Ad People Say the Funniest Things

• What do we do when people can block or skip our ads?
• We can’t just force brand messages into customers’ faces anymore
• We have to build experiences that engage with our audience.

Good grief. As a PR person, I can only think: Welcome to the game.

The marketing industries are maturing toward a similar kind of future where nearly all the work exists on the same spectrum:

1. Identify the audience of people who should care, notably those who reach many more
2. Create something that satisfies them: entertains, informs, provokes etc
3. Distribute it to them through earning mentions from influencers, publishing owned pieces yourself and putting a little money behind the most successful of these to reach audiences beyond your bubble.

We are entering a world where everything is really PR.

Old ads, where you force an unimaginative, ridiculous message in someone’s face, are just a very bad execution of PR, with lots of money behind it. You might see a little success thanks to sheer scale — but you’ve likely missed a bigger opportunity as the cost.