advertising, agencies, and failure

Lately I've been savvy to considering the problems inherent to advertising, as I'm becoming more and more frustrated by deep-rooted fallacies that have been part-and-parcel of the industry.

(disclaimer: these fallacies are applicable in varying degrees to varying organizations. I very much admire some outstandingly innovative thinking that exists out there.)

I'm using "advertising" to describe what can essentially boil down to "push messaging" specifically, which is of course a different beast from the more general idea of "marketing." The issue I take with advertising is that in approaching advertising as a marketing strategy, one immediately turns away from product and service and becomes blindingly consumed by message and medium. The fundamental goal of message advertising is to wrap a product in shiny paper, with the only regard for the stuff inside being to identify the limits and constraints the message can work within.

...well, that and "awareness." (To be fair, I'm kind of torn on the nature and function of awareness so I'll save some thoughts on that for later. Perhaps you have some on the matter?)

So timely enough, today I ran into Jeff Jarvis' very smart thoughts on the nature of advertising, and how he's happened upon the notion of advertising as failure. I'm an easy sell.

Jarvis - "This, then, is about the impact on the ad agency as a middleman:"

Comments

[daria]

well, awareness makes me torn to. i saw some research some time ago showing the high colleration between the levels of awareness and sales.
but that was the only thing and since then i keep on cracking the code why we should measure awareness and what's the relation to sales. the goal of advertising efforts is to change behavior and generate sales and i have seen too many products where those goals weren't achieved despite impressive awareness levels. i think it is a question of finding the balance in weighting the awareness respectively to its importance. i guess we do choose to set awareness as one of key goals cause we are used too. it is an interesting issue you touched upon. let's stay in touch on this.

[Kyle Studstill]

I think you're right to approach awareness as one thing amongst many others, keeping in mind it's relative importance to the task at hand. I'm hoping that this approach is becoming more acceptable. Awareness is a very natural thing to come up with when thinking about how to measure success; exactly why it's something the industry is used to. It's being so natural however, is exactly what makes it so unimaginative, so basic, and in many ways so lacking.

[mlgreen8753]

By the time a product launch hits the advertising phase, the product quality should have been tested. There is only so much testing you can do prior to the product release. A company should do further testing after a product has been launched for continous improvement.