Evolution vs. Extinction: How Advertising Agencies Survive

What I would have written about advertising...

1997. The final days of the golden age of advertising. A time when advertising agencies were at their peak. Confidence in advertising was high, and companies were spending a lot of money to ensure their company/product/service was represented. Advertising agencies focused on ads. Of course they did. They were advertising agencies. It’s what they were expected to do. And they did it well. But like all golden eras, things changed. And times like that faded away.

By traditional definitions, very few advertising agencies still exist. For an advertising agency in 2007, evolution is the key to survival. It’s no longer feasible to simply produce ads. Fourteen-year-old kids sitting at home on their computers can do that. Targeting an audience through mass messaging is not effective. Consumers are smarter and increasingly more bored with traditional communication. Consumers also posses a great deal of power. The Internet has opened the door to immediate AND direct consumer feedback making consumer insight and reaction (good and, more importantly, bad) instantly available.

The agency that uses this readily accessible consumer insight to identify what a consumer WANTS will be successful. THAT is what a client needs to achieve awareness – open consumer dialogue – not mass, directionless communication.

Defensive, reactive advertising is not enough. The more this information is used to better understand your consumer, the more offensive or proactive the message can become. Address the need before a consumer even knows they have it. Integrate your brand into their lives and align with their needs to establish and solidify relevance in their lives. A client’s solution lies in an agency’s ability to do this.

At Schupp Company, we still call ourselves an advertising agency. We’re proud to. It’s our definition of advertising that continuously evolves. Because as we learn more about what each consumer wants, the more we can help our clients better understand what they need to do to keep them.