Advertising 2.0

I don’t know what the future of advertising is. I can’t see the future. All I can do is the see the work concepted and produced day in, day out here at our shop. And collectively, I can make my own hypothesis:

Advertising is going social. It has to.

If the whole objective of advertising is to; A) target a niche audience, B) inform and educate said audience and C) be loyal to said audience, it’s pretty clear to see where you should go to spend your resources, time and energy – social media land.

I’m not one of those ‘social mediaites’ that live and breathe on these platforms 24/7/365. I actually have a life offline. But I do speak to social media often and find myself blogging about it just as much. I do so because I get it and it’s remarkably fascinating to me that one medium, can attract and occupy such a gigantic audience. For advertisers, this is a dream come true. For advertisers, this is an obvious approach.

The run-around of targeting audiences, learning their day-to-day initiatives, what they do, how they do it, etc. is gone. We know what they do. Where they go. Where they live. What their hobbies are. Social media has simplified the hardest part of advertising.

If you are a marketing department or an ad agency, drafting a 2010 marketing plan and it doesn’t include at least one social media initiative, you need to reevaluate. And if you or your client thinks that social media isn’t a valid resource, you’re dumb. Everyone, from generation x to generation y, has some form of social media page. There’s your target audience on a silver platter.

Not only is having a social media marketing plan smart, it also gives your clients a cool, new status. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, they’re all cool things. And people like to be cool, because most people and businesses, are not. And this is their chance. They want to tell their customers, “Follow us on Twitter.” Or, “Go to our Facebook page to sign up.” Even more, they want to add the Twitter and Facebook icons on their lame Web site, because it offers a new status. It’s shows their modern and more so, it shows that they care about their customers because they, as a company, recognize where we are – social media land.

Being creative no longer means producing memorable jingles and rhyming brand lines, it means concepting innovative solutions and approaches to interactive and social media integration and developing communication channels through digital and viral elements. It means that you must include some social media and interactive initiatives into each one of your concepts. It means creative is changing. It means concepting is changing. It all means advertising is changing.