I call it persuasive communications because the art and science of today’s advertising is so much greater than traditional advertising. I teach at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. It is reputed to be the best small university in America. Our kids are reputed to be the best of the brightest in America.
I teach two classes of 30 students who are juniors and seniors. Recently, I polled the classes. Out of 60 of these bright folks, only one has a subscription to a newspaper and only three reported reading a newspaper on a daily basis. The only time they listen to the radio is in a car when they have forgotten to take their IPod. The television is background noise while they work their computers. They thumb through some magazines but rarely subscribe to them or read through them. They do notice outdoor advertising when they are in their cars but they have been taught to reject advertising claims outright. Now admittedly this is a small sample of the future, but I should inform you that previous students at William & Mary include George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Tyler, Patrick Henry and some other famous revolutionaries.
Even if this is only a limited vision of the revolutionary future, it is bad news for advertising agencies who think in terms of only advertising in its original sense.
Not only are typical media becoming fragmented and marginalized, but the world is being inexplicably altered by what intelligence agencies call disruptive BARN technologies. These are the rapid advances in biological technologies, artificial intelligence and robotics and nano technologies. BARN advances will change the way the world is ordered and perceived by populations in the future. But it will also change the way your clients do their business and contact their customers.
In addition, culture will dramatically change. Within 20 years, among men 18 to 34 in Moscow, Muslims will be a majority. Within 40 years, Muslims will be the majority in the Russian Federation. In Europe as well as Russia, European women are projected to have 1.2 babies in their lifetime. Urban Muslim women will have six babies. Rural Muslim women will have ten babies. At the same time, the Russian working population will decline by a million persons a year – every year for the foreseeable future. Europe is sure to follow. Ditto, the Latinization of the USA and the Chinese diasporas in Asia.
What does this mean to the advertising industry? I cannot tell you that I know the answer, but I do know that culture is like water. Any home owner can tell you that water always wins. You can’t patch a leak well enough. You have to change the route of the water. Like water, culture always wins.
And what happens to the advertising industry when there is convergence between Westerners who either ignore media or are taught to disregard it, and Easterners who culturally reject the commercial world? I only know that the best and the brightest young people in Williamsburg are not reached by the ads and that 9/11 in the Middle Eastern world is not remembered as the New York disaster but as the anniversary of the defeat of the Muslim armies at Vienna on 9/11/1689.
