The death of the campaign

The unwritten rule of the PR blogosphere is that you’re not allowed to be an A-Lister until you declare something dead. What can I say? It’s a morbid profession.

This is something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot lately, and I’ve come to the conclusion that as the mediascape continues to shift toward an always-on, on-demand world, the notion of the advertising campaign makes less and less sense.

Advertising campaigns are short because traditionally, they had to be. Campaigns were based around television and print flight dates and took different approaches – sometimes staggered, sometimes increasing, sometimes steady. Advertisers would shout a message at us until we were numb to it, and then they would change their message to something new and exciting so that we would pay attention again.

This, it has been noted, is not a sustsainable advertising model in a million channel universe where consumers have dozens of electronic and personal filters at their disposal. Instead, we switch to interactive and social media, allowing consumers to interact with the brand in a meaningful way, to give instant feedback, and to give audiences a message they want instead of shoving one down their throat.

Now that advertisers are beginning to realize the importance of these tools in their communications arsenal, they’re beginning to ask for it. The problem is, they’re asking for it to be integrated into their campaigns, which typically have a flight date of 2 or 3 months, and, at least for Canadian brands, are geographically targeted.

When it comes to things like social networking, blogging, social media and the like, the typical notion of the campaign makes absolutely no sense. Joining a community of your consumers and participating in a meaningful way takes time, and unless you’re doing it yourself, takes a fair amount of money. That’s fine – there’s a lot of value to this kind of interaction with your key markets, as long as you can reach a state of sustained inertia. In the campaign model, however, there is no time for inertia. We need results now, and three months from now, we won’t even think of this campaign, until we submit it for an award to show how creative we are.

The environment has changed and therefore so must our approach. The longer we try to cram a square peg into a newly-round hole, the more our industry is going to suffer. I’m convinced after this weeks conference and conversations I’ve had, that we as an industry are at least talking the talk, but my sense is that it’s more of an “I want one of those” approaches rather than a real understanding of the underlying principles of the new marketing arena.

Of course, messaging and product launches must be timely, but if agencies and marketers are going to work together to bring brands to their communities, we need to work together to stop compartmentalizing our approach into a finite window of time, only to throw it out and start all over again when we’re done.

Community is constantly evolving. Attempting to cram it into an ad flight is counterproductive and will ultimately fail. Once we kill the idea of the campaign and think of marketing and community as a living organism that needs time to thrive, we’ll all be better off.