SAINTS PRESERVE US

White Noise, Muted

We are living in interesting, disease-ridden, hyper-sensitive times. Advertisers are confounded by the prospect of trying to deliver a message through a myriad of minefields. “We’re all in this together” isn’t good enough in days of protest like these. Last week actions spoke louder than slogans and tag lines. Canada’s major banks, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Frito-Lay among others pulled their July buys from Facebook, the world’s largest advertising platform.

Business practices aside, the forum is perceived as an evil garden filled with hostile foreign trolls, hate speech, propaganda, goopy quackery and cat videos. Facebook and its digital ilk may have devolved the human intellect back to the nadir of the Dark Ages. To be fair, nobody grasps the unintended consequences of something new when it bursts into the mundane everyday – except perhaps an aghast brand manager. At issue here is a semantic stance, Facebook’s insistence that it is a parrot and not a publisher.

Yet this big brand boycott of Facebook feels temporary, a pandering gesture much like Pride rainbow logo affectations. A stalled economy equates to hard times for anybody wishing to buy or sell anything. It’s tricky business trying to quantify an advertising campaign’s return on investment; inadequate statistics can be skewed and that’s part of the game. Should an advertiser’s portion of a consumer’s shrunken dollar decrease exponentially, it only makes sense to ramp up the spend, amplify a brand’s message and its awareness. A sliver of a pie is better than no slice at all.

The arcane value of advertising is too often all too easily dismissed. A new enterprise won’t include the expense in its business plan. Advertising is the afterthought waiting for the initial revenues to roll in. Bit of a hard sell if nobody knows. For a struggling established company advertising is the simplest budgetary cut to make. Good luck with future sales, fade to red ink. Should the aforementioned big brands really eschew Facebook, where can they turn outside of the digital realm?

Advertising and mainstream media are symbiotic industries, mutually supportive. They don’t always get along because eventually a reporter will have to file a story about the doings of an advertiser or an advertiser will bristle over a particular though informed editorial stance. The creaky old analogue system worked pretty well for both parties and the first disruptive cracks in it were almost invisible.

Network television began its lingering death throes in the 80s, decades before its broadcast signal went digital and long before anybody noticed the symptoms: dedicated cable channels, video recording devices and video cassette rental shops on every commercial street corner. The communal evenings of everybody watching the same show at the same time vanished into the night. Fast forward to today. Trophy ad spots have been reduced to play stoppages in live sports broadcasts. There are no live sports amid a global pandemic. So spare a thought for Scotiabank who bet its brand image and marketing budget on hockey.

Classified ads and automotive and real estate listings are grey stuff, no glamour. But these were the basic, ancient elements like earth, air and water, crucial to a newspaper’s survival. Those lucrative column inches migrated to the world-wide-web, settling in places like Kijiji. Internet ethos demanded that its up-to-the-minute content must be democratic and free. So why pay for this morning’s newspaper when its content is already yesterday’s news? Declining circulations reduced the reach of advertisers, and media buyers understandably insisted on paying less for less. Magazines, those weekly or monthly compendiums of news and information suffered as well as their content had yellowed into the historical even as they went to press.

It’s strange to consider that the advent of radio was once considered a threat to sheet music publishers and the nascent recording industry. The corporate conglomerate wasteland that constitutes commercial radio has now been rendered irrelevant by podcasts, satellite channels and streaming. Its formats are strict, indifferent segments of pre-programmed tastes. Nobody’s listening anymore and so why should an advertiser bother to buy chain-wide time on the generic wacky zoo morning show or the generic afternoon drive? Brands like to stand out, as they must. Radio advertising sounds the way most unaddressed admail reads: All free estimates will be matched.

Come August there will be some kind of reckoning between big brands and big tech because they need each other. We’re all aware of what becomes of media outlets when advertisers reduce or cease their spending. Conversely, beyond social media there’s no viable alternative avenue of mass reach for major advertisers. One of the interested parties will dictate the terms of pandemic advertising in the new woke world order. We’ll learn soon enough what’s cheaper, talk and posing or ad rates.                     

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of business commentary since 2013. Don’t sign up for e-mail alerts from the Crooked 9, stay safe.