One could argue therefore that the agenda for advertising shifted from short-term ambition – what people bought after seeing an advertisement – to long term objectives – what people thought after seeing their advertisement.
A counter view is that advertising’s methods hardly changed at all in 10 years, and to an extent this is true. Established communication skills are still required to connect with consumers. However, the strategic positioning of campaigns has developed. More often the strategy contains a more detailed plan of how and when brands should address target audiences, and a more defined route for prospects to respond to a call to action. Where previously advertisements stirred customers to go out and buy a product, advertising now calls on customers to develop dialogues and relationships with brands – as if a first-time purchase is no longer enough.
The difference now is that brand owners realize marketing and advertising has far greater potential reach than had been realized in the mid-1990s. Advertising need no longer be just about stimulating an impulse to buy: it can now also be about shaping people’s experience of a product. This is why many international pioneering brands – notably Nike, Sony, Apple and Amex – invest heavily in an advertising infrastructure to support the consumption of their products.
Making advertising an all-encompassing activity was an approach pioneered by automotive and telecommunications services – as some of the case studies in this book demonstrate. In particular, by shaping customer services with advertising techniques, brands have been able to use every bit of one-to-one customer dialogue as an opportunity to develop the user experience, which itself is an advertisement to stick with a brand. This makes for more effective returns on advertising investment.
A number of platforms have emerged as vehicles for involving customers with brands, driven in part because involvement creates opportunities to gather customer information. Interactive digital video, brand service centres and social network groups have emerged as the main platforms for customer involvement. Such platforms allow knowledge already accumulated on customers to be exercised through personalized communication.
Campaigns such as O2’s customer retention project (see chapter 4) used SMS, e-mail and call centres to enhance its relationship with existing customers for a campaign that was symptomatic of a ‘second generation’ approach, where brands focus on the experience of existing clients to influence others. Like many current campaigns, O2 shaped its campaign around customers rather than the brand by using all points of customer contact at its disposal. The Nike+ interactive design scheme took this further, with its online community and a series of digital avenue to explore.
This ability to ‘get closer’ by harnessing all points of contact with customers and prospects has only been possible since the mid-1990s. This is because:
Reverberations from the above are only just being felt by the communications industries. Only now is the capability of digital information gathering and message spread being realized in advertising.
As I noted at the beginning of this book, it has been brands that have driven change by pushing their advertising agencies closer to target markets through digital channels, using better data. This serves the needs of advertising’s clients because digital channels provide an accurate measure of advertising effectiveness. Therefore online advertising has become popular with many companies because it readily lent itself to audit processes in terms of accuracy and accountability.
With online advertising, you’ve got to look at it not in terms of reaching thousands of viewers or listeners, but in terms of effective costs per thousand rates of return. You can track it and research it more effectively online.
In terms of changing the advertising process, a consequence of the drive to close in on consumers has been to expand the role research plays. There are now far more specialist research and development roles involved with larger scale campaigns. As listing agents and brands themselves hold customer data, the tasks involved in getting market insights have rapidly developed as a pre-creative phase before and during the planning stage.
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