Digital medium and messaging

Advertising At The Crossroads

Author: John Philip Jones & Mary Baumgartner Jones

Publisher: Westland Business

Pages: 272

Price: Rs 699

The digital sphere has made inroads into every aspect of business, creating an unprecedented degree of flux across the board. The contours of advertising, too, are being redrawn in line with the opportunities and challenges thrown up by this new medium.

As John Philip Jones and Mary Baumgartner Jones write in this well-researched work, Advertising at the Crossroads, “If it follows its traditional path, concentrating on low-involvement brands and with campaigns broadcast on untargeted television, advertising will be profitable but the markets will be stagnant. However, if advertising follows the new digital path, with high-involvement brands and narrowcast and targeted media, sales will grow.” The second path demands that agencies do more than tweak their operating methods.

Part-history, part-analysis, part-myth buster this book is a compelling read for practitioners and academicians alike. Most importantly, it answers one of the most-debated questions: Is advertising a strong force? The authors support the European view that advertising is not a prime mover, but is definitely an effective reinforcement that works synergistically, as part of an interconnected group of sales stimuli. This is opposed to the approach of most US practitioners that it is best to be louder and more intrusive than the rest.

The book’s voice carries immense worth given the pedigree of one of its co-authors. Mr Jones is one of the doyens of the industry, having spent 27 years each in the advertising business and as faculty member of Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University. He has to his credit 23 books. As with his earlier works, his proficiency as an industry expert, erudition as a teacher and depth as a thinker are all well in evidence. Co-author Mary Baumgartner Jones, too, brings to the table several years of industry experience.  

Advertising for low-involvement goods and services is untargeted and broadcast; it looks for buyers. On the contrary, high-involvement advertising is targeted and narrowcast; buyers seek the information contained in these ads so that they can make the right brand choice. The most important shift in the last three decades is that high-involvement products have grown while low-involvement ones have been stagnant. As the authors point out, this shift has mainly been the result of changes in consumer taste and behaviour—people are turning more discerning by the day and making more considered and expensive purchases. In this scenario, the way ahead for agencies is to embrace all forms of advertising. The authors suggest that traditional ones that are unable to adapt their systems fully could amalgamate with digital agencies, just as J Walter Thompson and Wunderman did to form Wunderman Thompson.

The duo go on to look back a few decades, dwell upon the present, and look into the future, offering a comprehensive view of the international advertising network, the different phases the industry has gone through, how it took its modern form, and the economics of advertising and brands. Once this larger canvas is drawn, the scene shifts to Asia and then to India, which is the real focus of the book—the country’s emergence on the world stage, its brands, its advertising paradigm, and so on.

The Indian and American experiences are compared throughout. They are pretty much the same, the only difference being in expenditure—Indian advertising spending is just 5 per cent of that in the US. As in many other parts of the globe, digital media advertising has been growing the fastest in India too—it rose from 14 per cent of total expenditure in 2016 to 22 per cent in 2019—and many are cashing on its dynamism.

It is against this backdrop that the authors look at the future of advertising in India. They view it through the prism of the long-term opportunities as well as problems, such as ineffective campaigns, pressures on budgets, and the dilemmas of media planning. It is notable that in this context, they do not just offer their perspectives. They incorporate the views of many who are close to the scene — a consultant panel of 20 industry figures from 13 organisations, which includes Sam Balsara, Ambi Parameswaran, Shubhranshu Singh, Hemant Malik, Vikram Garga, and C K Ranganathan. This wide variety of perspectives helps place the book in the realm of the practical.

The Indian advertisement industry is in the throes of change, and this has been triggered by digital media growth as well as increase in the volume sales of high-involvement products and services. So, where is it all headed? High-involvement advertising and narrowcast media seem to be the direction it will follow. Low-involvement will remain relatively important, but it will only be a subsidiary component in the overall picture, the authors add. The prediction is clearly about the trajectory in India, but it is also the general shape of things to come in the terrain of advertising the world over. And that makes the book a useful read for marketers, especially those struggling to embrace the digital age, to re-chart their paths accordingly.