue what we’re doing anymore. But I can promise you an affordable CPC and SEO!