To the death of piggy spiv advertising.

Everything is wrong with advertising, and that will become clear over the next few years. Almost all business plans based on advertising will fail. The amount of money being spent on advertising will decrease. The number of spivs that the advertising industry can find meaningless work for will plummet. And this is a damn good thing.

Bold words, and sure to met with chuckles from the spivs currently dreaming up the next big advertising platform – maybe it’s mobile, maybe it’s online. They’ll be laughing all the way to the piggy-bank, little piggy tails bobbing, while anti-business, idealist anarchists are force-fed our own words. Or so they dream. This is the first in a series of posts explaining why we’ll be having a big piggy barbecue soon, and why we should be already smelling the bacon.

One of the reason the pig-spivs are deluded is that they don’t have a clue what advertising is. To them, advertising is either defined existentially as ‘what advertising people get paid for’ or recursively as ‘what advertising budgets are for.’ Deconstructing google’s marketing the ‘ad’ in Adwords refers to the budget-line that they get paid from rather than what they’re doing.

Alongside this Orwellian pig-spiv wordplay comes another odd assumption. That advertising in some way makes things cheaper. Having advertising on my mobile phone makes my mobile phone free; having advertising in a newspaper makes the journalism available for free. When you put it like that, it’s clear that advertising merely moves end-user cost from one activity, say journalism, and adds it on to another, say making cars. Now this may be a bargain we’re willing to strike, but, overall, it means that things cost more – largely to no-one’s benefit.

Reflect a while on this: the current economic difficulties are, to some degree, caused by folks in the States defaulting on their home-loans, often to pay medical and drug bills to companies that spend more in advertising than in either production or research. This is not a smart state of affairs.

One sliver of advertising that I think is safe is what I’m going to call ‘yellow pages advertising’. I have a need for something, and I want to see who can satisfy that need. And, crucially, I search to satisfy that need. Whether that’s by going to the yellow pages, searching on google, visiting a price comparison site, I search. The internet has made this process more information-rich, perhaps more price sensitive. The cost we bear for this advertising – being advertised to is always something that costs us in the end – pays for better information. I think that’s ok.

Most advertising, though, is of a different sort – I’m going to call it ’shove advertising’. It’s aim is either to push a product on to us, to influence our view of a product, or to create a demand where none existed. Because its aim is to distract rather than to inform – it’s aim is to make us do something that we hadn’t planned to, spend money we weren’t going to. It’s in essence distracting, intrusive. In essence I say to avoid this very odd assumption that there’s a holy grail in relevancy which can somehow make intrusions welcome, distractions non-distracting. Relevancy is the pig-spiv’s silk purse. Trying to turn shove advertising into yellow pages advertising. A shove is a shove – unless I’m being pushed out of the way of a speeding bendy-bus, shoves just aren’t welcome.

That’s enough for now, in the next post, I’m going to expand on why shove advertising has grown so prevalent, and why it won’t last. And why I believe the internet has changed this. Hopefully forever.