ADVERTISING AND MARKETING R.I,P.

Advertising Age recently had this article by Paul Ashby whom it transpires is pitching interactive marketing as the saviour we all need.

Here are some of the juicy bits.

“Advertising Age has just claimed that we are living in the "Post-advertising age"…… Actually we're just stuffed. Marketing & Advertising hit a tree….. There is no replacement advertising model for us to drive off in. We must bash out the dents, clear the broken glass, remove the bumper from the front wheel, and limp on as best we can. We should accommodate ourselves to that prospect…..

But behind the curve, and banging the table as ever, the marketing gurus all have not yet latched on to the rhetoric of the "new economic model"…. They are still trying to kick life back into the old one. But it becomes apparent even to the Marketing & Advertising community that there is to be no return to that golden decade of no hard choices and uninterrupted growth….. This recession is not a failure of market economics. It is a reassertion of market economics after a decade in which we paid ourselves more than we were producing, and funded it precariously and temporarily, together with a total lack of accountability so that it took a while for the market to rumble…. Now a prosperity that always baffled ordinary citizens has collapsed.”

Fair enough but it’s a touch cynical. Clever and effective marketing is exactly what the world needs right now in whichever form it takes. Marketing creates the confidence and the relationship between brands and that consumers that helps make this world go round. I am proud of being a marketer and not ashamed to say to people I’ve advised “sometimes it’s smart to spend less – it’s always smart to zig when the others zag”. I agree with Maurice Saatchi who said:-

“Creativity is the last, legal way to secure an unfair advantage”

THEY ARE SAYING THIS WAS A MALE RECESSION

Perhaps to be a little cynical that is why it is over almost before it has started.

All the signs are that green is the colour and surge is going to replace shoots.

If you believe what you read.

The story about male recession was in the Times a week or so ago and was about a McKinsey study revealing an emergence of an alarming gender imbalance in the city. Women are departing in their droves through voluntary redundancy, resignation or whatever. The emigration supposedly brought about by a high level of disapproval and anger at male excess and sheer bad behaviour.

One woman said “they were foul enough in the good times but now they are repellent”.

The women are off to set up their own businesses – what price the first all female bank? – now that would be a winner. And behind they leave chaos. Because without some kind of gender balance this is going to be a very unstable and erratically managed place.

If this was a male recession this loss of women terrifies me. It would terrify Tom Peters even more. It was Tom who said in Re-Imagine!

“Women make most of the buying and investment decisions. Women are better investors than men.”

He added “women roar”.

I think that’s what they’ve just done.