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entertainment and the apocalypse

A lot has been said about advertising’s alleged dire straits and it’s soon-to-be irrelevance. This morning alone, I Googled “death of advertising,” and got 114 million results. Yes, 114 million. Clearly, there is no shortage of doomsday predictions for this business that pays my mortgage and puts food on the table for my family. What’s a boy to do? Should I pack it in now, cash out my meager retirement plans, and live off the land with Sasquatch and Sarah Palin? Or should I call caca on all of these negative prognostications and still forge ahead?

I’m going to call caca and forge ahead. The reason why? Entertainment.

Every human being wants to be entertained. Sometimes, we pay money to do so by going to the movies, the theater, the opera, concerts, whatever. Other times, entertainment comes to us in the form of TV commercials.

“Omigod, did you see the latest E-Trade commercial with the talking babies? Or that Mac vs. PC spot where the PC guy has swollen like Violet Beauregarde in Willy Wonka?” Yes, folks. It’s about entertainment.

Now, I’m not advocating entertainment for entertainment’s sake. I’m advocating the merger of entertainment with consumer insight. Says Jon Bond of Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners, “Telling and selling doesn’t work as well as it used to because I’d literally just tune out the commercial. Because of that, the merger of entertainment and selling is inevitable. Unless there is entertainment value, why would I opt in?”

Bingo. Relevance is still important. But relevance alone won’t stick unless you entertain at the same time – something “the YouTube generation of advertising has forgotten,” states Peter Krivkovich, president and CEO of Cramer-Krasselt. “You can have a brilliant, unique, funny ad, but if it’s not coupled with insight it will be forgotten.”

Oh, but people aren’t watching TV anymore, you say? But they are – and at record levels.

In the last three months of 2008 alone, Nielsen reported that “the average American television viewer is watching more than 151 hours of television per month — an ‘all-time’ high — up from more than 145 hours during the same period the previous year.”

So why all the doom and gloom? Lots of reasons. But I have a strong suspicion that the main one is the current infatuation with “new media” and how it will kick old media’s caboose. But it won’t.

Remember when people were convinced that the VCR was going to kill TV? It didn’t. Or how TiVo was supposed to nail the TV coffin shut? Ummm, that didn’t happen, either. Or how new media will now push old media’s face into the mud and watch it flail, gurgle and die? Not gonna happen. Because in this business, it isn’t about the delivery mechanism. It’s about the message, delivered in an entertaining and memorable way. Always has been, always will be.

It ain’t rocket science. Because it all boils down to one indelible truth.

As long as there are TV shows people want to watch, the boob tube will be one of the first things people click on when they get home. And your ads, with their entertainment value, will be there, too. No matter what the disciples of doom say.

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