AaaS – Advertising as a Service
After a while, back to blog. A month of intensive Chinese languange in WeiHai (Shandong-China), taking the GMAT exam (660 marks) and the TOEFL (110 marks), kept me quite busy.
Internet allows brands to remove intermediaries to talk to their customers and they are doing it. This is why, probably, we start listening topics like “Is the Advertising Model Dead?” (by the way, after watching the video that question remains, of course, unanswered). Do we need to use Advertising, considered as placing messages in third parties places, in order to talk to our existing customers or increase our customer base?
Converting advertising into a service is something successfuly done by Google. Most people do not identify AdWords as advertising. By making ads very relevant, they are even a service. This makes ads a very acceptable reality. By contrast, irrelevant ads placed “for branding” wherever as long as it is cheap (bulk), is deffinitely getting into trouble (in other words, into an ever decreasing CPM).
CPMs trend are an objective reality and a result of a growing audience without a growing investment. And, in the other hand, they are a great opportunity and, finally, the way of reaching independent media. Socially, a decreasing role of mass-bulk-indiscriminated advertising is an step forward. The marketing mix is swifting towards more importance of price, place and product while promotion starts to be rooted on those three qualities and, therefore, word of mouth, than in pushed messages. IKEA, Ryanair, Dell, Google, and many others know it and focus on them investing less in advertising than companies previously doing the same.
For human, the fact that added value comes more from product and convenience to reach it in terms of price and location, is going back to a reality we have been forgetting after being pushed to a supposed and imaginary value. Imagination and aspiration will continue to play a role, but, likely (and hopefuly) less relevant.
In this environment we are already, and this is how we have to think on adding value to our audiences. Advertising should also be a service, and media can still play a role, within this new game. The opportunity is not pushing commercial messages to our readers, but, on the contrary, letting them know exactly what product is best and cheaper, where to get it, and how to better use it.
