So I’ve been in the US for all of 3 minutes and wherever I turn, I see evidence that the media is spoon-feeding information to its consumers.
Now there could be many reasons for this, but sitting here with Andy, we’ve narrowed it down to 5 …
[1] Consumers don’t consume media, they just look at pictures.
[2] Consumers are too thick to understand any information that requires them to think.
[3] The Media are too thick to understand their consumers don’t care about what they deem newsworthy.
[4] The Media are too thick to convey information with a degree of intelligence and/or sophistication.
[5] All of the above.
Our favourite bit of ‘stating-the-bleedin’-obvious’?
This lovely picture [and astoundingly daft copy] in US magazine …
Genius … pointing out that the pic was taken ‘before he died’ – and there was us thinking Anna-Nicole Smith had got him stuffed after his tragic death and posed him like that.
The sad part is, alot of advertising is like this these days because clients and agencies think people won’t ‘get’ what they are trying to do/say. They seem to forget to ask themselves whether the product they are trying to flog – or the communication they have created – is something people want, like and are engaged by.
It’s exactly this sort of behaviour that has led to the decline/effectiveness of most communication channels as well as a distinct lack of consumer loyalty for most brands out in consumerland.
The sooner companies understand BOREDOM is not STUPIDITY, the quicker consumers will start positively reacting to communication again and the better companies sales results will be.
It’s not a hard job – infact, it’s one of the easiest ones in the World – but my God, we don’t half complicate matters, mainly because we’re all so pre-occupied with validating our jobs [and looking intelligent]
Communication companies are good at many things – pity that in alot of cases – communication is rarely it.