Advertising is facing a ticking time bomb, and the only way to save it? To stop advertising.
That’s the words of Exposure chief strategy officer Jonathan Fraser and Big Balls Media chief strategy officer James Kirkham, as the urged the crowd at Cannes to take stock of the industry, before it’s too late.
Quoting the film The Big Short, Fraser says “The truth is like poetry, and nobody fucking likes poetry”.
“We think the advertising industry is built on a lie, on a flawed model,” he says.
Fraser pointed to the rhetoric surrounding advertising in the digital world; while attention on traditional media is falling, it is being replaced by digital attention, so it won’t impact the industry.
But the problem, is that the digital audience not only find ads irritating, they’re blocking them through the use of ad blockers. The other issue, is that digital efficacy is built on “click” metrics, which Fraser says is a “fraudulent model” given proliferation of bots.
“As the audience move into digital, they actively try to get away from the industry,” Fraser says. “It’s a ticking time bomb that just can’t sustain itself.”
Kirkham compared the response of advertisers to the problem, to the way the music industry, Sony in particular, reacted to evolution of music downloading.
“If we’re looking now at the big players at our industry how are they dealing with this problem that exists of ad avoidance?” Kirkham.
“[Martin Sorrell] said recently that Google should ban adblockers. For us, that has echoes of the block and protect defensive stance that we’ve just been describing about Sony. It feels eerily reminiscent of a bunch of people slightly burying their heads in the sand about changing consumer behaviour that is occurring.”
Instead, the Kirkham and Fraser pointed to a frame work to “stop advertising”, in its current form at least.
It includes swapping taglines for visions, stopping the advertising of adverts themsleves and focusing on being part of the moment instead of just "marketing to a moment" when using real time communications.
“These are three points; there are hopefully countless,” Kirkham says. “We want you to think about it and we want you to build on them because right here, right now is history. We’re at a juncture, a cross roads. we need to stop the endless cycle and stop burying our heads in the sand… and bit by bit we need to do what we can to change advertising.”
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