For Christmas, my little brother gave me The End of Advertising by Andrew Essex.
I would recommend this book for someone who has worked in the advertising world for a long time or whose thoughts on advertising stem from years ago.
As a digital native and Gary Vaynerchuck fan, the concepts in the book are preaching to the choir. But I am regularly surprised by people I speak with that are way behind the times when it comes to advertising.
To Andrew’s credit, he is a storied and successful advertising man. But he is wise enough to see the changes coming and is writing this book, I think, to help awaken his colleagues to the modern realities of today.
One of the core concepts that most people to figure out is that appointment TV no longer exists. What is appointment TV? It’s TV that people watch at certain time every night/week and, therefore, are there to watch the commercials, too. But with the exception of live sports, almost no one watches live tv anymore, and almost no one watches TV commercials. (With the huge exception being the SuperBowl, even Gary Vee says that it is one of the best deals in advertising!)
This applies also to banner ads and increasingly all forms of digital marketing. Interruption-based marketing, as Seth Godin would refer to it, is becoming less and less effective. Most large companies are just riding the Titanic down to the bottom.
The second thing I loved about this book was the case study of CitiBike. Here is a link to an article Andrew wrote that gives a shorter version of the account in the book.
The big point is here: the next generation doesn’t want to watch your interruption ads. How your company deals with that will determine a lot about how your company succeeds in the next 40 years.
