The Changing World of Advertising and Promotion

Nearly everyone in the modern world is influenced to some degree by advertising and other forms of promotion. Organizations in both the private and public sectors have learned that the ability to communicate effectively and efficiently with their target audiences is critical to their success. Advertising and other types of promotional messages are used to sell products and services as well as to promote causes, market political candidates, and deal with societal problems such as the AIDS crisis and alcohol and drug abuse. Consumers are finding it increasingly difficult to avoid the efforts of marketers, who are constantly searching for new ways to communicate with them.

Most of the people involved in advertising and promotion will tell you that there is no more dynamic and fascinating a field to either practice or study. However, they will also tell you that the field is undergoing dramatic changes that are changing advertising and promotion for ever. The changes are coming from all sides clients demanding better results from their advertising and promotional dollars; lean but highly creative smaller adagencies; sales promotion and direct marketing firms, as well as interactive agencies, who want a larger share of the billions of dollars companies spend each year promoting their products and services; consumers who no longer respond to traditional forms of advertising; and new technologies that may reinvent the very process of advertising. As the new millennium begins, we are experiencing perhaps the most dynamic and revolutionary changes of any era in the history of marketing, as well as advertising and promotion. These changes are being driven by advances in technology and developments that have led to the rapid growth of communications through interactive media, particularly the Internet.

For decades the advertising business was dominated by large, full service Madison Avenue type agencies. The advertising strategy for a national brand involved creating one or two commercials that could be run in general interest magazines, and some sales promotion support such as coupons or premium offers. However, in today’s world there are a myriad of media outlers print, radio, cable and satellite TV, and now the Internet comporting for consumers, attention. Marketers are looking beyond the traditional media to find new and better ways to commonicate with their customers. They no longer accept on faith the value of conventional advertising placed in traditional media. The large agencies are recognizing that they must change if they hope to survive in the 21^st century. Keith Reinhard, chairman and CEO of DDB Worldwide, notes that the large agencies “have finally begun to acknowledge that this isn’t a recession we’re in, and that we’re not going back to the good old days.

In addition to redefining the role and nature of their advertising agencies, marketers are changing the way they communicate with consumers. They know they are operating in an environment where advertising messages are everywhere. Consumers channel surf past most commercials and brands promoted in traditional ways often fail. New age advertisers are redefining the notion of what an ad is and where it runs. Stealth messages are being woven into the culture and embedded into movies and TV shows or made into their own form of entertainment.