When is it time?

Have you ever genuinely clicked on an ad based on your search history?

In my experience of the interweb, if I’ve already browsed for a product and gone elsewhere I either don’t want it, or I have a reason to delay the purchase. It’s that simple.

Showing me a small banner ad, reminding me that the product exists (after I have JUST looked at it), is not going to change my mind.

Maybe I’m out of touch. Maybe I’m cynical. I’m probably both.

But I have a feeling this opinion is more widespread than we like to admit. Probably within advertising. Definitely outside of it.

The great digital revolution in marketing promised us so much. Improved targeting, programmatic, 101 new ways to spy on people, and DATA.

SO. MUCH. DATA.

We all got very excited, didn’t we?

I’d be an idiot to say all of it is negative all of the time. It’s definitely not. I have, in multiple blogs, said there is a place for ‘digital’ marketing – even though calling it ‘digital’ marketing in a digital world is ridiculous.

Plus, loads of us got a shiny new word in our job titles, right?!

But, a few things aside, has everything actually got better?

Well… since this revolution, the quality and public perception of our output has fallen considerably. Now, call me crazy, but doesn’t that mean we should re-evaluate?

Surely it’s time to lower our weapons? Put down the 90%-social-budgets, and the Tik-Tok-strategy-meetings. Call off the optimisation-fests.

Maybe, just maybe, we should go backwards a bit? You know, to the time when it all worked better? Or – and this is truly bonkers – we could take the best bits of the new and combine with the old?

Christ. Now I’ve truly lost it.

I think by now we can prove beyond reasonable doubt that advertising is not a science. It’s an art. The decades of success treating it as the latter, trump the failed debut-decade of the former. By far.

Sure, data and digital has it’s place. But our focus is, and has been for too long, all wrong.

It wasn’t what we thought it would be. We need to re-evaluate.

Is it time to re-evaluate yet?