It\u2019s a curious thing that whereas many media people of my generation find it essential to learn as much as we can about the digital world, many digital natives currently populating the media world do not seem to consider it in any way relevant to learn anything from or about the past.<\/p>\n
Every so often I feel the need to remind you why this is called The Cog Blog. Although I do use cogs on this site as an illustration of what happens when you \u2018join the dots\u2019 in thinking, more relevantly perhaps Cog stands for Cynical Old Git; and it\u2019s certainly true that over the years I have become more cynical than I used to be about the advertising and media businesses. It\u2019s also true that I\u2019m getting pretty old \u2013 at least by the standards of the advertising and media businesses.<\/p>\n
The major benefit my advanced years brings (beyond increasingly finding carpet slippers and a pipe strangely attractive items) is experience; the sense that many of the concepts, the issues, the debates that occupy the pages of the trade press these days have indeed been there before.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to say that each generation finds the past an irrelevance \u2013 but actually it isn\u2019t true. When I was learning my trade in the old full service ad agencies I could have bored for England with my knowledge of the great men of the industry and the issues of the day. I could have told you all about Bill Bernbach and Rosser Reeves, David Ogilvy and Leo Burnett. I made it my business to understand what USP\u2019s were all about, and I did my best to understand the theories of Simon Broadbent and John Philip Jones. Being interested in stuff outside of your particular job function wasn\u2019t particularly unusual \u2013 there were groups to go to and conferences to attend. Nowadays too many groups and conferences are excuses for sales pitches by sponsors \u2013 which is why I generally don\u2019t bother going.<\/p>\n
Does this lack of interest in the past, this narrowness in thinking only about the immediate present matter? Well, when it comes to the core theories on how advertising works I think it does.<\/p>\n
Nowadays there is an understandable interest in short-term advertising effects. Fair enough; times are hard, Boards demand results, and the digitisation of media channels means that it is more possible than ever before to track results. Attention spans are short (and I\u2019m talking about professional attention spans, not just how long the average consumer can focus on one thing before casting around for something on which to multi-task), and so as a result we expect the model to be spend the money, count the return.<\/p>\n
But as those who\u2019ve been around a bit know, brands aren\u2019t built like that. Brands are built over time; in Jeremy Bullmore\u2019s words, \u201cpeople build brands as birds build nests, from scraps and straws we chance upon\u201d<\/b>. Some of those scraps are of course via short-term activities such as what used to be referred to as direct response ads, but to stretch Jeremy\u2019s analogy to breaking point, it would be a pretty poor nest built only out of one size or one type of scrap.<\/p>\n
Many people in advertising agencies understand this well, and are well-versed in communicating the benefits to a business of long-term brand building. Yet it is fairly unusual to come across digital media agency managers well informed as to how different media strategies can help build healthy brands.<\/p>\n
Certainly they can explain very well how digital works and what programmatic buying means (actually that\u2019s a lie, no one can explain what \u2018programmatic\u2019 means as it mutates to mean whatever the speaker wants it to mean). But they often struggle to understand the role that their particular specialism plays within what used to be called \u2018the marketing mix\u2019.<\/p>\n
Many commentators, including this one have pointed out that what consumers do, and have always done is use a variety of channels and devices to fulfil different needs. So it is with communication planning \u2013 advertisers need and use a variety of channels and techniques to build their brands.<\/p>\n
It would be smart of the digital generation to understand that this isn\u2019t about throwing rocks at each other (\u2018my channel\u2019s bigger than your channel\u2019) but rather it\u2019s about collaborating and combining to meet the advertiser\u2019s strategic objectives. And an understanding and appreciation of where we\u2019ve come from can help when it comes to deciding where to go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s a curious thing that whereas many media people of my generation find it essential to learn as much as we can about the digital world, many digital natives currently populating the media world do not seem to consider it in any way relevant to learn anything from or about the past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=289"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":291,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289\/revisions\/291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}