Right Back Where We Started
The Devolution of Advertising Man
By Mike Einstein

Ever see one of those human evolutionary charts? You know,
the ones that provide a visual timeline of our journey
from primordial ooze to glass tower?

Let me suggest that this same chart provides a good analogy
for our industry, except we need to hold it up to a mirror
to get the full impact, because advertising in general,
and media in particular, are heading straight back to the
swamp.

What’s more, whereas we’ve been perfecting our posture for
7 million years, our virtual devolution has taken only six
decades.

To illustrate this thesis, let’s equate the sponsored
content model that spawned the golden age of radio and
television back in the late 1930s and ’40s with today’s
Homo sapiens. Back then, content was king and advertisers
controlled their own destinies. Agencies were named after
real people, and audiences were easily reachable and happy
to oblige.

Enter the commercial pod in the 1950s (Homo clutterus), and
the beginning of our trek backwards begins in earnest, with
more advertisers competing for and encouraging shorter
attention spans through a growing assault on our senses and
sensibilities.

The downward pressure continues to build with the introduct-
ion of FM radio (Paranthropus Marconius) and independent
television stations soon thereafter. Momentum takes control
and the audience grows more fragmented; the media gene pool
more diluted and polluted.

The TV remote control (finally, a real use for opposable
thumbs) and cable television (Australopithecus Ted
Turnerus) arrive on the scene and our backs begin to
stoop under the weight of too much media The Internet
(Dryopithecus Googleus) explodes before our very eyes and
we feel our knuckles reaching for the ground.

What did our soap-peddling ancestors understand about the
causal relationship between content and audience that we’ve
lost sight of over the past 60 years? With online video
content all the current rage, perhaps the answer lies
within one of three cogent questions advertisers can and
should ask themselves and/or their agencies:

1) Am I better off rubbing elbows with video content, other
advertisers, and audiences on a third-party publisher’s
site?

2) Am I better off rubbing elbows with video content, other
advertisers, and audiences on the content provider’s
site?

3) Am I better off hosting both content and audience all by
myself on my site?

With industry-average CTRs based on “legitimate” impressions
(no RON crap allowed) now congregating south of .1%,
question #1 answers itself with a resounding “NO”. The
same goes for question #2.

But if you answered “Yes” to question #3, congratulations!
You’ve escaped the revolving door to Darwin’s waiting room
(thanks, Dennis Miller) and are well on your way to media
survival in the 21st century!

Interestingly enough, content providers and publishers also
stand to benefit through this re-discovery of what works by
abandoning their misguided territorial claims to content
and allowing it to work its magic where it can work best,
front and center within the branded surroundings of the
advertiser who’s picking up the tab.

Whether we choose to believe it (let alone accept it) or
not, we are now playing witness to the demise of advertis-
ing as intermediary and to the resurrection of advertising
as destination. That’s because no other model except
advertising as destination embraces the three truths of
media on-demand:

1) Nobody demands more advertising.
2) Everybody demands more video.
3) Nobody and everybody are the same people.

Because we’re so invested in the advertising as intermediary
model our industry keeps targeting behavior hit-and-miss in
the rearview mirror rather than tapping behavior that we
know for certain already exists. We’ve devolved to where we
now define ad-supported media as advertisers supporting
content, rather than content supporting advertisers.

The course is clear. The way forward is to head right
back where we started.

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About Mike Einstein and the Brothers Einstein

Mike Einstein is one-half of the Brothers Einstein, a
creative strategy and branding boutique. The Brothers
Einstein work with very select rapid-growth clients to
help define and execute healthy brand strategies in a
toxic media environment.

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Questions? Comments? Email me at: quote (at) Quotes2u.com
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