It’s True: Advertising Is Broken, Says McKinsey

AdAge reports that McKinsey & Co. is telling major marketers that by 2010, traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990:

That shocking statistic, delivered to the company’s Fortune 100 clients in a report on media proliferation, assumes a 15% decrease in buying power driving by cost-per-thousand rate increases; a 23% decline in ads viewed due to switching off; a 9% loss of attention to ads due to increased multitasking and a 37% decrease in message impact due to saturation.

Perhaps John Hagel is right: attention is the new scarcity, not shelf space!

Note this passage:

[Tom French, director at McKinsey] also suggests there’s a great role for chief marketing officers to play within their organizations, where they have influence over all customer-interaction channels — call centers, sales forces, retail partners — and can use those to supplement a decreasingly effective media channel.

I think what French is really trying to say is that the entire customer experience matters, and lazy marketing execs that pay exclusive attention to easy factors they can control (i.e., mainly paid media space) are toast.

 

Published by Max Kalehoff

Father, sailor and marketing executive.

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2 Comments

  1. Max, your right, marketing is not simply just advertising. The marketing concept is about building a product that customers want. That means you have to think about getting it delivered and presented in the right way as well for the customer to keep on coming back, and for your customer to recommend you to others.

  2. Max, your right, marketing is not simply just advertising. The marketing concept is about building a product that customers want. That means you have to think about getting it delivered and presented in the right way as well for the customer to keep on coming back, and for your customer to recommend you to others.

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