Depending on who you talk to, it was either Lord Leverhulme (founder of Unilever) or John Wanamaker who first muttered the well worn phrase, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Either way, this quote is one of the most worthless pieces of word vomit spewed from the mouths of marketers today.

Are we really wasting parts of our budgets?

I have nothing against Tevor Young (@trevoryoung), but he like so many before him assumes an automatic and upfront wastage in the practice of advertising in his post (which was also featured on MarCom Pro).

But if marketers knew that they were wasting 50% of their dollars upfront, why would they continue to practice the same thing for the last hundred years? In fact, he asks this himself:

…how come many marketers are still blindly throwing money against the wall by producing (and then buying media time/space) for mediocre advertising that simply doesn’t work hard enough?

He of course suggests that we should use our money for “activities that connect with people, build trust and respect.” (Does that sound familiar?)

The bigger question, I think, is HOW do we connect with people and built trust through traditional ads?

What advertising is really about

Advertising has never been about quantifying wastage and usage. Advertising is about investing time, energy, and space in order to do two things:

1. pull immediate sales through, and
2. build a long-term brand position (and maybe now “customer relationships”)

From a marketer’s perspective, when you think of advertising as an investment designed to do very specific things, it’s tough to see how you can “waste” a certain percentage of your ad spend. Sure, you can make crappy investments that don’t get you very good returns, and in that case, the whole investment is a waste of money, not just a part of it.

So how do we make solid ad investments?

To be honest, I hate interruption-based marketing (i.e. ads), but I don’t see them going away anytime soon. Sure, they’re less effective than they once were, but is that solely because they’re based interruption, or because we’re still producing ads that would kick ass in 1999?

At #140conf ad genius Hank Wasiak (@hankwasiak) suggested that our typical way of thinking about ads won’t cut it. Presently, ads are designed to get

• Attention
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

Wasiak suggests that we have to add to that mix

• Engagement
• Shareability

Those two words, engagement and shareablity, give us an invaluable insight into how to make our ads connect with people and build trust—they give us a schema for planning our investments.

Have you ever stopped to think “how is this ad going to fit in with the creatives, message tone, and call-to-action I have in my email newsletter, my website, my social media presence, my blog…?”

If ads are going to be about person-to-person engagement and sharing, then they must plug in to every other part of your marketing plan. If you can integrate and unify your message across multiple platforms, you start to look like you have your act together.

And if people see your ads as a natural extension of your social media presence (where you get to be a real person and build trust), then suddenly they become worth while.

So before you send another ad to the printer, sit down and map out your entire customer experience. Think about every possible way your customer could come into a relationship with you. Think about targing your messages for new customers that you want to build relationships with, and for old customers with whom you already have relationships.

Ads aren’t dead yet, we just have to find a better way of using them as an extension of the human interactions that are driving sales today.

-Andrew

Photo Credit: Stephen Gibson
(budgetstoc on Stock Exchange, also at budgetstockphoto.com); original image

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keywords: advertising, engagement, Marketing, strategy, trust

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