Centered Messaging: How Modern Advertising is Hitting its Stride

The old concepts of having a “central message” or a theme has changed in modern advertising. It’s subtle. Some might not even notice other than through the shift in venues towards the digital mediums. Today, it’s important for companies to shift from that old central message to “centered messaging” in order to take advantage of everything the is available in the diversified world of ads.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand this shift is to look at a popular television show, Mad Men. In it, the characters will usually take a client and position them around a central theme that would drive all of the creative surrounding the account. It worked because consistency in the exact message was necessary in order to get it hammered into the intended targets.

The rise of the internet coupled with the more recent shift towards multi-channel marketing has made it necessary to adjust the thinking a bit. With centered messaging, an ad company or a business can take the primary message and point back to it from the various channels. It’s no longer about putting a special on a billboard or a magazine ad and paying for more eyeballs to see it. Now, your message itself might be someplace entirely different from the medium and accessible now or in the future.

The centered message could be about visiting a particular website that acts as a landing page. People can’t click through to the landing page from a television ad or newspaper piece, but the can still be directed there. In many cases, the multi-channel nature of the digital age means that people will have access to the internet regardless of where they are or what they’re doing.

“We want to take people down a path towards conversion regardless of where they are at any given point,” said an automotive advertising executive at WorldDealer. “They can become a lead for our clients whether they’re watching television, sitting on a bus, or waiting in line at the bank.”

What does all of this mean for modern advertising?

Tell a Story

In the past, you would deliver the message anywhere possible. Television ads, for example, would mention the brand and message as often as possible in a very short time.

Today, you shouldn’t try to cram in brand mentions. In fact, the most compelling ads are often those that don’t even reveal their intended marketing message until the end. Here’s an example. They tell a story. It isn’t until the very end that you realize that this was an ad for a company and the app they were trying to promote.

People want to care about things even if they don’t really care about them right now. That’s not doubletalk. It’s simply a statement that they don’t want to be hammered with marketing materials as much as they want to be made to care for something. It’s about giving them a reason and striking a chord.

Take them to the Point of Action

There’s another component of the video above that is compelling and gives us a good lesson. The video told a great story, but it was all leading up to the end where they try to generate action. The action cannot take place on the video, so they have to point somewhere else.

In this case, that “somewhere else” happens to be the app store. They want people to download their app and continue the story they started with the video. It doesn’t just take videos to make this happen, either. Telling a story is a matter of positioning the message to be appropriate for the medium. Articles, for example, can be advertisements even when they are intended to entertain or educate. As content marketing continues to grow in importance, the need for more story-telling venues increases.

Consistency without Repetition

People are more savvy today about the impact of repetition. They realize what advertisers are doing when they’re pushing something too hard. A perfect example of this is actually one that worked.

In the video, the name of the company was repeated over and over again. We lost count around a dozen times in the one-minute video. The reality is that this old-school form of advertising worked. The name is embedded in the brains of anyone who paid attention (or not) to the video. Unfortunately, it took it so far that it probably turned a lot of people off who might have been receptive had the message not been overdone.

You can be consistent and put the branding out there without being annoying. It worked in the 60s. It doesn’t work as well today.

Keep Trying

The most important thing to remember in modern digital advertising is to keep it coming. The biggest problem that many companies and marketing agencies have is that they keep changing their message. The various venues make it easy to switch back and forth, up and down through different marketing messages. As a result, they often do. Come up with the right marketing message and stick with it. That doesn’t mean that you can’t make adjustments over time, but there’s a reason why we still think about insurance any time we see a gecko.