Reinventing advertising = unseating the snob within

When I got my first job in marketing, I was a total snob.

(I was one of those English-Majors-for-life, who feels his grammatical skills and summary knowledge of titles in classic literature hold him above the rest of the world.)

I applied this in my role as a marketing communications manager for a software company. I fashioned a bubble around myself and my desk --- from within which I wrote wordy press releases, brochures, and sales sheets --- fancying that I was some kind of Machiavellian spin doctor.

Life and maturity lifted me out of this ridiculous plane and dumped me into the street with the rest of us.

I learned the hardest possible way just how equal I was with everyone else in the eyes of nature and the human world. This humbling experience made me a better marketer, by way of making me a better person. I became more authentic and understanding.

I believe a lot of the advertising and marketing community still resides within a self-perpetuating bubble, its own unique culture of genius. In some moments I bow to it, wishing I were half as good as these, truly the smartest guys in the room.

Smart or not, the lofty position all of us marketers hold at times is not helping our craft.

I, Narcissist

In boom times, it's a seller's market. TV ads get weirder and more self-referential as we begin to amuse ourselves at the expense of everyone else. We're making art, or perhaps merely scribbling cartoons for each other in the margins of notebooks that everyone else is forced to read. Barely discernible, what actual brand messages do exist are at best out of touch and at worst, big brotherly --- statements of fact rather than invitations to dialogue.

Panderama

Inevitably, because people are smart and adaptable, consumers get wiser and more discriminating. Traditional advertising responds with a craven and obsequious tone. The spokesman for your cereal hisses at you from behind a grinning rictus, desperate for your business, recycling adages that are just as removed from reality as those uttered in his better times.

The rich emptiness in-between: listening

What's the answer to all of this? Better listening.

This is different than facilitating staged focus groups that are ultimately bent on confirming a predetermined product agenda. It's about finding the places where consumers naturally assemble to talk about your brand (or your client's brand) and hearing what they have to say, good and bad.

I'm a salesman at heart, so I'm opportunistic. My first instinct when I stumble across this kind of customer data is to get ravenous, to seize hold of the obvious chunks of information, wipe off the blood and gristle, and put them right back on the plate. But consumers are smart enough to know when they're being fed what they supposedly want to hear.

(This data comes from lots of places. In a later post I hope to talk about the specific role interactive plays in providing us with it.)

At these moments I try to remember about listening. I sedate both the analytical and hungry parts of my mind and just really look and listen to what's there. I don't polish it up or reposition it out a desire for authorship, because the temptation to seek out an "I made this" moment is great. Rather, I complement myself on the ability to stay open and just look.

All goodness springs from a level plane

Listening to what consumers say, and restating it authentically, is the first step towards a needed reinvention of advertising and marketing communication.

This approach will unseat many of us who have enjoyed the perception of elevated status.

Once we realize we belong down below, because we're consumers too, it will only increase our ability to communicate with authenticity. Reinvention can happen from the ground up.