end of the ad?

Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine writes often about the intersection between media, news, advertising, and the internet. His latest book is "What Would Google Do?", and in recent interviews he's posited something I find pretty interesting: the idea that advertising, as we know is, is pretty much over:

"Advertising is failure. If you have a great product or service customers sell for you and a great relationship with those customers, you don't need to advertise."

Now this, he admits, might be going a bit far - obviously, if you have a new product and no market awareness, you're going to have to do some advertising. But Jarvis suggests that the marketing relationship between company and consumer is changing, and changing fast. He suggests that the openness of the internet means that your product and your pricing are open for all to see - and in effect, your product becomes all the advertisement you need.

Instead, then, companies ought to consider spending their ad dollars on a more extended campaign to cultivate relationships with their consumers, for example - spending those ad dollars on online customer service, and calling that marketing.

In an interview on C-Span, Jarvis talked of the shifting roles of advertising and PR in a company's marketing strategy. Previously, advertising would make up the bulk of a marketing plan, and the public relations strategy would fill in the holes - essentially performing a stopgap measure. Jarvis envisions a new world where the flipside is true: advertising will end up filling in the gaps of a marketing plan that a strong PR plan can't address.

The reason why PR will be pushed to the forefront is that companies marketing online are now involving their customers to participate in their product to such a degree that these efforts amount to a long-term public relations campaign that has much less use for an advertisement. Continuous input and interaction with customers - with customers even contributing self-made testimonials or messages reinforcing the company's product - is an ideal that bypasses the need to create ad hype, and to the consumer, may feel far more genuine.

The Vest advertising blog points to several examples of this move from advertising to a more sustained, long-term "PR campaign" in which companies have created sites intended to foster very high degrees of consumer participation. The most interesting is The Potty Project from Huggies, where several real families and their babies represent different potty training "styles." These families are blogging, submitting video diaries, and using the site as a platform to discuss the difficult and confusing process of toilet-training a young child.

This to me illustrates very clearly that indeed, advertising - in the form of 30 second spots, inserted into my Hulu or my NYT - isn't dying, necessarily (Jarvis can get a little hyperbolic) - but I do believe that the kind of thing that Huggies is doing with the Potty Project is the direction marketing should be moving in - instead of producing diapers and a series of ads to sell them, Huggies is creating a platform for people to gather. It's a radical re-thinking of what marketing a product even means.

The consumer goods producers aren't the only ones starting to think this way - Rupert Murdoch and management at the NYTimes have both indicated that they are working on developing software to host blogs - to also essentially become platforms for other writers and bloggers.

It seems like the best marketing message you can send to your customer isn't so much about your product but your relationships with them - and now instead of talking about how you're "there" for your customer in a fifteen second advertisement, you can actually make these relationships manifest.