Why Am I Paying More For Ads?

What is going on these days with advertising???

I pay escalating rates for cable to watch an ever-escalating # of commecials. I can’t change the channel or hit fast forward fast enough (if fortunate enough to have taped show on my DVR). The national news plays the same handful of Pharma brand commercials every night. How many times can they push this repeated flurry of ads on us before we get mad? I for one am mad! The amount of money expended on these expensive commercials, poured on us every night by the same marketers, is passed directly onto a consumer base choking on the cost of these same drugs. I often wonder if they’re checking the pulse of viewers to see if maybe ‘we have a problem, Houston’. I propose a new Healthcare reform initiative: Stop advertising Rx…or restrict mass ad budgets.

Or take women’s magazines. I occassionally look at the most popular ones my wife subscribes to. On page 35, you’ll find the table of contents. And if you’re patient enough, you may actually be able to find articles within these ‘ad books’. Make it a game the whole family can enjoy: ‘Find the Content’.

What these traditional marketers seemingly don’t understand is simple. It’s no longer a numbers game. Mass media is dying a slow death. Cheaper isn’t cheaper if your mass audiences are not ‘listening’.'Push marketing’ (mass ads) is slowly but definitively being replaced by ‘Pull Marketing’(a reason to buy). But not ‘pull marketing’ in the traditional sense using coupons/rebates, sweepstakes, etc… No, the future of ‘Pull Marketing’ involves one-on-one engagement with your audience and those audiences you hope to build (or ‘pull’) into a meaningful conversation. And yes, conversation can and does convert into currency for the bottom-line.

Again, why don’t advertisers simply “give me the ad money” to buy their products?  Sounds far fetched.  I am working on the solution.

Ask me a question about this or tell me what you think…it’s all about peer-to-peer conversation now.

Tagged as: blog marketing, brand marketing, business blogging, business disruption, business exchange, business transformation, conversational marketing, innovation economy, intellectual capital, jay deragon, Relationship Economy, social capital, social commerce, Social Media, social media roi