Having talked about this subject face to face yesterday with a big bod from the music industry and then having made a comment here today, I decided to put down a quick thought about the state of ad blogs today.
The problem with advertising press online and offline is that they report on advertising. It’s a fundamental flaw. Advertising is not where the game is at anymore. Advertising has become a tactic while client side marketers look at how companies act as a brand as a whole - and communications is just one of many tools.
You can’t completely fault the ad press totally - they feed off an industry committed to making one way communications rather than valuable brand-customer dialog.
When you look at what’s happening online with the ad press, you get two alternatives:
* Individuals with forward thinking ideas - educational but not informative
* Industry blogs that look at their specialty (advertising, PR, etc) - informative but of little educational value.
There is little in between. Ad-blogs have the same problem as the ad press - they see the game as advertising and they’ll tend to highlight the newsworthy and miss the strategically sound. Just take a look at the number of shocking Brazilian campaigns that ad blogs feature - although amusing, these campaigns are often irrelevant, non-educational and by featuring them, the ad blogs suggest that the future of marketing is through shock tactics and urban spam.
Many ad blogs misinform and ignore important brand manifestations that connect with consumers directly such as retail experience, packaging and product design. Meanwhile this is the focus of many marketers is (while the agencies may be way off still).
Our IF! marketing ideas site is far from perfect but we do try to go out and find content that provides a balanced ground between education and information. We believe that the brand is the soul of an organization and that those companies must live and breath their brand in order to successfully create valuable and valid relationships with consumers.
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