The Death of Advertising
OK. The much ballyhooed Death of Advertising is finally upon us. About ten years too late, but better late than never.
One of the channels that advertisers are shifting to is video games. Take, for instance, Massive. They've set up an ad platform that delivers dynamic targeted ads to any game that's part of their network and can be updated online. Good idea? Yeah. But...
The question is: is traditional advertising really dying, or is the virus just moving to a new host? Massive is a great example. Now, they might simple replace real billboards on your local highway with virtual billboards on the highways in your favorite driving game. Is this - substituting the simulation economy for the physical economy - really innovation? Is it gonna have an impact with the much-desired 21-34 year old males? Or will it end up in the same place as traditional advertising - an exclusionary Red Queen race to forcibly steal attention?
So I think the death of advertising is not upon us yet: the real death of advertising will happen when we start to see real
dialogues between producers and consumers, so value dyads can define new drivers of wealth creation and reshape old ones.
Aside: I see more and more is marketers who say 'I am having a conversation with my customer just like the digerati tell me' - but are really doing nothing of the kind (viz. Gawker adblogs). This may in fact be worse than traditional marketing - because it devalues new technology in the eyes of the consumer, who then discounts further attempts at real dialogue.