Advertising, Big Data and Persuasion

Advertising as we know it is changing. There are two kinds of advertising that we see now:

  1. Intrusive: This is the kind that is targeted at a customer in a moment of truth (about to buy a product/service) and will try to convince this person to buy your product/service rather than from your competitors.
  2. Persuasive: This is the kind that will create new brand associations, market categories or product positioning.

As marketers and advertisers, we need to understand and decide, based on our goals, which kind of advertising is more suited to achieve our objectives.

The intrusive advertisement will leverage big data, SoLoMo (Social, Location & mobile data) and will be tech heavy in the way the ads are designed, delivered and measured.

The Persuasive advertisement will need to leverage the ingenuity of the ad-men to create and associate strong emotional reactions to the brand.

The more innovative the product is, the more it will depend on persuasive advertisement. The more commoditized your product is, the more it will depend on Intrusive advertisement.

So, it is not a question of whether the traditional ad agencies will win the advertising wars or the Google’s and facebook. They will both need to find their space and co-exist, possibly, you might get to a stage where you shall start to see that they collaborate on accounts where together they are able to provide a holistic approach to the advertisers. I am sure that this is not far in the future.

What do you think? Do share your views with me by commenting below or by tweeting to me at @rmukeshgupta.