Business Models, Economics, Social Media

Can the advertising industry withstand the next big disruption? Probably not. Since the emergence of modern advertising in the 20s, marked by the shift from text-based to visual advertising and the use of psychologically sophisticated messages, advertising began to resonate powerfully with consumers. Madison Avenue represented the new and the modern (until the emergence of social networks and media), and ads helped consumers figure out what was needed to live a certain lifestyle. Consumers were eager to embrace the cultural authority of Madison Avenue. But today, social technologies is making this an end. Advertising has lost its charm.

The collective work of the Frankfort School (Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and their classic 1944 piece “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”) provided the intellectual foundation for a consumer critique.. The imperatives of the production side were central, and in both consumption and production consumers were relatively powerless, even “manipulated” and victimized by advertisers. In these accounts, the powerful and active agents were corporations, not individuals. Today, we can see that this changing, with an over abundance of almost everything and the growing influences of social media and networks. Finally, the power is switching back to the mass – powered by social technologies.

The “de-legitimization” of modern liberalism, paternalist state policy and Keynesian economics continued to undercut the consumer critics. The growth of corporate power was accompanied by an ideology that posited the reverse—namely that the consumer is king and the corporation is at his or her mercy.

Even though as consumers we are all trained from the earliest ages to be consumers, and though our identities are deeply bound up with consumption choices, social networks are gradually becoming the medium that define our identities. This is the world we are living in. A TV campaign can only go so far in building a brand. In fact, it doesn’t build brands, it merely build awareness. Social technologies and media enable advertisers to cultivate brand engagement where interactions are take place. Time to reinvent advertising and if you have any of the following on your bookshelf, it’s time to put them away:

Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy, 1963
Bill Bernbach’s Book By Bob Levenson, 1987
A Technique for Producing Ideas, by James Webb Young, 1940