The Changes in Advertisement: What to Be Delivered?
The Changes in Advertisement: What to Be Delivered?
  • Boram Park
  • 승인 2016.09.07 17:30
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Claiming ‘this is not an advertisement’ ironically induces significant advertisement effects, and this is the path that advertisements tread. While customers are getting better at avoiding advertisements which ‘seem like advertisements’, companies still have no choice but ‘advertise’. The reason being, the connected world has arrived, but that world still has originally been molded by Capitalism. The change starts from the fact that individuals can possess media. ‘Crazy Friday on colleagues’ was in fact a more fascinating subject than ‘Morning Dramas on TV’, but the former lacked the method of delivery. With the revolution of digital media, majority of people with minor social influences had transformed themselves simultaneously from a pluck or ‘mass’, into ‘unique individuals’ who can impose unprecedentedly significant influences. They are no longer willing to passively sponge any advertisement even including their dislikes. The so-called ‘mass media’ has not disappeared, but it is losing its color of 1:Mass, the relationship in which mass population passively adopts unfiltered advertisements. What used to be called mass media such as TV, newspapers, magazines, and radio are now just one of many media which want to maintain optimistic relationships with current mass.
The problem is, companies that want to simultaneously deliver commercial messages continue to exist, most likely forever. In the past when the mass media such as TV, newspaper, and magazines used to intervene in between companies and customers, companies could easily transmit commercial messages. Media sold broken up spaces and advertisers could buy ‘delivery’. Then what is delivered nowadays? If the subject is wide-scope transmission to unspecified individuals, ‘what is to be shared’ is solely delivered. More specifically speaking, ‘things that are to be shared’ are shared among unspecified individuals, rendering actual deliveries. In modern individual-media society, viral manner of communication is the only way of ‘delivery’. ‘What wants to be shared’ stimulates neurons of vast media to open paths like the crossing of the Red Sea and render them to scoop up indefinitely. This sometimes leads to ‘passive adoption of advertisements by mass population’ by further extent, even compared to the past. Of course, marketers are fully aware of these circumstances. However, it is unlikely to request the marketers only the advertisements that are contagious. Top-hit advertisements in global markets have been sometimes achieved their goals with low costs, meaning that you can attribute the failure of your advertisement to the lack of producer’s genius. Frankly speaking, however, it is not realistic for commercial messages to be promoted to values that are to be shared. Furthermore, becoming viral does not necessarily mean accomplishing ultimate commercial targets. On the other hand, claiming that there is no need for advertisements by taking examples of those that provide absolute values such as Tesla, Google, and Xiaomi and other rare cases such as Honey Butter Chips is pretty much saying that so-so products and services never lead to success.
For those advertisement practitioners who question ‘then what should we do?’, I would say not doing what you dislike is the starting point of success. Kant’s categorical imperative which is acknowledged as the foundation of Western ethics, and Confucius who is an authoritative Asian philosopher claim not to do things that you dislike to others. Even the Bible emphasizes the golden rule. The key point of Design Thinking that is recently receiving attention is to abandon the perspective of producers and follow the trend of consumers.
It must be acknowledged profoundly that every consumer dislikes advertisements, because now that individuals possess media, they can easily avoid dislikes, which is significant. If we call companies’ commercial messages that customers dislike as contents, they at least need to have the ‘context’ that can be contained into ‘container’, the customers’ media. Before referring to cultural products such as movies, dramas and videos, content originally means things that are contained by something else. Even if contained in media, those that include highly poor context that is disliked by consumers cannot be contained, thus they cannot be ‘contents’. An example can be in-stream or deceiving advertisements that come out before playing videos, mostly neglected. Whereas, those advertisements that solely contain truths and sincerity can be highly useful contents for potential consumers. Consumers are not looking after the advertisements that sparkle with wit. Excuse my typical conclusion, but eventually, everything comes down to big data mining and creativity. If advertisements are delivered at the right time, at the right locations by extracting potential consumers (big data Mining), and in the righteous ways (creativity), advertisements will become ‘contents’ and media will readily open paths for them. But remember, advertisements can hardly be something that is ‘not disliked’. I mean, you hate advertisements from the beginning.