The Future of Marketing and Advertising

I gazed into my crystal ball and saw a vision of the future of marketing and advertising. OK, it was the bottom of a beer glass and an active imagination, but it was a cool vision nonetheless.

Advertising has always been tied to art, entertainment, information. It's a means of associating a product or a company with a feeling or image. Most often, these are good feelings and positive images, from the point of view of your target audience. Naturally you want to cause your target demographic to experience good feelings in association with your company, product or service.

At present there are usually a series of middlemen between the advertiser and the creative content he or she wants to be associated with. Offerings are limited, as are opportunities for the producers, by the capacity and capability of the middlemen.

While I don't expect the middlemen to disappear, I do expect their relevance to shrink dramatically as advertisers and content creators work more directly together. First the larger companies, directly producing shows rather than buying advertising space during airtime. The advertiser becomes the producer and can even become the broadcaster as both production and transmission become easier and less expensive.

The only indispensable elements in the system are the advertiser (producers of goods and services) and the creatives. While the rest may hang around, their influence will be severely diminished. It may not be the death of the salesman, but he wont be what he used to be.