The failing of today’s advertising is that we have been sold a bill of goods, again.
When I was in college, the myth was always that if we could just measure advertising and marketing more effectively, we’d become better at marketing and advertising.
Strangely enough, we can measure things more effectively than ever before…except for the fact that all of this ability to understand what advertising is working has only seemed to make us less effective marketers.
This is driving people mad.
Even as advertising and marketing is supposedly having an introspective moment, the inclination is to double down on the amount of money being spent.
Bad idea!
You really can’t spend your way out of bad, ineffective advertising.
There are just too many reasons for this, but let’s make a short list:
- If you don’t have a clear focus, nothing else will matter.
- If your advertising isn’t targeted, doing more of it won’t help.
- Having no clear call to action won’t make people magically do the thing you won’t.
- Advertising to people in a format or medium where they are unlikely to see your message isn’t going to make more more effective.
- When there is so much noise and such a huge amount of advertising, just throwing more banner ads at the problem isn’t going to make those ads cut through more efficiently.
- More of a bad ad isn’t going to make the ad good.
- No message repeated over and over again isn’t going to help.
This is just a starting point, but the key is that you aren’t ever going to spend your way out of bad advertising.