Advertising is expanding

Advertising is EXPANDING, from messaging to creating deliberate value
. What does this mean?

This is an explanation I’ve written in order to explain one of the major changes to marketing and advertising in plain English to some brilliant students who have been visiting us. I thought it could create some value on this blog as well.

Hopefully it would be in line with the Resurfacing mindset I wrote about back in january.

For a long time advertising has been mostly about interrupting people with messages, the goal of these message is to create awareness and interest, but more importantly to create anticipation for the experience of using the product. You watch an ad by Nike, and you imagine the running experience to be fantastic with their shoes and clothes on.

This is all well and good, and these messages are built to give people personal preference and good reasons to buy stuff… But then something happened. When increased accessibility started to affect how we communicated with and used digital technology we started looking at different opportunities.

Messaging-advertising is all about talking to the consumer before or after they’ve used a product in order to affect how they perceive the experience of using it. We create anticipation, and we manipulate the part of the process where the consumer makes up their mind.

But suddenly, with the accessibility of new technology, we are given the opportunity to be present when the experience happens – when people are actually running

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. Not just before or after it has happened.

And this changes everything, it opens up an opportunity to add value to the experience itself (not only talk about it). And in this situation, when people are running. it’s not about interrupting them, telling them how brilliant their shoes are. Its about adding value to the experience, making the running experience better, enhancing it, adding new concepts to it. And this is services. Where brands interact with consumers as they are using their products

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But the important thing here, is that it is not old or new advertising, it is traditional message based advertising, and new activity based advertising. Both of them are still highly relevant, and serves different purposes. It is up to the category of brand, product and experience to find out which one to use (or both).

That is why we say that when it comes to the traditional stuff, it’s all about giving people reasons to buy stuff, but when it comes to situations or activities its all about adding value to the experience.

The new way of doing things, the activity based advertising, has one main goal, inspired by Trevor Edwards back in 2007:

The main goal of advertising is not to create a message, but to connect with or create relations with your consumers and participants.