Marketers Are Weakening Marketing

I had a wonderful experience with Harrison Troughton Wunderman a few years back. I was invited, along with Martin Thomas, then with Nylon, to discuss ‘responsible communications’ in marketing.

Thomas’s point was simple. Marketers spend their lives ensuring that wherever and whenever the consumer looks, they see the message. Usually this results in a diagram of an unfortunate consumer being assuaged from all sides by an army of communications arrows. We ‘immerse’ the consumer, with ‘total communications’ that are experienced ‘360 degrees’. We trade utility and discernment for ubiquity and repetition.

And as we do this, the clutter that marketing communications has become, increases. Three billboard ads where once there was one. Four pop-up web ads per hour on a screen when once there was none. As an industry, our prime goal is to discover ever more annoying, repetitive and unwelcome ways to immerse our unfortunate target segment (and the rest of the population) in the brand. Our response to clutter is more clutter.

The marketing communications industry must pull itself out of this ever-decreasing spiral of clutter. But how is this possible? The only communications industry exempt from clutter is public relations. PR has avoided the clutter trap, not through any advanced approach from PR professionals (that’ll be the day), but because any and all PR attempts are limited by the discretionary force that is the editorial team.

Every PR agency in the land would also gladly pepper our newspapers and magazines with a thousand unwelcome, repetitive and tedious stories about their clients’ products if they could. But they must first pass the critical evaluation of the editorial team at each media outlet target. Editors ensure that the only PR to reach the consumer through their pages is relevant to the consumer, interesting, new and worthwhile.

So to save the marketing communications industry, I suggest we set up a national foundation called Filter – the Foundation Intent on Limitations through Editorial Responsibility. I will become chief editor for all marketing communications in the UK and the US, with the power to ban any and all clutter-creating marketing.

I would prevent any ads from being repeated more than five times a month.

I would limit the number of print ads to 5% of the total content of a publication. I would ban all ambient advertising. Unsolicited telemarketing would be made illegal. All direct mail would be banned, unless it could clearly be demonstrated that 75% of the recipients would welcome being targeted. The distribution of junk e-mails promoting prescription drugs or penis-enlargement devices would be punishable by death.

And it would work. Not only would consumers breathe a sigh of relief, but marketing communications would start to be effective again. Clutter isn’t just bad for customers, it’s bad for us. Sadly, Filter will never become a reality, so it’s up to the industry to produce less repetitive, lazily conceived crap and more communication that is interesting, different, useful and effective.

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