Ken Auletta had a nice article in last week’s New Yorker asking the question we’ve been asking around here recently—does advertising work? The short answer, we think, is that advertising is just like any other “content.” If it’s good, it works. If it’s bad, it doesn’t. That doesn’t go very far in describing or explaining the trillion-dollar advertising industry today, and we’re forever intrigued by the imbalance between the cost of a page of advertising versus the cost of a page of edit. (Speak with a commercial photographer sometime for a graphic description of the contrast between ad budgets and edit budgets.)
We felt a little short-changed by Auletta’s piece, though, because he focused almost entirely on TV advertising; he made some of the usual common-sense observations about web advertising, and did not even mention print advertising. The reason to focus on TV is because it has a more easily reduced history— there was a time, he points out, when a major ad buy on one of the three national TV networks would literally reach 80 percent of the public. That sort of audience consolidation ought to result in a pretty clear picture of whether (TV) advertising works in any meaningful sense.
As any advertising professional can tell you, one cannot think too simplistically about advertising. If you buy an over-the-counter ad and expect to see an immediate increase in business, you will be disappointed. This partly explains the massive explosion of the ad industry in the past fifty years—an ad is not in itself a commodity, and therefore the people who conceive, create, and buy ads rely on developing a relationship. Today, ad people call themselves “partners in your branding initiative”—and they fulfill the McLuhanesque prophecy in which the package fully eclipses the product. (In fact, the advertising begins to eclipse the physical packaging; it’s an information age in an attention economy, baby!)
The point of all this is a simple one: Contrast. Distinguishing yourself in a busy, noisy marketplace is ninety-five percent of the battle. That is why we read and actually enjoyed Tina Brown’s little whine yesterday at the Washington Post—and why it always gets our hackles up when someone says nobody under the age of fifty is interested in reading long-form narrative journalism. “Elitist” is just a dirty word for contrarians, troublemakers, smart-alecks, and bred-in-the-bone attention-getters, and they are ultimately the only real economic engines in a marketplace that would die without constant, fresh inputs of restless novelty. Julie Caniglia recently foretold the rapture that may one day attend the End Times of ad-driven consumerism and media. She noted that inner peace is not a revenue-generating proposition for capitalism. In other words, we may not know whether advertising works. But we do know that not advertising does not work. You don’t want to be left behind, do you?
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