Eyes & Ears On Social Media

Five Golden Rules In Advertising

Monday, July 21st, 2008

A couple of weeks ago I was at Ad:Tech and besides meeting some companies who treated us like idiots and some that didn’t, there was a pretty decent talk by three creative directors with their own set of “Five golden rules” in advertising.

The first and the last creative directors gave typical rules like stay true to the brand etc. Very advertising in the ’90s or web1.0. Now one of them gave five points that were much, much more relevant to this day and age:

  1. Understand your consumer
  2. Own an issue, stand for something
  3. Spark & manage a conversation
  4. Involve your audience
  5. Aim for impact

Alright understand your consumer and aim for impact are normal, but while the other two were talking about transmitting one-way messages, at least he mentioned “conversation” and involving the audience.

If you’re paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to an agency to do your advertising, wouldn’t you rather it be an interactive, engaging effort instead of one of 2 million “impressions” that registered in their peripheral vision for all of two seconds? Because if you’re still engaged in the transmit model (i.e one way monologue) as opposed to conversation and two way dialogue, it seems like a waste of time. Especially if your demo is Gen Y.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,