Photo credit: Wikipedia)Apple is rumored to be working on a deal with cable companies to pay them for letting viewers opt-out of watching commercials. While I've said for a while now that reports of its death were greatly exaggerated, such a set-top box would all but kill advertising as we know it.
Advertising on TV is still the best and most reliable way to sell stuff. Mainstream marketers have been slow to abandon it, not because they're dumb dinosaurs, but because they're smart businesspeople. TV ads work, perhaps not as well as they once did, but far better than any of the alternatives.
They sure get a bad rap, though.
Perhaps it's because ads are inherently disruptive. Nobody tunes in to watch ads (unless it's the Super Bowl, but those commercials aren't intended to sell anything, so they're not really ads). TV was never "free" because viewers paid for it by paying attention to the commerce inserted between programs. Ads were a necessary evil, no matter how entertainingly produced.
Maybe that's why they worked so well in the past. Ads were overtly purposed to sell things, and everyone knew it. This set up a particularly harsh and cruel litmus test for commercials - they either worked, or they didn't - but it simultaneously offered a clarity of purpose that today's alternative media don't. You don't have to figure out why you're being shown a TV commercial, or what its purveyors hope you'll do with it. No ad ever claimed to "make a friend" or "enhance a viewer's experience."
A half-century ago, David Ogilvy wrote, "I do not regard advertising as entertainment or art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don't want you to tell me that you find it 'creative.' I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product."
And there's the rub. If TV commercials provided half the truthful content they once did, along with the honesty of respecting consumers enough to make a choice, maybe people wouldn't hate them so much today.
Such blunt clarity empowers consumers to reach conclusions about the products and services the ads promote; they can say yes or no to the sales messages, which is quite empowering. So I'd posit that today's best commercials sell stuff, while the bad ones miss the mark or, more commonly, waste viewers' time with creative blather intended to avoid or otherwise obfuscate their commercial purpose (and win awards). There are a lot more of the latter being produced these days, if only because the advertising industry has forgotten its founding purpose.
As such, it's doing its best to destroy its last and best hope for being relevant to consumers.
So what happens if Apple's TV plan comes to be? Cable companies get paid for the ads that consumers are no longer watching. Since ad rates are determined by eyeball counts, those rates will decline as more viewers opted-out, so cable companies will need to figure out new ways to make money. Perhaps they'll rely more heavily on creating content, which they'd sell to Apple (or other distributors), transforming them into production companies. Most of them eventually go away, as the natural conclusion of a process begun by giving up control to Apple.
As for advertising agencies? With fewer and fewer big-ticket TV spots to produce for ever-smaller audiences, they'll have to rely on less profitable marketing communications media. Of course, all that creative talent would have to be occupied, so the world would get a lot more expertly produced video content, whether on YouTube or company websites. The problem would be that nobody would have asked for it, so it wouldn't accomplish anything close to what the spots did on TV. Nor would the other stuff the agencies produced instead (like content and social media engagement). The process of upending and, for some, destroying the livelihood of ad agencies would continue.
If I were advising the ad or cable industries, I'd take these possibilities as a huge and immediate wake-up call to get our houses in order. Much of TV advertising is created by people who misunderstand its purpose, and many consumers easily mischaracterize even the stuff that's right on target.
Imagine if advertisers and cable companies got together and made real, compelling steps to produce and deliver TV ads that people appreciated because they actually used them..and then had the audacity to tell consumers about it?
Where are the advocates talking on behalf of advertising? No, not the creatives loving one another for being so smart, or digital gurus explaining how their tools will read the writing in peoples' souls without consumers even knowing it. The world needs to hear from people who are willing to stand up for advertising as a medium for communicating truth, and describe it as a tool that's relevant to consumers' lives. People who believe in its integrity and utility. People who aren't embarrassed to admit that they're trying to sell stuff, and do so with conviction and aplomb.
Apple can't kill advertising, come to think of it. That job is already being accomplished by its practitioners. Without a serious industry-wide course change, a box that zaps commercials will only be doing everyone a favor.
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