Advertising platforms - whether analogue or digital, print or moving - outdo themselves with the production of numerical material that documents the advertiser beyond doubt: the biggest, best and most beautiful target group sticks right here in each case and is thus defencelessly ready to have advertising shoved in front of their noses. The target group itself, however, zaps away, doesn't look at all, is annoyed and scrolls over it as if it didn't know these promising statistics. And they don't.
This reminds me of the Peter Greenaway film "Drowning by Numbers", which won an award in Cannes in 1988. The film is about a grandmother, her daughter and her niece who drowned their husbands, and about the investigator in these murder cases. As a cinematic stylistic element, Greenaway uses rules of the game, repetition and - as the title already reveals - numbers. Repetition, clinging to rules, numbers and ultimately drowning ... apart from the fact that they were drowned by the ladies instead of putting on concrete slippers themselves, this metaphor fits wonderfully with the image that the entangled advertising and media industry has been portraying for decades.
Has anyone noticed that the number-crunching, the hunt for more contacts and better click-through rates, the desperate data collection, targeting and re-targeting to catch people who actually want to see something completely different is one of the main reasons, if not the only reason, that people actually want to see something completely different? One day you accidentally click on a lawnmower on Amazon and for the next three weeks it follows you around the internet as if you actually had a garden.
Let's face it, whining about the problems of getting advertising exposure is nothing more than tiptoeing around an inconvenient truth. People, the methods that have brought us success for over a hundred years are no longer working. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, "We can't solve problems with the same methods we used to create them!" We have to radically change our methods. And our way of thinking first of all.
Despite all the necessity to use data smartly in media planning & Co, in the end data remains just data. And we are so busy measuring public opinion that we completely forget what our job is: shaping opinion, generating opinion, helping to shape opinion. A value-rich brand story with value-rich content is the only method that brings sustainable success. Brands must have meaning in people's lives with their communication, be useful beyond the product benefit.
Should we say goodbye to data? No. But we need to go full steam ahead and develop new methods and metrics to assess the true effectiveness of marketing communications. How do we measure relevance and Time with Brand, because that's what counts? Ever since the first mammoth retailer opened in Neandertal, it's been the same question: how do we get, keep and reward attention? In the meantime, we've become a pretty big bunch of Neanderthals - shouting around is no longer enough. And the club certainly isn't.
No one has claimed that it is easy. For those who want it to be easy, I recommend continuing as before, clinging to the good old numbers and going down with them. The good thing is that it won't take long.