Coping with the post-advertising age

I started work in advertising just over 30 years ago in October 1975. I remember well my first day at an agency. There was a sense that I was not just entering an office, but a kind of cultural and creative emporium of our times.

I knew well why I wanted to work in advertising. It was for the experience. My ultimate destination was politics but I wanted to learn. So I chose advertising because I wanted to penetrate the very heart of modern communications.

In truth, I was not very good at it but I loved working in advertising. I loved the people, the creativity, the energy. Probably the main thing I learnt was that there is no division between private and public organisations when it comes to decency and moral purpose. Ever since then, in any professional or personal situation, I have always been drawn towards advertising people and the advertising process.

But time has not been kind to advertising. The building where I started to work still stands, but the agency – Wasey Campbell Ewald – has long gone, mutated into endless sets of initials and now called I know not what.

This seems a kind of metaphor for what has happened to advertising over the past 30 years. The buildings stand but the intellectual preeminence and communications power has wilted. Agencies have risen and fallen and the business of advertising has continued, but the context in which adverting is conducted has changed.

Advertising was once the sun at the assured centre of a constellation of stars. Now it is a fragment in an exponentially exploding communications universe. Thirty years has seen a complete and utter transformation in the nature of global communications.

The exponential increase in the quantity of media has been matched by changes in its character. It is now far more negative, moving towards what Professor Stephen Carter calls the 'politics of personal destructiveness'.

The mass media has fragmented, fractured and succumbed to its destructive darker side.

We have seen, in the last two decades, a revolution that amounts to a 'communications big bang', with communication forms, methods and media blasting through space with ever increasing speed and in greater quantity.

LESSONS FROM THE POLITICAL ARENA

Politics has recognised this new diversity in communications. Karl Rove, the George W. Bush campaign strategist, has said privately that what mattered to him was forcing messages through free media and connecting directly with voters through word of mouth and personalised communication. Traditional advertising was simply not as important as it once was. You had to do it but it was no longer decisive.

Word of mouth was what Bush's campaign was about. Everything, was boiled down to the message of security, and campaign volunteers were not asked to stuff envelopes but instead had to write down the names of their friends who, as the campaign progressed, would gently be persuaded by the volunteer to vote Republican.

These sweeping changes in communications have not occurred in isolation. The consumer has changed hugely in 30 years: a 'typical' consumer is less trusting, more demanding, more empowered, more sceptical, much more knowing and more questioning.

Furthermore, global migration, global terror, growing fundamentalism and a crisis of identity across the world have led to a new politics of identity, and this has amplified the power of global media. Crimes of terror have morphed into crimes of communication. They are seen by billions and therefore, they are powerful.

It is no longer possible to ignore the death in Africa of 6,600 people every day of the AIDS/HIV virus. A striking response to this is the American Express RED card, an icon of capitalism has been transformed into an icon of compassion, forging new marketing ground.

This is the start of a tidal wave of ethical business. Pressure groups are no longer marginal, they have become mainstream.

If anyone feels we nearing the end of a curve of change, they could not be more wrong. There has been more change in the last 30 years than the last 100 or more. The next 50 years will see change of a totally different order of magnitude.

THE FUTURE FOR ADVERTISING

This is truly a post-advertising world. How do CEOs, marketing directors and advertising agencies make sense of this?

Although the world has changed, fundamentally the architecture of the advertising industry is still basically intact. Advertising agencies have changed commendably, but they are still usually the first port of call for many marketing directors seeking to connect to the world. I am not sure that this is right.

We need to build a new communications architecture for the new times. The starting point for any kind of organisation is the understanding that it is existing in a volatile environment in which everything around it is constantly changing; it is continually vulnerable to threat but there are potential opportunities.

Seamless communication requires a seamless organisational structure. Demarcations of different media were valid once but are now redundant. Companies need to create new forms of communications structures that meet their new needs.

I think modern communications now require a 'central brain' – a nerve centre that has the speed, flexibility, responsiveness, strategic capacity and operational capability to deal with a complex communications flow.

The point of this nerve centre is to rise above the pre-existing communications divisions. They must be servants to only one master.

All successful political campaigns now operate on this basis, drawing together key communications skills and expertise into one core function – typically called the war room. The flow of politics is so fast, the need to react so great and the speed of response so demanding that only an integrated communications core can succeed.

The purpose of a communications nerve centre is threefold: to coordinate strategy, knowledge and message – and the greatest of these is strategy.

Strategy

If I have learnt one thing in working for 20 years in politics it is that with strategy you will win, without it you will lose. Successful strategists must have 360° vision, open to the often chaotic and unpredictable flow of communications that surrounds them, but always looking for the big decisive insight that makes sense of it all.

This is the process I call strategic synthesis. It is a dynamic process, always moving forward but always grounded in what has gone before. This process of evaluating and synthesising means that strategy is never still. Once implemented, it begins invariably to become redundant.

Knowledge

It follows that to have this view of strategy, based on 360° vision, that you must have a mechanism for obtaining 360° knowledge.

To obtain simplicity you must know complexity. I no longer own a polling company but I still must declare an interest here. I am passionately committed to polling, and most polling that I see simply fails to get close to meeting modern communications needs.

It tends, as far as I can see, to be diagnostic, which means a few focus groups, or evaluative, defined by tracking and measurement of consumer behaviour and attitudes over long time frames.

Both of these polling methods are important, but both are inadequate. We need new kinds of polling for the new communications environment. In the last election I developed something called 'wrap around polling', which tries to reach public opinion from a multitude of different perspectives.

We used focus groups, internet panels, strategic polling, daily tracking and marginal polling. It involves using polling for two purposes: first to develop the right strategy and the right message to maximise communications effectiveness, and second to predict, using research as radar to find early any signs of movement that could either be a threat or opportunity. 360° polling of this sort is now not a luxury for a modern business, it is a necessity.

Message

The third weapon is message. Without a strong message you will not be heard, and you effectively will not exist. James Carville used to say that he could tell a successful campaign by one thing: did it have a message, did it a have a rationale for winning the election?

This is a very good test: in 2000 Al Gore lost the US Presidential election because he did not have a message; in 2004 John Kerry lost because he too was lacking a message. In both elections George W. Bush won because he had a very simple message: 'I will keep America secure'.

My conclusions about advertising have used lessons from politics, because politics could be thought of as corporate communication in a different form.

This is a long way from my first day in advertising all those years before. Those next 10 years were the most fun I have ever had in my life. Because so much in society and technology has changed, the architecture of marketing and communications must also change, but whatever the building, the spirit of advertising lives on, and I am proud to have been part of it.

This article featured in Market Leader, Summer 2006.