Some say that the act of advertising is actually a very natural trend : there are the flowers, with their wonderful colors and shapes; or the roosters, with their plumage and their songs; and even the human being, trying to convince others, from the most primitive instinctive times, of his strength or his beauty. And what is all this but advertising?
In a society like ours, based on consumption, its importance is evident; and not only as an economic engine, but as a way of life, since it supports fashions, customs and even culture . A successful ad involves the product itself, but also projects the tastes and feelings that dominate at the time.
Thus, the slogan of Nike’s advertisements – Just do it -, in addition to being a great success for the brand, shows a whole philosophy of life . Do you like to drive ?, from the famous BMW campaign, are words that evoke traveling pleasures and a feeling of freedom. The controversial campaigns of United Colors of Benetton have also been engraved in the collective memory, due to all their involvement in social values – linked to issues such as religion, race or homosexuality. Or the good impact of evoking the intimate world of the home – and more so in a monarchical country – that has the phrase The independent republic of your home , by Ikea.
A perfect bet in the middle of Christmas
And if we look into the more recent past, who does not remember the Leo Burnett agency campaign for the 2015 Christmas Lottery draw? The story of Justino, the night security guard who is left with a winning lottery ticket by his colleagues on one of the factory mannequins. Well, according to the latest Gunn Report –world index of creative excellence in advertising–, published last February, Justino’s has become the most awarded ad in the world in 2016 , with a total of 48 awards, including a Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions 2016, the most important international festival.
Less endearing but just as effective, because it fulfills the objective of leaving no one indifferent , is Chicfy ‘s cutrelux spot – an application for buying and selling clothes only for girls – devised by the producer Randm: proof that it has had a deep impact is how popular it is he has become his most emblematic phrase: “Of course, handsome.” This ad generates such a sentiment controversy that it could well be considered the worst ad of 2016 … well the best.
The ubiquitous entity that happens to be advertising is what it is today especially since the Industrial Revolution. Mass production, which since the nineteenth century spread the industrial waves that emerged in England energized by its colonial empire, required a tailored propaganda. There were many more products to sell and many more people to sell them to – potential consumers who, furthermore, with increased education, could read. Advertising was thus doomed to become an industry on its own as well.
Managed by advertising companies or agencies, it found its main route of expansion through newspaper and magazine advertisements, which at that time appeared everywhere thanks to precisely that same mass production. In the 20s of the last century, another alternative medium was added, which came to expand and give sound to the advertisements: the radio. This is how advertising began to be more invasive, since what is heard does not require the intention or the effort of the act of reading.
And it became even more dominant when the images illustrated the message: television erupts in the 1950s and, with it, the road ahead until today was already more than sown. Territory paid so that, in the 90s, no one would be scared of the dominance taking that for advertising meant the arrival of the internet.
And we are already entering the time of big data, neuromarketing and all the paraphernalia on which today’s advertising rides, which takes for granted premises such as the importance of presentation over other competitive resources, which increasingly invades the field intimate of the individual and handles the tricks learned and the shortcuts provided by technology with the same ease when it comes to selling a product or when promoting a political party.
But how did we get to this state of affairs? Someone had to think of advertising as it is done today, right? Londoner Thomas James Barratt (1841-1914) is considered the promoter of modern marketing o because in his campaign for Pears soaps, at the end of the 19th century, he included slogans designed for a specific audience along with suggestive images, he managed to associate the product to a high regard for culture and quality and defined the brand image as canon. Some of his maxims still fit today: “Tastes change, fashions change and the publicist has to change with them.”
Big data and neuromarketing, two new tools
There are the advertising machinery and all its resources chasing the consumer through the ups and downs that social networks make and break so quickly. The abundant global data on any individual or issue – big data – and the knowledge of the brain mechanism that is activated when something is desired, highlighted by neuromarketing, are some of its advanced tools. In the words of Ana Alonso, director of Strategic Planning of the advertising agency Dommo.x, “big data and neuromarketing are a great opportunity to increase efficiency through hypersegmentation: information is power.”
This monitoring of trends would not have been possible, especially in the current vertigo of fashions and media that change incessantly, without the infrastructure that absorbs, drags or reinvents these movements: agencies . Covering in the same company all the actions that advertising entails was a shock at the time. Of course, the initiative arose in the country of the Industrial Revolution par excellence, England, in the early 19th century.
In 1800, a certain James White was the first who, in addition to acquiring advertising space for companies, wrote the advertisements . From there, both in Great Britain and in the United States, the idea took hold and was completed through large agencies that made history and that would shape the current formula. If you’ve seen the television series Mad Men , starring actor Jon Hamm, you will have a pretty good idea of how these agencies worked in the 60s: in fact, it works at times almost like a documentary about what advertising was like at one time. of which we are direct heirs.
