Future Efforts

In Wayne Friedman’s recent Media Critique, “Commercial Clutter May Finally Choke Content,” he touches on the media tidal wave that’s been churning since the 1990s, and offers his prediction for the fate of cable TV programming as "branded content in TV commercials". He then goes on to talk about his, and select marketing communities', "wonder and worry" for a commercial-saturated future, and for the possible endangerment of future marketing and advertising efforts in general.

And he kind of lost me on that last part.

Because, while the withering away of TV programming is one thing, equating it with the self-combustion of marketing and advertising is another. The most successful marketing efforts have never relied solely on the medium, they've always had a relevant message that connects with the target. Friedman's statement, “Perhaps younger adults don't really mind being sold to that much,” however sarcastic it may be, represents the sort of objective guessing that a lot of brands are using to ineffectively target upcoming generations. Isn't it time for all marketers, advertisers, brands to take a look through the windows... meet the consumers, and get to know the audiences rather than prospect them?

If they did look, they'd see that the future--today's youth--doesn't mind the media clutter. They’re just used to working around it. Fliers, coupons, pop-ups, billboards—if the message isn’t interesting, they’ll cut it out. Anyone in touch with the generation knows they like to mess around with pictures in Photoshop, cut up newspapers and rearrange the text, take a $25,000 car and put $50,000 worth of investments into it (or watch someone else do it), create plunky sounds with an old Casio keyboard.... as a result of media clutter, they are contextually experimental, process-oriented, and they pick and choose from different genres.

They like to re-fix, revamp, remix, refigure. So, they are constantly removing messages, adding messages, creating and extracting stories for their own entertainment. They take sections, splices, and overlapping layers, and combine them to create something unique and tweaked to their satisfaction. They’ve got their own white space, which they fill selectively. So, if companies aren’t worried that this burgeoning tech culture is going to find a way around their intrusive advertising efforts, then they might want to consider the fact that the upcoming generation is accustomed to piecing out them out altogether—unless the message is interesting enough to add to their collage. Meaning: forget about the medium for a second.

Even stepping away from the youth-specific bracket, the most important element of future marketing efforts isn’t how the message is “being sold” by a specific medium to consumers, like Friedman has posed, it's what consumers are doing with the message. More damaging than the repetition—which won’t necessarily deter every audience—is the artifice. When so much control is taken away from consumers (when molded, cliched "marketing" is stuffed down their throats), it doesn't allow for the kind of accessibility and freedom that makes it exciting for consumers to embrace a brand. And for Friedman’s “MTV generation” (that was painful to repeat), ownership and relevance of the brand message is more important than ever.

While they haven’t lost their enthusiasm for new stories, upcoming generations are much more selective and critical toward what they’ll accept. Advertisers might want to consider the fact that over-saturation could compromise any messages out there that might actually resonate with this audience. A copy of a copy of a copy probably won’t be valuable (no, not even in some neo-Warholian fashion) to a group that gets its thrills from slicing up templates, and is aware of prevailing commodities.

That said, the bottom line for marketing to ANY generation--whether your advertisements are running 23 hours a day, or once during TV programs--is that the spots will still be worthless if their content isn’t relevant. And by focusing on the medium rather than the message, agencies are scrapping any relevant content before consumers can take a look and see for themselves.

-LR