Advertisers have become more and more difficult in the past two years. Not only have marketing budgets decreased, market competition has become more and more intense, but also users' requirements for advertising creativity have become higher and higher. In such a big environment, what should advertisers do? The author of this article expresses his opinion on this and shares it with you. It is no exaggeration to say that the changes in the advertising and marketing industry in the last two or three years may be greater than the changes in the past few decades.

It is precisely this kind of rapid change that has sparked a lot of discussions in the industry. For example, can ideas be done with machines? Will KOL replace advertising companies in the future? Can the product and effect be unified? And the previous two days of discussions around big ideas: Are ideas that <a href=" removed link " target="_blank" rel="noopener">job title email list  are mass-produced in technology "real ideas"? Do we still need creative directors? There has been a lot of discussion and controversy in the marketing industry. All the disputes mean that the advertising and marketing industry is facing a huge transformation of the times. In the final analysis, various discussions are not only about the future prospects of the marketing industry, but also about the big propositions of humanities and technology, so let’s start from this and briefly talk about our views on the marketing industry.

01 Many advertising and marketing practitioners will repeatedly think about a soul torture - is advertising a science or an art? This is the origin of almost all debates in the advertising and marketing industry, and generations of advertising creative masters have different answers to this question. If you choose "science", then you are on the same front as David Ogilvy, the Pope of Advertising, Rosser Reeves, who proposed the USP theory, and John Hopkins, who wrote the classic "Scientific Advertising". Today you may still be passionate about technical marketing, martech, data analytics, user operations. If you choose "art", you are in the same camp as Bernbach, the unsung hero of Volkswagen, Leo Burnett, the star, George Lewis, who wrote "The Blue Trick", and you may also highly respect it. Taiwanese commercials, Thai commercials, Xu Shunying and Yang Haihua may be your favorite Chinese advertisers.

Although there has been no answer to this soul torture for decades, but looking at it now, the question itself has been raised with the limitation of the times, and it has artificially opposed "science" and "art", which has caused us to fall into a misunderstanding of thinking. , has become a long-term trouble for countless advertising marketers. If we think about it from a different angle, we can jump out of this proposition and suddenly see - can science be art, and can art be science? The answer can actually be YES. 02 Another common misunderstanding is that the "scientific school" focuses on strategic derivation and rational analysis, while the "artistic school" tends to be imaginative and bold. In fact, neither the "scientific school" nor the "artistic school" can deny the value of user insight, and the basis of insight is still essentially data.

No matter how the advertising masters have a flash of inspiration after getting drunk, they can't imagine and act willfully when facing a customer brief. It is the only way to observe the market and users in a solid way. After all, the advertising and marketing industry is "dancing in shackles", not free-flying. After receiving the order from Volkswagen, Bernbach did not sit in the office thinking about ideas, nor did he find a bar for inspiration, but immediately went to the Volkswagen factory to inspect products and user needs. These information materials are today. "Data" can be digitized. Even the creative "black box algorithm" behind this "artistic" advertising master still needs data (life experience, industry research, etc.) to feed.

Ogilvy is even more maddened. Friends who have read the book "Ogilvy on Advertising" should know that a traditional newspaper, where and what font and font size should be used, he records in detail. In fact, most of Ogilvy's books do not give specific reasons, but only through the data of previous advertising and advertising, repeatedly verifying the correlation, and thus summed up a set of "best advertising plan". Many people in the advertising and marketing industry (especially some 4A friends) have mythicalized creativity, but it is difficult to admit the fact that the foundation of creativity is data collection and information decision-making. From ancient times to the present, marketing has been a matter of data industry.

03 Why is there a problem in the marketing industry today? What went wrong? We believe that it is the conflict between the new communication environment and the old mode of operation. The operation process, operation mechanism and organizational structure of advertising and marketing companies have been unable to adapt to the rapid changes in the communication environment, resulting in various contradictions. This is just like in ancient times, it was difficult for humans to obtain sugar, and thus the hunger and thirst for sugar evolved in their genes. Today, the sugar industry is extremely developed, and the desire for sugar has caused a series of diseases such as obesity and diabetes.

The external environment is changing too fast, and human biological functions have no time to adapt. Overall, the marketing industry has seen two major changes: First, the media communication environment changes. This point is often mentioned in the industry. In the marketing environment decades ago, the media was centralized and the industry changed slowly. Brands could achieve "overnight fame" by getting newspaper and TV advertisements, which also led to most of the communication modes at that time. It is a one-way output of the brand to the user. But nowadays, the media and user contacts have been fragmented, and there is almost no monopolistic communication media like CCTV more than ten years ago. At the same time, each media has its own positioning and communication rules, which leads to the traditional marketing methodology. failure in the moment.