WHY DO WE HAVE SO MANY ADS?

The story of some guy in the 1950s who couldn’t attribute for sh*t.

Have you ever wondered how and why we have so many adverts today? (and how to get away from them...) Adverts are everywhere today - if there’s people there, there’s probably ads. An endless stream of screaming about anything and everything. So how did we get here? 

The story starts way back in the 18th century with one of the first forms of mass communication, the trade card. Trade cards were used to sell yes, but the point of them was to become a talking point. To start conversations amongst potential customers and create a relationship between those people and the brand. 

Fast forward to the 19th century and we are starting to see the explosion of newspapers. As the printing press becomes more mainstream, newspapers become more affordable. And a whole new channel for communicating with an even wider audience is created. A lot of adverts in these papers were actually wanted posters (yikes). But here we can start to see the shift towards a one way conversation. Adverts aimed to say one thing to as many people as possible. 

Jump to the 1950s and we have numerous channels and agencies and marketing mix models. (I know blah blah blah marketing words - stay with me here.) From the 50s onwards, the audience started to grow exponentially and there were so many more ways to reach people than ever before. More people = more sales. But they had one key problem - one that marketers today are still grappling with. Attribution. Which adverts are working? The answer to this problem for a long time was often to just throw more money at things until you reached the desired outcome. Hammering the message home became more valuable than actually having meaningful engagement from consumers. 

And now we have the internet. Since the 90s as the internet and social media came in, we could watch people (creepy) and pretty easily track where they came from. Making it even easier for the richest to shout the loudest, keeping the consumer so engulfed with information that it drowns out the competition (greedy scumbags). Pretty much taking away all control from the consumer. But now we have new privacy laws (as we should) isn’t it time to look outside the box and away from desperately following and shouting at our target audiences?

All of this has happened so organically. We consider the modern day form of advertising completely normal because of its evolution. This advertising, which we all know, dominates the things we all see every day. But does advertising actually work? The answer depends on what you think is most important. Brands driving sales using noisy tactics described above. Or consumers getting helpful and trustworthy information to make better choices of where to spend their money.

It’s time for consumers to have a say in the conversation. I’m not suggesting a return to trade cards, our society is too big to go back to this one-on-one form of selling. But we as consumers form a community and it's about time that community had a voice beyond the binary choice to spend or not spend. And before you say this will be the end of advertising because no one will want to see ads ever. That’s not true. People are always looking for new places to spend, and people's needs aren't going to disappear over night. What we might see is an evolution where the consumer retains the same power they have in a one on one exchange. The right to ask questions, the right to say not right now, or just to say no.

Advertising today isn’t built to serve consumers. It is built to serve brands. More than that, it is tailor made for brands already big enough to dominate the noise. But this is wrong when the commodity - consumer attention - belongs to consumers. The information explosion today consumes our attention. We need an advertising that works the other way around.