Blogless

For my money, we’ve learned a lot thinking about promising in advertising. We’ve learned that you while you can’t promise something you can’t deliver, a lot of companies try to circumvent reality by promising almost nothing, insinuating anything and everything, promising something deeply vague, or adopting an ironic stance toward the whole promising practice in general. From a viewer’s perspective, that’s a whole lot of of sneakiness, and it leads to an ongoing state of consumer anxiety.

I’d like to talk briefly today about how we as designers, advertisers, and corporations, can address this problem, and why we should want to.

We consumers are jaded. That is part and parcel of living now, in the culture we live in. We’ve been lied to enough that we aren’t willing to accept that. If that’s the case, we should note, there’s no reason to think that the practices of promising something minimal, irrelevant, vague, or indefinitely deferred can go on forever with our blessing either. On the contrary, the ironic stance we’re adopting toward these promises (and their counterpart wild insinuations) seems to evidence that this paradigm is falling apart even more quickly than the last.

In short, I think the writing’s on the wall: The “lifestyle” insinuation advertising and bad promises that were meant to address the outright lies of first-generation advertising are being subsumed by a kind of third-generation advertising, one that responds to a more jaded, ironic consumer. Self-aware, hip and ironic advertising is the new "doctors recommending smoking."

But it’s much, much worse for companies. And here’s why: Ever since advertising stopped being able to outright lie to us, advertisers have assumed that the correct strategy is to make the the kinds of promises that they make progressively more oblique or minimal. They have done this, I want to argue, at the cost of brand loyalty. To today’s consumer, brand loyalty is laughable - a thing of the past. This phenomena is, I suggest, entirely a failure of advertising.

Orpheus and Eurydice, Christian Kratzenstein-Stub (1783-1816)

Consumers want to love their things. That’s what makes them consumers. But they feel like they can’t. For years, companies have tried — and now I’m not mincing words — to trick people into trusting them. Naturally, people have adapted. (That’s what we do.) So the tricks have become more and more elaborate.

On the last day of 2008, then, DLB wants to leave you with this: All canonical advertising and branding wisdom operates on premises that don’t work anymore. Somehow, somewhere back in the early days of second-gen advertising, some proto-advertising agent clearly convinced someone powerful that they way to make money was to invest in creating an aura that would sell a product. While that has been (let’s say) successful for some time, the end is in sight. With the heavy adoption of the internet, and the ability for consumers to self-publish, auras can’t sell products anymore.

Instead, looking to the future, companies need to focus on building trust through product quality and transparent communication with their customer base. (Obama understands this.) At least in our current technological situation, trust is going to have to get built in the way it did before advertising: making and keeping meaningful promises. Which means that if the advertising industry is going to continue to thrive, it’s time for it to reconsider its deepest operative premises.