Brandjack News

By Quentin Langley

Henry Ford is famously supposed to have said "half my advertising budget is wasted, and I will give a million dollars to the man who can tell me which half". He may have underestimated the proportion that is wasted, and the value of knowing which slice of the budget is, even in the dollars of 80 years ago. 

But does the advance of digital platforms destroy advertising in its traditional sense altogether? 

Michael Wolff wrote in Television is the New Television:

Digital advertising works less well even beyond its own clumsy presentation because all advertising works less well, and, alas, digital allows a finer measurement of this ever-falling response rate.

People can skip ads on TiVo. They can block pop-ups. They can simply do other things. But advertising is also getting more intelligent. Google and Facebook algorithms can target ads directly at individual consumers.

One can argue that such targeted communication is no longer advertising, in the traditional sense. If it is not mass communication, then perhaps it is direct marketing. If it is about building conversation and relationships, perhaps it is public relations. Certainly the days when an ad booked in a prime time show can reach over a hundred of million in the US or tens of millions in the UK are gone. When companies make ads for the Superbowl, the earned media coverage often dwarfs the paid for. 

And yet, I saw something astonishing last night, that I had never seen before, and all with no media coverage that I had seen. Facebook ran a TV ad. It seems the campaign was actually announced in February, and it wholly passed me by. That, in itself, says something about the impact of TV ads.

The death of advertising is much discussed in business schools. It remains a controversial thesis. But that advertising is changing in ways that will make it unrecognisable seems beyond doubt.