A vision for the future of advertising
As seen on Fast Company Executive Board
The average person sees 4,000 advertisements every day—or so says the internet, where that statistic has been quoted and requoted for years, even though all indications are that it was simply made up. No reliable study has been found to support this figure. I suppose the 4,000 number was intended to be amazingly high, whereas I am left wondering,“Who are these people who, in a day, only see 4,000 ads?”
Consider all the forms of advertising to which we are now subjected. They range from logos on T-shirts to interjections into our social media feeds … from wraps on buses and subway cars to acknowledgments of the “sponsors” of charities and public radio programs … from corporate names on sports stadiums to the interruptions of “free” online games. Even the spam that somehow evades our email filters qualifies as advertising. It is hard to find a surface or second of time that is not used for some ad for something (although ad agencies keep trying).
The result of all of this is, of course, noise. No one could possibly absorb this much information. It is bad enough that brands and advertisers find themselves in a constant arms race, where it is more difficult than ever to break through; worse is the effect on human beings, who have to work hard to ignore the clamor and constant demands for attention. The situation is far from benign. The overload has been proven to contribute to higher levels of anxiety, accompanied by a host of mental and physical ills.
I believe there is a solution. I am optimistic that advertising can have a positive instead of negative effect on our quality of life, but it will take a change of perspective; some artificial intelligence (AI) magic; a lot of cooperation between brands, media companies, and regulators; and—I believe—a new paradigm for advertising agencies like mine.
The change of perspective I’m talking about was foreshadowed by the famous 1960s-era quote from San Francisco adman Howard Luck Gossage: “Nobody reads advertising. People read what interests them; and sometimes it’s an ad.” We know this is true because we detest ads, but we will spend hours drooling over catalogs, videos, or websites devoted to our personal hobbies or passions—some of which are ads. Put another way, sometimes ads are interesting, and people read them. Can we imagine a world where we received only what interested us, including some ads? What a pleasant—and quiet—world that would be.
That utopia would work for brands, who would not have to pay for advertising wasted on those who will never buy. Agencies would have plenty to do, because, after all, the ads still need to be interesting. Even media channels could benefit, because they could charge dearly for placements that were guaranteed to reach the most likely customers.
Agencies make an effort in this direction today when they “target” audiences by engaging in market research, and then use programmatic media buying and similar techniques to narrow in on the most desirable consumers, but these practices remain very crude. Agencies congratulate themselves if they engage even 2% of those who receive ads, with no regard for the collateral damage caused. So far the promises of big data and programmatic media have only served to increase the number of ads needed for the average campaign.
AI has the potential to get us much closer. A very smart AI could learn our interests, predict our purchases, and bring us only the advertising we want and need to see. With a much lower volume of junk crowding our brains, we would have more capacity to watch and learn about the products and services relevant to us.
There are significant challenges, of course. Privacy is a huge concern. People are creeped out already when they are targeted for ads based on their online behavior (or a comment overheard by Alexa or Siri). Spammers’ very existence is predicated on flooding people with ads and evading the filters. It will take very clever AI indeed to protect our privacy, eradicate spam, and serve us only the advertising from which we will benefit.
It will be worth it. Legit advertising fills a vital function in commerce; it brings us information and inspiration, but life is too short to have it consumed with the inescapable, irrelevant, and sometimes infuriating deluge we receive now.
I call on the advertising industry to lead this revolution. Agencies stand only to benefit from the dramatic increase in efficiency and effectiveness that I believe is possible. In fact, agencies will have the ability to hit a sweet spot where they are known as an indispensable source of creativity to solve complex business problems—whether it’s advertising or not. Advertising could become—dare I say it—a social good that people value and look forward to, but the advertising industry will need collaboration from brands, technology providers, media partners, and those who regulate business and communication.