"The Next Big Thing"

What do you think is the next big thing in advertising/public relations? If you don't have a crystal ball or have a specific idea, talk about the general elements of the next trends in the field. What trends currently going on in ad/pr do you think are actually fads?

Advertising and PR are not my topics of expertise, so forgive me a bit if I take more of the advertised-to perspective.

Based on a lot of what we've read and considered about the impact of new media in our lives, and the trend towards personalization, interactivity and "the long tail" of things, I would venture a guess that all these same things will have a significant impact on advertising and PR.

If I look at advertising aimed at the public before I was born, I can get a sense that the advertisers were trying to convince people that their product was best, in the same way we still expect political candidates to engage us when seeking our support. Soon they started to have famous or important people tell us why they though the product was the best, in the hopes that we would follow along with those we so admired. Then it was about us, with faceless voices or simply embedded messages trying to convince us that WE could be better, faster, smarter than all the rest - if we used that product.

The common element to all these approaches is that we simply passively received the message from a single authoritative source, which controlled the shape and delivery and expereince of the advertising message. Surely, if new media is to have the same sort of impact on advertising and public relations as it has on seemingly everything else, these things will be the first to go. Vandermerwe's article seemed to understand this best by looking at the communication modes made available by new media.

You can already see this when you look at how successful technologies "advertise" themselves. There are no television ads, fliers in the mail or logos on sporting equipment for things like Flicker and Facebook yet we all know of them. Users themselves advertise the technologies, slapping logos like "Powered by Netscape" and "Support Web Standards: Use Firefox" on their own personal spaces of the Web. Users speak about, even advocate for, technologies like Tivo, becoming more ardent spokespersons than the companies that sell the products. We tend to find out about what we might like to use through people in our social sphere, or from people who have used similar products or who have similar tastes to us. My husband adds to our music collection every so often by listening to Pandora. And finally, we tend to have more personal investment in products and services we are able to contribute to. For example, users of YouTube contribute to the wealth of videos available on the service. They're far more invested in YouTube than any other video-sharing service because of this, and more likely to enagage in the kinds of activities that promote products and services in this new media enabled world.

I'm not sure how convinced I am that Immersive Ad Campaigns might be the key to the next big thing in advertising, partly because it's still such an orchestrated effort. Such things often do work, spectacularly well, once or twice before becoming "Tired". While we do gravitate towards playing the kinds of games that immersive campaigns can be, we also tire of them easily. Instead, I lean more towards Marken's simple message of effective email. It seems a bit pedestrian these days (is email old new media?) but it's an easy was to start the cascade effect of user supported advertising by keeping the message clear, simple and portable.

I also agree with the New York times article, "Madison Avenue's 30-second Spot Remover,", that technology is goign to wreak havoc on the agency business and that, despite the possibilities, that consumers are so swamped with pitches that they tune them out. I know I do.

In fact, several years ago I decided to make my home environment as advertising-free as possible, at least on the surface. I'd noticed that photos of dreamy, comforting and clearly restful rooms, gardens, spas and other physical spaces in lifestyle and home and garden magazines were often devoid of any advertising. So, I took to recycling the cereal box as soon as it came home from the grocery store (putting the contents in a glass jar). I tossed fliers and junk mail as soon as I took them out of the mailbox. Bathroom products whose labels I could not remove were relegated to baskets, boxes and drawers. The effect is startling and apparently noticeable to many who visit; I regularly get comments on how "restful" my home is.

This doesn't mean I'm an advertising agency's worst nightmare however. Not only am I still exposed to advertising in several traditional mediums, but I'm also a part of the effect of new media in helping others advertise. Several of my friends know of my knowledge for cooking techniques because of my online activity. Subsequently they came to me for advice on a brand of cookware. I might write of the same on a blog and provide a link to an electric tea kettle I recommend. And I quite deliberately peruse the smaller ads in my cooking magazines, visiting websites of specialty dinnerware. In other words, there are places where I can't escape advertising, places where I still seek it out, and new media arenas where I advocate for the products and services that I prefer. I'm just not going to allow it to passively surround me any longer.

The problem then, is in measuring the effectiveness of the message and the channels it is put through for any given product or service. Wu explores this a bit in the article, Conceptualizing and Measuring the Perceived Interactivity of Websites about measuring the interactivity of websites. But as we've seen before, this can be problematic, especially given the problems inherent in operationalizing "interactivity" (and quite possibly, "web site" now. But that's another essay.)

I envy them (ad and pr agencies) not the task.