Advertising,Luddites,don,despa marketing Advertising Luddites don’t despair. We really need you more

Automation technologies represent a fundamental aspect of any modern industry. The major types of industrial automation solutions, such as DCS, PLC, SCADA, and MES, are used on a large-scale in process and discrete industries.DCS technologie Awhile ago, I got an email from one of the "gurus" I follow and it shocked me. The gist of it was this person wanted to trade services for a household item.To say it floored me would be an understatement.What was worse was a few days later t

Because the digital freaks are trying to take over your world.Someone said very frequently about the state of advertising and the future,"We have to recast the whole of the advertising world to cope with the digital age".The digital freaks have two distinguishing features.. The first is the crass assumption that certain technological advances are good in themselves. Which is obviously nonsense. The second feature is the delusion that anybody not agreeing with them is a Luddite.Frankly I don’t think that we should, as we appear to be doing, overreact to the emerging digital technology.After all lets face it, all this new, exciting, technology is utterly dependent, in the end, upon human beings!And don’t you know, as Advertising Professionals, that we all depend, in the end, upon a human being reacting to our advertising?The accusation has been made that advertising has already dehumanised and depersonalised the world we live in. All this sparkly new digital technology does, in the end, is to dehumanise and depersonalise it even further.When we click on a button on our PC, we all know that when we receive a response of whatever kind, it has been produced by a piece of software programming.Yes, the new technology is transforming our lives and it is leading to, in many respects, a loss of control.It has been said that you, the advertisers, are in deep trouble as people can now either screen out the advertisements or compare products and prices world-wide.However, dear Advertising Luddite, you have the answer to the problem right there in the palm of your hand.You could become a hero, you could re-establish, to a degree, existing media channels, magazines, newspapers and, more importantly, terrestrial TV, as the pre-eminent media.After all it has suited your purpose admirably for the last one hundred years or so and there is no reason at all that it does not continue that way for the foreseeable future. Yes you will have to change some of your ways, yes you will have to become far more accountable than you are now, in point of fact, you are not at all at the moment!But more importantly than that, you will have to change the way in which you understand and regard the word "communication".So may we review advertising together with that rather complicated process of communication ?Due to a lack of understanding of the communication process you have helped create a media society during the past 40 or 50 years, where the whole process has been de-humanised. There is now an extraordinary reduction in interaction because conventional advertising and marketing have become a one-way practice whereby information is disseminated in a passive form.However, people still have this desire to be taken account of. To affect change, to learn and personalise their relationship with their environment. There are a phenomenal number of reasons that cause people to interact, going far beyond just giving them things.All of the advertising you have been responsible for is a form of learning, whereby you have been asking people to change their behaviour after learning the benefits of the products or services you were promoting. However you, like all other advertising Luddites, chose to overlook the fact that your customer filtered out information, which they did not want to hear. This clearly alters the effectiveness of your advertising in quite a dramatic way.The final purchase decision is invariably a compromise and this leads to a certain amount of anxiety; the worry that perhaps the decision was not the best or the right one. In order to minimise this anxiety your purchaser seeks to reinforce their choice and begins to take more notice of their chosen product’s marketing communications.Additionally you must change in the way you think about media, there has to be a major shift away from thinking about media as ‘channels’ down which you tip messages and information. Now we must get down to the fundamentally most important element of your advertising growth, that of interactive communication.So, you ask, "precisely what do you mean by interaction"?Well, Interaction can be defined simply as straightforward communication between two parties. Presently we are in danger of losing the real meaning of interaction, as we tend to focus discussions on the emerging technologies and neglect the communication process itself. With an understanding of the real meaning of Interactive Communication, existing media can be made interactive, and subsequently far more cost effective.Interactive Marketing Communication turns passive advertising into active advertising and actually alters behaviour during the communication and learning process.That is why it essential to fully understand and comprehend the meaning of the word communication…to interact is to communicate all else is a sheer waste of time, energy and money…your money!Let us recall the essential elements of business, and especially Advertising and Marketing-as-usual, in the 20th Century. Mass production and its attendant economies of scales exemplified business for most of the past 100 years.Perhaps the reason for this hanging on to the past way of doing things is the persistence of mass media, which came about as a result of the needs of business as a way of reaching mass markets.Now you have a massive task ahead of you, you have to remould traditional thinking regarding "mass marketing", you have to re-educate mass media, they have to realise that they have to recast their own thinking in the way you, in the future, are going to use their medium.Despite all of this you still have a vital role to play in the marketing of your Clients products or services, you have everything to gain once you introduce the concept of interactive communication because interaction is, and will continue to be, the only game in town!