The current perspective of advertising. How YOU can help fix it.

I got word that TAC was having a guest speaker, so I went today to check it out. The speaker was Tom Czajkowski, who is an associate creative director at Carton Donofrio Partners in Baltimore. He had an interesting take on the advertising industry, and here’s a recap on what he touched upon.

He began his presentation by discussing the current state of the advertising industry. He said the business is in a weird situation because right now, people do not like us as advertisers. Most people across the board feel that advertising is interruptive, and regard it as white noise. They feel that most advertisements are out of sync with their life, and only care about selling a product. The tolerance the American people have is high, but right now they have had enough, and advertising has crossed the line bombarding them. The average American is assaulted with over 5,000 advertisements per day.

He then went on to discuss how we as advertisers can fix this problem. He presented, “Ten things you can do to transform advertising”.

1. Advertising works best when it is a mutually beneficial transaction.

2. Resist the temptation to bombard people with messages anywhere and everywhere just because you can.

3. Create, execute and deliver meaningful messages that reach the right audience in the right places at the right times.

4. Kill the fake adspeak. Always communicate with customers in honest, authentic, real ways.

5. Constantly collaborate with your customers. Really listen to their wishes and do your best to grant them. An example he gave of this was the new Domino’s campaign for a pizza turnaround.

6. Help your customers get what they need to make better decisions. A good example for this he discussed was Progressive insurance. They give customers not only their rates, but competitors’ rates as well. This keeps customers from going to other insurance websites, and ultimately gains their trust with this honest information. There is a good chance a customer will go with Progressive because of this, even if their rates are a little bit higher.

7. Enable your customers to share you messages with others.

8. Never forget your responsibility to be considerate of your customers’ time, privacy and feelings.

9. Help your clients to create better products and services that people won’t want to avoid.

10. Do your part to repair the social contract between advertising and consumers.

Tom  Czajkowski finished up by saying why this whole idea was created by his agency because they felt something needed to be done. It was in hopes of bringing together everyone in the ad business. To promote this issue, they created a website, www.stoptheadness.org. Here, it tells you how you can fix what is wrong with the ad business today. You can join an online community to talk about these issues, and you can sign a pledge to ensure they are corrected. So check it out, and we can all do our part to turn the publics’ perception of this industry around!