idea > logic > magic

Whilst re-reading Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram recently, I came across the following passage: ‘Still, she was beautiful. Hers was a big, lovely, empty face: the face of a pom-pom girl at a football match, the face advertisers use to help them sell preposterous and irrelevant things.’  And it got me thinking.

Has the advertising industry really changed the way they think about communicating their messages, or are they simply trying to find new ways of re-hashing  age-old concepts? We need to consider the fact that the world around us is changing. And it’s possible that people are slowly developing a resistance to pretty and vacuous pictures that are meant to represent an aspirational outcome. That they may never attain.

People’s needs and wants must soon be measured in different ways, and not simply by LSM’s, demographics and psychographic profiles. Since most people are constantly innovating daily in order to stay ahead of the game or merely to survive, isn’t it perhaps time that we looked at more relevant ways of talking to them in their own words, and not just with pretty pictures and ‘cleverly’ researched, well-written copy?

Finding innovative ways of building communities and then communicating with them is probably going to become the way products and services are marketed into the future.

Let’s see if advertisers actually have something relevant to say behind the pictures of those shiny, happy people. And applaud those who’re trying to think differently – and not just for the sake of being different. Just a thought…