Good friend Frank Singleton, Senior Vice President at Ogilvy Communications World Wide joins us on this episode of Overflow. There are times when we have a good time on Overflow, talking about music and other fun social endeavors, but today we get a bit serious discussing the future of advertising.
The conversation was instigated by a blog post on TechCrunch by Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School. The article contained the link bait worthy headline of “Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet”.
The premise is that advertising in general is not effective when it is an intrusive interruption to whatever is attempting to be accomplished while browsing on line. This is something that Doc Searls was saying in The Cluetrain Manifesto 10 years ago.
Frank’s great line is that “advertising is not failing on the internet, as much as advertising is failing the internet” .. he means that advertising needs to stop trying to shoehorn former ways of communicating into this medium and become more creative with the technology that is available.
Clients will be looking to new ways to spend dollars in the future, where a traditional buy might be to spread dollars through broadcast to print and public relations .. now that spend might be technology investment such as mobile applications or rich media content development such as podcasts and video.
A future application for direct brand communication is the intersection between mobile and location based advertising. Frank is working with a client looking to build targeting technology where moments after crossing through the security gates at the airport, a text message discount for a coffee will be delivered to the consumer… Powerful if not overused.
We also needed to hit Frank up for his thoughts as a Crisis Communications expert about the AIG rebranding to AIU in the face of the bailout bonuses that have been the rage of Capitol Hill.
“It ain’t rocket surgery, you have to tear the bandaid off to heal the wound”.
