No Intermediary between Brands And Consumers
For a long time, what stood between brands and people was advertising.
Advertising was the “spin of information.” For the most part, advertising wasn’t especially informative. What it lacked in information it made up in entertainment.
But today, what stands between the product and the consumer is nothing. There is no intermediary.
Today, a brand has to stand head to head with the consumer trying to compete for the sale.
For the past 50 years, companies have built brands on television. Television served as the architecture on which a brand was built. The architecture for today’s brands must be built on the consumer. This is a true structural change.
It’s been a long kept secret that advertising people are old- fashioned and the last ones to catch on. Consumers have bypassed the techniques that are used by advertisers.
To save the newspaper business as well as the rest of the media world, someone better get out there and find out what consumers really want.
This article was originally posted as a comment on News Is Dying Because Advertising Is Dying on NY Times’ Idea of the Day on April 6, 2009.