Marketing For Power Packed Business Growth

Having read David Ogilvy's book "Ogilvy on Advertising" again I thought it would be useful to review his predictions on the future of advertising.

As he says "I've never been a futurist" and his publisher insisted that he have a go at predicting change. I've used his original bullet points (shortened) as the headings.

As he had a number of points to make I'll split this over 3 or 4 posts so that neither of us gets fed up.

So here we go...

Quality of Research Will Improve

I think that there is no doubt that with the Internet the amount of research that can be done has increased exponentially. That means that data can be cross-checked which in itself improves data quality.

I've posted before on focus groups and my opinion is that they don't really help with discovering whether your market is buying what you sell.

So that quality (i.e. reliability of the data) is suspect.

There Will Be A Renaissance in Print Advertising

The Internet has encouraged people to advertise more online. In fact print, TV and radio adverts have been diverted onto the Internet.

With good reason...

The Internet now allows us to do micro advertising where we can target very, very small sub-markets of a major market, such as insurance buyers.

That means the cost of advertising to sales drops significantly.

Advertising Will Contain More
Information And Less Hot Air

I'd like to believe that is the case but if you look at advertising today there is a lot of "brand awareness" hot air that doesn't sell products.

Ogilvy himself said, ""Research has demonstrated that a shocking percentage of viewers remember your commercial, but forget the name of your product".

And worse than than that he says, "All too often they attribute
your commercial to a competing brand."

Human nature doesn't change so what's the chance of that view changing now?

Zero to nil I suspect.

So much for advertising for branding purposes!

Billboards Will Be Abolished

No, and thrice times no!

In fact billboards have become ever more inventive. Now you find several different variants, including:

• Ones that rotate through a series of adverts
• Ones that use LCD screens as part of the billboard
• Ones that temporarily cover complete sides of buildings

Sport stadium billboards are big business, particularly with a country's most popular sport. In the UK that's football, rugby and cricket.

And given the vast number of anglers I wouldn't be surprised to see hoardings along famous fishing rivers.

In the next post I'll talk about TV, Radio and government advertising.

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