Is advertising dead?

Just read a fairly apocolyptic, yet very insightful article about how big brands completely misunderstanding their consumers on http://www.adrants.com

http://www.adrants.com/2007/04/marketers-meet-the-new-consumer.php#more


Is this the end of advertising? Not really... but I do think that ad agencies need to rethink how they engage their customers, especially in our current web 2.0 culture. More and more people are doing it for themselves - they don't need or possibly trust big glossy ad camapigns that showcase products yet show no interest in their potential customers... current advetising tends to be an interruptive monlogue, whereas people now want a dialogue with the products they use...

Brilliantly Boring

I read a great article in the guardian this morning examining why a webcam focussed on a piece of maturing cheddar cheese has had over 803,414 since January 2007.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2048707,00.html/

In my view, I feel that because we live in an ever more vibrant, colourful, faster world, it's actaully quite refreshing to stare at something quite inconsequential on the off chance something might happen to it. We live in a world 'just do it', 'colour like no other', 'kills more germs than any other cleaner' etc. There's pressure to sieze the day, live for the moment, because every second counds... well isn't it great sometimes to just forget all that and just sit and procrastinate for a bit and do something relentlessly meaningless... my personal favourite is, http://www.hencam.co.uk, a kind of soap opera for chickens - beats Eastenders anyday.