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:"

youth, music, and a universal human truth

What I like about this spot is that it reminds us we're all a lot more similar than we tend to realize.

(and by that I mean similarly ridiculous)

[evidently I forgot to hit "publish" on this this back a month or two ago]