Dumbing Down the Communications Agenda

One of us has been re-reading The Catcher in the Rye, a classic novel by JD Salinger. It touches on issues of disaffection with society where even the bland has become an accepted, sometimes heralded, norm. And boy, have we dumbed down in this country. We like to say, “tolerating Zambian adverts is a PhD in international diplomacy.” The stuff is, quite frankly, utter bollocks but you deal the hand you’re dealt in life.

Last week, we pitched to a global player in the hospitality industry. They don’t need advertising and in their own words, “we’d be paying a small fortune to have our brand laughed at.” So what do you do when a company is not spending its advertising budget but would still like to have media and customer engagement?

You look at the plausible alternatives.

That means you give your brand social currency with a very high exchange rate. Getting the public to talk about your product is the best endorsement any company can get. Anything else is porkies, a hard sell from a well-prepared script. The brand must become the message, not the interface.

Where advertising – in his words – ‘has us spending money we don’t have on shi* we don’t need’ its done well enough to build today’s biggest brands. But as the attention span of the 21^st century individual continues to dwindle (try competing with iPhones, cellphones, Twitter, Facebook, iPods), its clear that micro-communication is the way to go.

All this means brands will have to become subliminal in their approach. More above the line and less below the line. Reading that last line today doesn’t make a compelling argument for rational communication but who ever got anywhere great by being rational?