Anything is advertising. Content is everything.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve blogged, posted, commented, and thought a lot about the same thing: The Message.

Anything is advertising. That’s one of my basic sticks.
And I do mean anything. Any way a business communicates a message to people is advertising. That means billboards, blogs, tv commercials, business cards, supplier invoices, and the heading on your outgoing faxes.

The message you communicate has three parts:
Content.
Style. (the creative)
Technique.

Advertisers and agencies, in search of the newest, hippest, and hopefully most (or at least more) effective way to talk to people, are jumping on technique. Giant discussions of whether bloggers can beat up advergamers, or who’s got the biggest guerrilla, are going on all over advertising land. This, on top of the style discussions that have been, since the beginning. But they’re forgetting the content.

And content is the most important.

The internet has made the world into a place where a shoemaker in a village in Portugal doesn’t have to make shoes just for the people in the village anymore. He can make shoes for anybody in the world. If he can communicate the right message.

But: “Hey! I make shoes in a village in Portugal!” is as far as most advertisers get.

Think back to marketing class. Think push and pull. Now apply it to message content.
The shoe pitch is push. Push is: Here’s what I do!
Pull is when you solve somebody’s problem.
But now, that’s not enough, either.

Because the other thing the internet, and 5 zillion cable stations have done, is to make skeptical people (all people), even more skeptical. People haven’t bought pure push messages for a long time. Now they almost never do. In fact, now, they don’t always buy pull messages, either. People now are less inclined to believe anything that’s too self-serving.
And they think all advertisers (pretty much) are self-serving.

“My shoes make your feet feel better,” isn’t enough.

Which means, even if you’re using a technique that’s on the bleeding edge, with a style that speaks perfectly to the people you’re talking to, it’ll flop if the content of your message doesn’t have something different to offer.

“My shoes make your feet feel better because I make them from an actual mold of your foot. And if they ever wear out, I’ll replace them.”

It doesn’t matter whether that content is on a blog or a billboard. If it reaches the right people, in a style that gets them to engage, and absorb it – it’ll sell shoes.

In order to make this happen, though, the agency and the advertiser actually have to work together. Because the agency can’t offer something the advertiser can’t provide. The agency, however – if they’re really good at what they’re supposed to be good at (talking to people, and finding out what they want) – should be able to help the advertiser with ideas.

That’s part of the job now.