Of course, today specialization and diversification are the order of the day among agencies . Those that cover the entire process –contracting, creativity, dissemination, monitoring… – are called full services; those of general advertising are those that do not cover all the phases and sell creativity by subcontracting the rest of the services; The purchasing center is defined as those that channel the advertising contracted by direct advertisers or other agencies to the media; and on the rise are digital ones, focused on the internet.
Different branches of science, at your service
Each advertising company model, apart from looking for the infallible recipe, makes appropriate use of the concepts and techniques that have been defining the advertising activity in recent times. In the nineteenth century, it occurred to publicists to resort to psychology, sociology and linguistics to refine objectives and tasks. And in the twentieth century, researchers like George Gallup and Daniel Starch created research companies to thoroughly study people’s behavior and mindsets regarding shopping and habits.
Instintivism, behaviorism, psychoanalysis and motivationalism are psychological currents that advertisements continue to draw on. There are the contributions of psychologists like John B. Watson and Walter D. Scott. A phrase of this has been inscribed in the ideology of modern advertising: “Man has been called a rational animal, but, with great success, could be called the creature of suggestion .”
There was the crux of the matter: you had to suggest the potential buyer, and nothing better than doing it indirectly. It is one of the ideas that turned Albert Lasker and his activity in Chicago in the first half of the last century into the germ of current marketing. Indirectly seducing the consumer through cultural or social incentives is a very established idea , as can be seen in the sponsorship of all kinds of activities carried out by brands and companies.
This indirect advertising has found an incessant mine in the digital world, reaching the high invasive level that now collides with the intimate ethics and the saturation of the public. And it is that, according to Alonso emphasizes, “it is not necessary to saturate attacking the privacy of the consumer: we all want personalized offers, adapted to our needs , but what we do not want is to feel attacked”.
In fact, this question already began to be raised when advertising expanded the means of expansion. In 1919, North American radio stations began broadcasting it in a row as they continue to do all over the planet today. Then came the sponsored programs and then the promotion of products inserted by the announcers themselves. The word emphasis is still very effective today , especially on music channels, where the commercials fit easily into the listeners’ ears. Investment in radio advertising reached 458 million in Spain in 2016, according to the advertising database Infoadex.
In the paper press (newspapers, Sunday newspapers and magazines), Spanish spending on advertising –always according to the same source– was 903.4 million. Gone are those times when this medium was the first and only one in the development of mass advertisements, like posters and other foreign resources, in which investment in our country in 2016 was 343.6 million. Those advertisements in newspapers and posters from the 19th and early 20th centuries were the origin of everything: first, pure information; then sparkling messages; later, intertwined with images … All of this is the basis of what continues to be deployed today with the desire to remain in the face of tough competition posed by new media.
Television is still the queen of the media
Television is in the same struggle, although it maintains its clear dominance: 2,121.9 million euros made up Spanish spending in 2016 on television promotion. Global statistics show that this type of marketing continues to be the most effective when combining the strength of messages and scenes, continuing to occupy the maximum audience levels and allowing selective advertising in line with the type of program, the audience it is directed to and even geographic and cultural coordinates.
That does not mean that the Internet is making its way with force, to take that first position in more and more sectors of the audience. It all started with the first spam sent by email on May 3, 1978 by publicist Gary Thuerk. Then, in 1993, the first banner arrived, and a year later, a web magazine, HotWired, was the first to sell space to advertisers.
In 1996, the innovation came from DoubleClick, the first company to offer and develop advertisements on the internet. At the end of the decade, pop-ups , pop-up window advertisements that the ExitExchange company claims to have invented, were the alternative to the banner ; although this regained its presence as of 2007 thanks to retargeting – a technology that, through cookies , locates the user’s tastes in order, at any moment, to show them advertisements that expand the offer of the products sought.
And more possibilities opened up in 2000, especially when big names like Google, Facebook, YouTube or Twitter turned online advertising into an essential resource and invented their own formulas. It meant “the democratization of advertising”, clarifies José Arribas León, creative director general of the Parnaso agency, because “the internet and the digital world, thanks to their low investment and production costs, have favored the incorporation of new advertisers and the emergence of of independent personal projects, away from the big structures and the confines of multinational advertising companies “.
Thus, spending on online advertisements in 2016 reached 1,407.8 million in our country (12.6% more than the previous year). But not everything is positive. “In Spain, more than 27 million people use the internet every day – 79% of the population between 16 and 74 years old. The potential as an advertising channel is tremendous, although we must not fall into the erroneous idea that it is a unlimited media Today, according to the Association for Media Research (AIMC), the greatest concern of Spanish Internet users is the amount of advertising, above aspects such as speed, cost, security or privacy, “says Arribas León.
