Rant: The Message in Marketing...

The following is the repost of a rant originally published in 2015. Some things change daily... some don't... 

"So... I really, really want to talk about how excited I am that we can all watch videos about my newest idea."

How may televised interviews with entrepreneurs and media artists have you seen lately that begin with the word, "So"? Maybe because I wasn't born in the eighties or later, it jars me every time I hear it. What surprises me the most is how frequently I hear it. Aside from its hurried style and less-than-sincere tone, I wonder where the younger business people, writers and media artists who use it constantly learned how to communicate? Given an on-the-air opportunity to pitch their idea, service or product effectively, they instead launch into a "hand-held-camera" style of speech: jittery, nervous and prone to skip ahead. Little help comes from most of the interviewers who seem to be more interested in fulfilling the time-count than capturing useful information for their viewers.

It probably annoys me more because of my years working actively in marketing and advertising. Back in the day, ad men were taught to show some respect for the market and especially for the target. Talking "down" to your prospective customer was strictly forbidden. You didn't want to write or speak in a stilted manner, but you didn't want to sound like a feckless teenager either. Now, it seems perfectly acceptable for a business person to speak to their target audience as if they were all rushing down the hall in their dorm, trying to get to a class.

The idea of life-style appeal wasn't lost on me, but to dumb-down the message really gives the consumer every opportunity not to listen to it. It makes it unimportant, no matter how "high-energy" or young-vernacular it might be.

When I was coming up in the business, I was taken under the wing of a succession of older, knowledgeable professional people. I learned from making mistakes, of course, but also by seeing how carefully crafting a pitch message could pay off in improved recognition and product sales. As I watch what passes for the current refinement of the techniques of the biz in commercials and pitch interviews, I'm beginning to get the impression that the intent and consideration of the core of the message has been lost along the way.

Not that the current video crop aren’t beautifully produced and edited. Not that lifestyle appeal isn't reinforced in the choices of diverse spokespersons wearing bright, engaging, diverse-themed clothing. No, those values are all very "current", upscale and culturally sensitive. However, what I'm seeing more and more is evidence that the state of the art in marketing has moved from improved product awareness and positioning, to high-recognition for the producer's portfolio and resume. I can't even begin to count all the commercials I've been seeing that fail to end on a logo image or any visual reinforcement of just who is footing the bill for putting the message out.

When "trademarks" were so strongly touted beginning in the late 1940s and name branding became the focus of the advertising industry in the 1950s and 1960s, it was for a reason. There was a lot of money and time put into empirical studies of how humans reacted to images and how much repetition was necessary to achieve recognition. Both psychologists and neurologists were brought in to discuss and investigate the hard-wired side of our memory and our emotional responses.

Today however, the selfie is king. Conscious direction and planning in marketing seem to have been discarded as so "old-tech" they are just not useful. What replaces them is a focus and concentration upon individual moments frozen in time, then looped together. Engaging as they might be, they are very easy to forget. Impressions that only feed the most fleeting emotions without addressing any real thought are very easy to completely forget.

Which is why despite enjoying the production values in a flashy, new commercial for a chain of shoe stores, I couldn't tell you which store or even the names of the brands carried. But it might be because I'm too old, or too male, or just out-of-the-loop.

So... maybe we should really be talking about just what the messages we send are really supposed to do?

You think?