ESSAYS
ADLAND AUTHOR MARK TUNGATE
he world’s first advertisement is not recorded, though we can imagine that at some point in the Neolithic period, one enterprising stone-grinder may have lined up an innovative strategy for sharing mammoth meat.
Marketing has existed for as long as commerce and, though the technology and the psychology have evolved, the most basic tenets have remained constant: it’s about providing consumers with product information designed, in the broadest sense, to make their lives easier, and to provoke an emotional connection with a particular brand.
FROM MAD MEN TO THE MILLENNIUM Mark Tungate is a Paris-based journalist whose recent book ‘Adland’ (published by Kogan Page) tracks the global history of advertising. It’s a comprehensive account which moves from Manhattan in the 1950s to London in the 1980s, tracks the relationship between advertising and popular culture and chronicles changing attitudes – in the boardroom and the living room – to the meaning and mechanics of marketing. Since the turn of the millennium, the advertising industry – like the rest of the media – has been wrestling with the myriad challenges presented by the digital revolution. So how does Tungate view its impact? “The first point to make is that
campaigns are a lot more integrated now,” he says. “There’ll be a big idea at the top and that’s broadcast through different platforms, including social media. Initially, I think a lot of agencies were slightly frustrated with platforms like Facebook because you could create a fan page for your brand, but the content still had to be constantly
refreshed with new video and so on, which almost means going back to a conventional advertising model and just using Facebook as the platform.” The difference with social media,
however, is that brands are placing themselves in a much more intimate arena; where once an ad appeared in print, on a billboard or halfway through Coronation Street, now a brand’s marketing material might be competing with messages from users’ friends and family in their Facebook news feed. What does Tungate make of the changing context in which consumers encounter advertising?
TWITTER ONLY WORKS IF YOU KNOW HOW TO TELL STORIES”
“It depends,” he says. “As a Facebook- user myself, my eye tends to slide over advertising content because I’m looking for something that’s meaningful to me. On the other hand, it’s all about creating a dialogue. If you’ve ‘Liked’ a brand, you’ve at least shown an interest in it, so you’re legitimising it to come back to you with more information. In that respect it works. And there are brands that do attract a great deal of genuine fandom. In the book I refer to Kevin Roberts at Saatchi & Saatchi who coined the term ‘lovemarks’ to describe ‘brands that inspire loyalty beyond reason’. Facebook is a great place for that. Twitter as well, because if the brand is doing it properly you get a kind of behind-the-scenes view of what’s happening. But these things still rely on
old-fashioned skills. The Twitter feed only works if the person running it knows how to tell stories. In that respect the core skills of advertising are still relevant.
“What advertisers like about all this is
they can encourage users to participate with brands and help them create content. A couple of years ago Heineken were encouraging people to take pictures of bottles in unusual
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circumstances and post them on Heineken’s Facebook page. That’s an interesting way of getting consumers directly involved in a branding effort which you see a lot of now, and it would never have happened before social media. It’s a way of getting people to express their comfort with a brand and become part of that brand’s history – part of its advertising heritage. If people are doing that in their daily lives with a brand, it shows that the relationship is well developed and solid.”
CONVERGENCE AND DIFFRACTION Back in 2006 academic Henry Jenkins wrote an influential book analysing the post-millennial media landscape entitled ‘Convergence Culture’. It was a view from the crossroads – or more accurately the multi-lane intersection – where old and new technology collided. There Jenkins offered a definition of convergence which highlighted the significance not of hardware, but the tendency towards greater interactivity between consumers and publishers and the way a single message (or film, or TV show) was distributed through different channels. In his book Tungate suggests that advertising in the digital age is about diffraction rather than convergence. “What I mean by that,” he says, “is
that a campaign can now spread across many different media channels without losing any sense of the overall, guiding idea. If the central idea of Coke, for example, is ‘happiness in a bottle’ how can you express that idea across as many platforms as possible to hit your target audience? The more touchpoints you have the more of your target market’s attention you have. That’s what I mean by diffraction. It’s not about everybody converging on one central point in the home or on a mobile device. It’s now about reaching people on as many platforms as possible – some traditional and some digital.”
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