Advertising and Marketing: Not such a capital idea any more.

Let’s face it there is good advertising and there is (extremely) bad advertising.
Apparently, positive attitudes towards advertising reached their peak during the mid-1950s, when ‘pro’ attitudes reached eight on a nine point scale. However, ratings fell to three by the 1970s and have bobbed around that score ever since.
I can’t help wondering if this has something to do with marketers and advertising agencies especially abandoning their belief in ‘demonstrable product superiority’ in favour of much more fancy (and mostly vacuous) theories about how to press consumers’ emotional buttons, press their unconscious triggers, and so on.
As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, consumers didn’t necessarily respond to the pursuit of demonstrable product superiority in the ways marketers hoped. But abandoning the quest may have had much more damaging effects, such as a catastrophic loss of trust.

We really need a more ethical advertising, and our whole concept of marketing practice needs to change. We must recognise that advertising has real responsibilities and that marketing is not just about making money.
Nobody yet appears to have hit upon a solution to improving marketing, and thus advertising, yet it has to happen because they have both become a dangerous monster, in need of harness.
It has to be said that people don’t seem to like big business very much, we really don’t like the power that companies have and we certainly don’t trust them to use them in our best interests!
Advertising is not about hope but expectations, marketing is not about dreams but plans. The false prophets of modern marketing have warped more than the language of consumerism.
The future is unknowable, what can be known, commentary suggests, is that social media and the Internet is replicating the same errors old advertising and marketing committed. Somebody needs to make a move, unilaterally determining that Social Media et al are not excellent marketing vehicles – merely more clutter!

Over the past two years, that evolution [the difficulty of "influencing customers by relying solely on one-way, push advertising"] has only accelerated. More and more consumers are using digital video recorders to fast-forward through TV commercials and are consuming video content on Web sites such as YouTube and on mobile devices. Billboards alongside train lines and bus routes struggle to capture the attention of people absorbed by the screens of their smart phones. Meanwhile, today’s more empowered, critical, demanding, and price-sensitive customers are turning in ever-growing numbers to social networks, blogs, online review forums, and other channels to quench their thirst for objective advice about products and to identify brands that seem to care about forming relationships with them. Individuals even are posting their own commercials on YouTube. In short, the avenues (or touch points) customers use to interact with companies have continued to multiply.
“The problem for many companies is that the very things that make push marketing effective—tight, relatively centralized operational control over a well-defined set of channels and touch points—hold it back in the era of engagement.”