What Kinds of Ads Will Work in the Future?

For those of you non-sports fans reading this, I apologize in advance for another sports reference, but I’ll keep it very short. I recall the days no more than 15 years ago when baseball stadiums only had a few ads beside the scoreboards, and the boards around professional hockey rinks were all white. Nowadays, of course, that’s all changed and there are big billboard ads everywhere.

Newer kinds of intrusive big ads, like the in-your-face in sports billboards, and the subliminal ones you see in the bottom corner of your TV set, and the video ads that began springing up on subway street signs and in malls, keep emerging every day. Like the more traditional space advertising, TV commercials or highway billboards, consumer response from any of these forms of advertising can not be accounted for.

And with business so awful all over, many advertisers are retreating as their budgets are being stripped. “Go Web Young Man!” could eventually prove as productive as “Go West!” once did. But for now, although Web advertising is often accountable, it remains quite limited in scope.

What’s needed is for all the emerging social technologies, some as simple as this blog, to reach a point where they can satisfy the needs of advertisers’ promotional accountability. But for now, as we hopefully soon emerge from The Great Recession, what forms of advertising will work best? Nobody (I’m exaggerating, of course) views TV commercials now in the age of the DVR. Newspapers are going out of business every day. Fewer people read magazines. Catalogs remain a viable medium for getting in consumers’ faces, but a growing number of catalog companies can’t afford the high cost of postage anymore (eg: the near-daily dose of Victoria’s Secret catalogs are long gone, guys).

I’m not an ad agency guy. But I’d love to be a fly on the wall at some agency pow-wows these days. The brainstorming going on must be quite intense.