Advertising's reason for being

Well, I have been in this predicament.

Imagine a cold and dirty train station in Moscow; imagine a sweaty local store in Kuala Lumpur. In both instances I could not speak the language, nor was I understood in my mother tongue. It was bloody awful; I was feeling lost and out of control until -

There it was, a can of Dove deodorant - staring at me from across the isle, saying, "Hello, I am your friend, you know me; you and I have a relationship, you carry me around in your bag every day, you can trust me."

Oh, and then I saw a Kit Kat; phew, what a relief. Less successful on the vodka front, of course, and the toothpaste - well, I found something strange from Unilever but as I knew and trusted the mother brand I, I somewhat reluctantly placed it in my basket.

A reminder

And that experience, dear friends and colleagues, is actually a reminder of our reason for being. Too basic? Maybe. But based on a human truth? Absolutely.

Brands have value to us as users. And we as advertisers create and evolve great brands. Period. Or is this really the case today?

So what then has changed? Why are we feeling a little out of our boots?

From the early days of creating brands, according to David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach and many others, to having to understand where the real power lies today, our eyes need to be wide open. We along with our world have to evolve. And evolve. And evolve.

Change and death - the only two things that life guarantees us.

Some non-negotiables

So how do we do this? In my humble opinion, here are some of the non-negotiables:

Stay in touch with an evolved world - life, people, the earth

Who is our customer, consumer, and brand advocate? Who are the bloggers and what are they saying? What makes them feel ok, feel great, feel hatred, feel secure? How do the brands we market fit into their lives? Do our brands have a place in their world? Do we know? Do we care? Do we listen? Do we understand?

Or do we simply bash away at tried and tested "it worked for the past five years so let's keep doing it this way" agency habits or, worse still, client dictates. Do we engage clients on how their brands and behaviours are impacting on the planet? Do we as agencies care? Do we take the moral ground or do we take the money?

Stay in touch with technology

Our world is moving - and has moved - SO FAST, that I wonder how many of us are up to speed.

Why is this important?

Because even our youngest consumers (people, smart people) are in touch are changing the world. Are experimenting. Are having their say, showing us what they will and won't accept, what they love and why. In their way, via their own intimate social networking dialogue.

There are 400 million active Facebook users today - imagine a company whose customer doubles in size each year over four consecutive years (including that of the global economic disaster). Well Facebook did; its user base has gone from 50 to 100, to 200, to now 400 million active users. To quote Mark Zuckerberg's vision, he is indeed "changing the world."

On 4 Feb 2004, Zuckerberg launched the site from his dorm room at Harvard. Using open source software and his code writing brilliance, he built a site, paid US$35 to register a web address "thefacebook.com" and paid US85$ a month to a web hosting company. The "infectious" appeal of the service went beyond what he and his mates anticipated and, within the semester at Harvard, he had a user base of 100 000 students across 30 schools. His journey then really began, as he needed to find potential investors. At one of these meetings a financier offered him US$10m on the spot for the company. He had just turned 20!

His story continues and is a wonderful one to read in full but, for the purposes of my story, it was to make the point of how savvy, bright, ambitious and headstrong young minds are today. Do you know that Zuckerberg has turned down offers to buy Facebook outright over the past six years in excess of US$10m in 2004, US$75m in 2005 and US$1billion in 2006?

As he says "The ultimate payout is not a priority. Changing the world is."

So some closing thoughts for us then are:

• Are we as communicators leading our clients based on relevant and current insights?

• Are we as agencies selling out to make our shareholders wealthy - or are we selling out to false gods to keep egos happy by winning awards for scam work?
  
• Are we genuinely deeply entrenched in our clients business? And in consumers' hearts?
  
• Are we happy to put "skin in the game" so that brand health really does touch our bottom line?

The answers to these questions will settle the debate around our reason for being. There will be those who accept the status quo and those who challenge it.