Death of advertising greatly exaggerated

As I read yet another article about the impending death of advertising and how trust is the new social slayer of all things one-way, I couldn't help but wonder if any of these dissenting voices were going anywhere. Or if they were relevant to begin with.

On one end, you have many people claiming advertising is dead, simply because the nature of social opinion has negated its impact. On the other, we know that despite how trust and peer advice is king, advertising still works. There is simply more to the hyperbole behind trust and influence than is superficially perceived.

The argument against advertising is simple: trust versus spam.

For all its purported ability to reach a large volume of consumers, it suffers from one fundamental flaw - it is disruptive.

Simply put, you would not tolerate a stranger butting into your conversation in a face-to-face situation, and that interruption is also deemed as being equally rude online.

This inevitably leads pundits to the conclusion that content, for the most part, needs to be free.

Any aversion to this belief is often met with some rather heated exchanges, as was the case of

Jaron Lanier, who received death threats after suggesting that authors deserved to be paid for their content.

It has also been consistently demonstrated that messages attributed to a commercial source carry a much lower credibility rating than those from peers with no identifiable vested interest.

In short, I trust my friends or, at the very least, anyone who seems to be like me.

If you're on the side of the client, then you're the enemy, and everything you say is questionable hype. Hardly anyone will argue this point with you, as forums, social networks and public relations practitioners will tell you that trust is the new brand and marketing holy grail.

However, as we huff and puff about how traditional advertising is the anti-hero of the social trust movement, online advertising, now a USD59 billion global industry, continues to disprove what the numbers are showing.

Yes, we have seen and will continue to see a precipitous drop in online newspaper ad revenue, but we seem to be distracted by the misfortunes of news sites to notice that advertising has and always will continue to work in other channels.

Spending on advertising using digital media channels makes up more than 10% of overall worldwide advertising spending. And while the recent economic downturn has somewhat dampened that growth, the advent of digital marketers saw the rapid migration from traditional media to new media, potentially at the expense of the former.

Digital marketers will continue to grow smarter as well, employing targeted advertising based on an individual's specific profiles and habits, allowing future marketers to charge a premium on potentially high-yield campaigns.

As much as we'd like to think the web has changed the way we perceive value, there is the undeniable truth that all of the content you're enjoying online is monetised in some way, whether you would want to acknowledge it or not.

Advertising helps keep quality content alive on your favourite website and, while its machinations may not be immediately transparent to you, the few who click on banner ads and participate in online quizzes and contests help in some way to provide administrators the ability to float their operations.

Speak to any blogger about advertising revenue if you need further convincing. As much as we'd like to slam advertising as being irrelevant and intrusive, it significantly helps to keep the internet alive, for no real content creation can survive on the warm approvals of fans alone.

People say that the problem isn't so much about advertising and its importance to a website's survival, but how it reaches them.

However, as marketers move towards targeted advertising, we will continue to see placements which are more relevant to your needs, and when they become relevant, they stop becoming noise.

We may see an age when advertising finds its place among reputation management as the prevailing form of consumer engagement and, as they continue to figure out how to become more effective in a less annoying manner, it will soon become hard to tell PR from sell.

We should all hope that by that time, we will be smart enough to know the difference.

Kelvin Lim is a digital strategist at Fleishman-Hillard and a regular columnist for A+M. This article was originally published in A+M Malaysia's May issue.