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A few decades ago, I was helping an advertising honcho craft an acceptance speech for a Lifetime Achievement Award. High on the list of reasons why advertising is a social good is that it enables citizens to access information and entertainment by providing media at a reasonable or no cost. Fast forward a few years, and the media veteran Pradeep Guha shocked the world by overtly positioning the primary role of the Times of India (TOI), once India’s newspaper of record, as an amasser of audiences for advertising to address. Pradeep’s honest assertion presaged the fall from grace of TOI and most other newspapers from a necessary read to a toilet accessory, if that.
In the realm of broadcast and cable television, the relentless pursuit of audiences for advertisers has led to a steady diet of mind-numbing soap operas and shallow news coverage. The once vibrant and diverse landscape of television has been reduced to a monotonous cycle of content, all in the name of catering to advertisers’ demands.
In the early years, social media was hailed as a tool of enlightenment and revolution, and the Arab Spring and Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution were credited to it. Today, it is seen not just as banal but as an insidious cause of rising depression among the young and tribalism at large. What gave? Once again, it was social media’s marriage with advertising. As Google (Alphabet) and Facebook (Meta) anchored their business model to advertising, they invented and nurtured algorithms that invented hordes of individuals hooked on content that amplified their worst impulses.
The rise of OTT (Over The Top) television based on a Netflix-like subscription model led to a creative renaissance that restored television content as an art form similar to the movies (the fact that film and music had survived, in the main, as art forms have to do with the fact that advertising played little or no role in their business model). To my mind, OTT’s recent experiment with advertising as a source of revenue is dangerous and could lead to an inevitable creative slide into inaneness.
The world is now seeing two revolutions.
There is now a backlash to the increasing irrelevance of traditional mass media and an increasing wariness with social media as a news and information source. As a result, social media like Instagram and, where available, TikTok (or its imitators) have become platforms for content creators across various genres. While traditional social media platforms are becoming forums for content creators aiming at the mass market, niche platforms like Substack, Medium, Reddit and YouTube are becoming platforms for niche content creators in journalism, opinion, reviews and think pieces.
In the coming years, if traditional media continues its decline, individuals or small, independent teams may take over a more significant share of the content market. While niche content on platforms like Substack and Medium is subscription or micro-payment-supported, content creators of mass platforms like Instagram and TikTok depend upon an insidious form of advertising called Influencer Marketing.
While the dispersed content-creation model gathers momentum, another revolution is afoot as AI matures and uniquely empowers individuals and businesses. In a decade or two, communication between brands and individuals will be AI mediated with an AI avatar of the brand in communication with an AI avatar of the individual. I have posited this in my MxMIndia column of Jan 2022 titled ‘The Coming Post-Digital Age’.
This will then result in a divorce between the media and advertising, leading to:
- A re-emergence of mass media, albeit with a different business model
- a repositioning of social media as a valued platform for content creators
- And more effective and efficient brand-building by marketers through direct communication and social diffusion
What do I mean by social diffusion? Globally, brands like Tesla and Apple have been built chiefly on social diffusion, which involves shared social narratives and the prosaic term unpaid media. Brands like Mercedes and BMW may have had advertising support in developed countries but have been mainly built on social diffusion in India. The guru brands – Sri Sri and Satguru – have been built through social diffusion. If Patanjali had continued to rely on social diffusion instead of relying on advertising to meet vaulting ambition, it would not be in the trouble it is today.
In conclusion, the marketing communication discipline will shift paradigm over the next decade. One dimension of the change will be technology, with the emergence of AI as the vital medium of consumer interaction. The other dimension will be social, with the slow and steady accretion of social diffusion through narratives and word-of-mouth.
Ashoke Agarrwal is a veteran advertising professional with around four decades in advertising and marketing services. Agarrwal, a chemical engineer from IIT Mumbai and a postgraduate from IIM Bangalore, is a pro-entrepreneur with past and current ventures in market research, advertising, CGI, e-learning and brand consultancy. He writes on MxMIndia every Thursday. His views here are personal.