Does Advertising Always Win?

I believe what we are seeing, over the course of the last 50 years or so, is a slow but steady progression to a point where advertising is unrecognizable from every other part of our lives. Television and radio may have been the first time advertisements started making their way uninvited into people’s lives. If you’ve ever seen those early TV ads it’s a little shocking how unsophisticated they were. As people pushed back against annoying TV ads, companies switched to things like product placement in the actual shows. But that was really only the beginning.

From there, strategies like native advertising, social media influencers, and more showed up. I think many people used to believe that social media would finally be a place where people could connect with each other or consume media uninterrupted. But we probably underestimated the ability of advertisers to find new and creative ways to insert themselves into new technology.

When my generation, the Millennials, came of age one of the supposed biggest insights into our group was we value experiences over things. Here was a generation of people that was not concerned with consumerism – they just wanted to live in the world and grow as people. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for advertising to figure out a way to take advantage of this as well. Enter experiential marketing. If you haven’t heard of it, it basically boils down to this: If people aren’t open to television ads, or targeted spots on social media, or influencers hocking their “favorite” product on YouTube, we will create an “experience” for them. This experience will be an in-person, live, real-time event that gives them a fun time with friends while also selling them a product or service.

It seems to me that whatever people are looking for, or whatever new technology emerges that offers to change society, it eventually (usually sooner rather than later) turns into a marketing tool. If we have gone from seeing advertising on billboards, to have them snuck into commercial breaks on TV, to being inserted directly into big-budget movies as part of the script, to posing as articles on respected websites, to now being the experience itself – what’s next? I mean we are literally at the point with experiential marketing where we are choosing to pay for an experience – paying to give up our time – to an event that was built first and foremost as a marketing tool. Not the other way around.

I’m curious to know what everyone thinks about a few things since this is a marketing class. First, how do we all feel about how much advertising has infiltrated our everyday lives to the degree that it has? I personally don’t have a problem with it, but I DO think that we as a society need much more media literacy. Second, what is going to be the next area that advertising makes inroads into? Some of the newest technologies are things like AI, augmented reality, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things. There is no doubt that advertising will be a feature in all these technologies and, if history is any lesson, likely become the main driving force behind them. What will advertising in these new arenas look like??