Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Ekrem Dupanović
For years now, year after year, I read how digital advertising has taken over the TV. It has been at least seven or eight years since various world-wide authorities in the field of digital started convincing us that television is dead, but it seems that no one has ever told that to the TV. And today, in the summer, double edition, of the Slovenian Marketing Magazine, I read how Mary Meeker, in her latest digital trends forecast, announced that in 2017, online advertising will take over the TV advertising globally. And Mary Meeker isn’t just anybody. She is the leading researcher and analyst at the American venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and each year she prepares a massive presentation of digital trends. Never heard of Mary or her company (uninformed shmuck), I immediately put them in the lengthy list of authorities and trends that were imposed on us in the last few years – of which nothing actually came true.
Tech giants (Google and Facebook above all), through their lobbyists and influential people around the world (who are on their pay lists), have been trying to convince us in something that is simply not true for years. In doing so, they use some of the world-famous conferences and festivals as the training grounds – including Cannes Lions. Since every trend reaches us with about two years delay, we are in a safe zone, because in those two years, about 75% of the trends just flunk – those same trends which some Mary had told us about at a conference or a festival somewhere, convincing us they are inevitable, they are already here, they will conquer the world, etc. etc. Humans have been telling stories four thousands of years, ever since the cavemen who drew pictures on the cave walls to say something and tell their story. But the communication industry opened our eyes just a few years ago, for the purpose of Digital, with Storytelling. At the right time, and in the right place, the right person mentioned Storytelling and it spread like a virus across the world overnight. Man finally, after four thousand years, started speaking, and started listening. “Consumers need to be told stories”, and since that is the case, “digital is the most convenient for that.” At a conference in Rovinj, I listened to a man who had come to take a whopping sum for a 45-minute lecture, and he concluded with a sentence: “What am I really trying to tell you? If you want to attract the attention of your consumers, you have to have an interesting story for them!” Oh, f..k that’s deep. Content! Oh yes. They also invented Content for us only a couple of years ago. Wooow, that’s it. Content! That’s great. So what were advertisers offering us so far, if it wasn’t content? Good or bad, it was always content. This no longer applies. Now Content is the buzz.
Try to remember. About a dozen or so years ago digital came into our professional lives with great pomp. Overnight, we started raising walls in the agencies between the digital departments and mere mortals who stayed in the traditional advertising department, waiting for them to leave the agency one day, when digital reigns supreme. Borders were set, digital was privileged. The next step was the separation of digital from the classic agencies. Digital agencies with full digital service started setting up. The “classic” teams shrunk, digital teams grew, and search for digital experts began. And then, the tech giants – who by then had already filled their pockets with money – started to buy and pay everything in the world to go into one final offensive for the destruction of the classic media. For them, the classic media are something like ISIS is to the rest of the world. They should be destroyed. This curse is an age long one: The more you have, the more you need. Thus Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube and the rest of the gang want to scoop up everything, so there would be no more television, no more print media, no more radio, there would be nothing in the world besides them. Three years ago, at the Branding Conference in Sarajevo, I heard a lecture by the regional director of Google from Zagreb (I didn’t even try to remember her name), who utterly arrogantly and boastfully danced on the stage and communicated with the audience in the style: “Television? Haven’t you finally realized that it is dead? (Music and dance) Print media? What? No one still told you that they no longer exist, come on… (music and dance) …” and so it went for 45 minutes. If only she knew how to dance.
And then it hit us. Someone told us that digital is just another channel of communication and that it should be treated like that. We started demolishing the built walls and abolishing dedicated digital agencies. I remember that the agency Bruketa & Žinić OM was the first to announce they are abolishing their digital agency and that digital is returning under the same roof with offline.
Through all that time, clients stood flabbergasted, uninformed and digitally uneducated. At first, they paid more attention to technology than to content and creative ideas because agencies were not immediately ready to offer that to them. The simplest way was to offer technology. Now things are changing slowly, but it’s early to talk about where this content will take us. I can’t say anything because I’m an old school generation, and I’d be risking being branded an idiot, instead of the young people whom agencies and clients, when digital is concerned, currently consider mere idiots, so since they are idiots we’ll offer them idiotic content. I’m currently going through the digital works that won awards at national and regional festivals over the last year, and I’m wondering who is really normal here. Kudos to Grey for Bedtime Storytellers, to McCann for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, to Saatchy Skopje for Sea Hero Quest, to Formitas BBDO Ljubljana for the Start It Up Slovenia Campaign which showed all the benefits of a smart link between television and internet media on the same task … I’ll let it rest here, because if I start going… But still, I have to ask you something. Do you remember the Pokémon Go game? The absolute nonsense that crazed the world a year ago? While staring at their phones, searching for Pokemon, young people were bumping into passers-by on the street, knocking their heads in the traffic lights, tripping on sidewalks and falling, toppling market stands…
Overnight, digital agencies started offering their clients to put Pokéstops at their venues, to attract the attention of consumers. The world went crazy overnight. When did you last hear about the Pokémon or started looking for them? And that was just a year ago. The taste from the cabbage roll I ate on the New Year’s Eve is stronger in my mouth after eight months than is the memory of Pokemon in the people’s brains. Or am I living on some other planet?
Digital is undoubtedly the future of the communications industry. Digital media are the future of the media industry. We’re also a digital medium, so we won’t start doing a disservice to ourselves. But do social networks really have to reach their future leaving dead bodies in their wake (television, newspapers and radio stations)? Of course they don’t. They’re just impatient. They don’t feel like waiting for some normal media evolution to happen. They want it now and immediately. If only they could put the billions of dollars invested in TV advertising into their own pockets – right now. It doesn’t go like that. Television today is stronger than ever and records growth rates. Last year one British national association published data according to which television reported growth in ad revenue. And what’s most interesting is the fact that the biggest advertisers on British television are Facebook (first place) and Google (third place), the two tech giants who have long since declared the television dead.
Yesterday we published information that Facebook’s advertising revenue in the first quarter grew by 45% and reached $9.3 billion. Does this tell you that the TV is dead? Not by a long shot. There certainly is diverting of resources from TV to digital, but one does not exclude the other. Only together they can be very efficient and successful. The TV was born, but the radio did not die. It adapted. Digital was born, television is still very much live and kicking, only print media are in a bad position because they have not adapted, they haven’t found new business models, at least not in our region.
As far as digital advertising is concerned, let me just remind you that Google recently admitted that 50 percent of paid ads have never been shown, that the ‘like farms’ in the Philippines, Indonesia, and some other countries where people used to click the entire day for those who paid for Facebook and Google, today are replaced by bots around the globe, who like and lie 24/7 in the name of the tech giants.
Read carefully what media are writing, and think with your own head. Inform yourself and do not let them fool you.
(It seems that the heat is getting to me).
Sarajevo, 3 August 2017.