How advertising has moved from Insights to Intelligence.

Advertising has changed. And changed it has, in just over a decade and a half.

Emotional Proposition, building relationships has given way to Optimization and customer acquisition.

Consumer Insights is passé. Consumer intelligence is in.

The Liril girl and the Perfect Man do not live on your television screens anymore. In fact, it would be extremely hard to find a TV commercial that is based on an emotional proposition. Instead you will see a lot of communication on ‘Buy me and Why buy me’ advertising.

We have moved from building relationships to being transactional in our relationships.

This change didn’t happen by accident. This change is driven and continues to be driven by platforms (or mediums !?) like Google & Facebook.

So, is advertising losing its art form to embrace the science of it? May be. Or Maybe not.

Our creatives used to complain that they had to package a storyline as well as product information in 30 secs.

Google came and said, please do that in 30 characters, spaces included. And suddenly 30 secs is a luxury that we don’t have any more.

This is forcing the creatives to think (!?) harder and be even sharper in communicating the idea.

In this continuum, the language of the advertisers and agencies have moved from Reach & OTS to Optimization and Bounce Rates. Advertisers and Agencies don’t withdraw a creative based on feedback. They kill the creative based on data and efficiency.

The medium may have changed. The stimuli might have changed. But the underlying motivation for advertising & communication remains the same. Results.