Advertising's New Idea

ADVERTISING'S NEW IDEA: DON'T PUSH THE PRODUCT; PULL THE CONSUMER INSTEAD
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Steven Pearlstein]
Naked Communications' premise is simple: If you go to a coal company looking for an energy supply, you'll get coal as the recommended solution. It's the same with most advertising agencies, which rarely meet a marketing problem that cannot be solved or a sales goal that cannot be met by a TV and radio campaign supported by direct marketing, some pop-up ads on Web sites and a bit of public relations. It's what they do, the way they are organized and how they make their money. Because Naked has nothing invested in any particular solution and nothing to gain by telling its clients to spend more rather than less, its pitch is that it can offer the least-biased, most-cost-effective solutions. The message resonates with companies dissatisfied by the payoff from traditional advertising. Back in the era of mass products, mass markets and mass media, it didn't matter whether advertising was clever (Alka-Seltzer) or annoying (Charmin), or just plain boring (Chrysler, Ford, General Motors). If companies were willing to throw enough money at ads, buying enough "gross rating points," they could sell anything. "We simply bludgeoned consumers into submission," said Bob Isherwood, creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi. And the more they bludgeoned, the higher the fees, which were based almost exclusively on 15 percent commissions for purchase of TV and radio time and print space. These days, however, the power has shifted from marketer to consumer. Thanks to the Internet and TiVo, digital radio and video-on-demand, consumers decide what information and entertainment they want. Rather than simply pushing messages on consumers, the trick is to get consumers to pull them.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/21/AR200609...
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