Advertising is dead. Won’t sell product in our interactive age. Won’t be a good use of your marketing dollar. Can’t compete with the pack and punch from social media.
The dollars once poured into mass media are being siphoned to social media, but the fact remains that nothing sells image and brand quite like a carefully placed billboard or a familiar voice in your car during the morning commute. Especially if you’re trying to gain credibility. Advertising builds awareness. It exposes what the brand thinks of itself – what the manufacturer or service wants you to think of when they show you a fleeting :30 seconds. Advertising is a cultural mirror. And, unfortunately, shows us how mature or immature we are in our response to the material world.
For the eco-economy, this is an opportune moment to learn from the big boys and take back advertising in a way that helps build brand awareness. Advertising isn’t evil, and purchasing air time may not be the best – or most economical – way of using a marketing budget. But it works.
Green Needs Mass Media
Although, critics, like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a media monitoring group, contend that the council’s ads mistakenly “seek to change individual behavior, not social conditions,” change-agents, and companies who are urging us to become more responsible, would do better with building their image with advertising, then, get the public swayed on how fun/wonderful/inspirational/spiritual/ and good “green” is. Check out Method’s ad on You Tube.
For the big boys, who already use adverting, and want us to believe you are change agents, be honest in your message. Toyota’s new Prius recall advertisement, sounds like Nike’s press campaign waxing how altruistic their corporation is around child protection laws – after some of its manufacturing plants got caught using child labor. Advice to Toyota: get your head honchos on the screen and apologize, give a guarantee; make something honest and real of your situation. Your commercial looks like a lot of old B-roll with an actor reading your corporate apology.
Let’s use our current cultural channels more intelligently. Then, maybe – just maybe – we can make some big changes.