For about the last fifteen years or so, I disparaged digital media because so many people were gulled by it into believing communicating with other people (either one-to-many or one-to-one) would, through the magic of "free" media, be forever inexpensive or even free.
Seeing that you could make ads and run them for little or no cost--certainly not the cost of, say, a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, Time or Seventeen, led people into devaluing along the way the care they took in creating the messaging.
It's free. Keep throwing shit out there till something hits. No consideration was giving to the cost of annoying people. Digital media became a port-o-san that was never emptied, that no one would ever think would stink and overflow.
Ads, in fact, became like steak house parsley. They didn't cost much. They didn't matter much. They didn't make much of a difference. So people stopped caring.
Many of the best companies in the world, of course, were built on good advertising. Agency people and client people forgot that. They bought into "it's cheap, who cares?" And every day, we see crappy ads drain billions from the literally trillions of brand equity good advertising helped brands amass over decades and decades.
I know of no reason to buy anything anymore, whether it's a hotel room, a Caribbean destination, an automobile or a new pair of running shoes. People used to pay extra for those reasons. Now they buy whatever's cheapest and nothing has any real value anymore.
Digital media convincing advertising people and marketers that advertising and media and reaching people are free destroyed billions in brand value.
I was hired twice by Ogilvy. Once in the analog era and once in the digital era. As Mark Twain once quipped "the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
The difference between analog and digital thinking is likewise.
If I were charged with selling a new technology, I do exactly what the people who sold us on digital did. I'd say everything will save users massive amounts of time and money. Since your competitors (in my examples, old-line media and in-person training) aren't cohesive, they don't defend the strengths of their ways.
While we were counting the money that was never delivered we also bought the idea that digital can train and inculcate people and marketers cheaply and quickly. No one ever says aloud, "online training sucks. Have you ever learned anything from an HR 'don't take a bribe' video?" No one ever says, when a customer shows up, 94% of all help is either a) non-existent, b) staring at their phone, or c) staring at their 72-ounce dunkin' coffee.
We bought a lot of purported savings and we're convinced to ignore the real costs. Like the cost of paying the c-suite 300-1000x the compensation of their median employees. It's great for the c-suite. But I can't think of many healthy businesses now, from retail, to law, to healthcare, to education, to advertising. There's no money left for the people "doing the work." There's only money for the people who own the companies.
Right now communications suck because no one cares (they're 'free, after all.) And no one knows anything about the brands because they went through eight-weeks of online modules written to appeal to a brain-damaged gerbil. And besides they're earning less in real dollars than I earned in 1980, when I made $11,700.
The costs of buying a panacea hook line and sinker are always staggering and narly beyond comprehension. Whether than panacea is a new fuel that far out-performs the old one--like gasoline versus whale oil. Or a drug that will help you shed the "freshman ten" you've been adding to since 1992.
Sooner or later the unintended consequences will catch up do you. Our environment will turn on us. Our drugs will kill us. Our machines will steal our privacy.
As Malcolm prophetically said after JFK was assassinated, it's a case of "the chickens coming home to roost."
We're slogging through a lot of bird shit.
But we need the eggs.
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