As featured in Ad Age:

Advertising is shortchanging its value. 

We’re so caught up in the language of commerce that we’re missing the most powerful impact our work can have. 

Awareness, consideration, traffic, conversion, repeat, and loyalty are all ingredients of selling more. They may be markers of marketing and proof points for the finance folks, but they ignore the dynamic that makes them all possible. 

A brand’s real job is to improve people’s lives. Advertising’s real job is to merit an invitation to share in someone’s life. 

That’s a much higher order and value than share of market. It requires us to shift our focus to elevating the people we serve so they invite us in. 

If we want share of life, we need to understand someone’s life. Then we can transcend the stereotypes that limit brand opportunity and impact. 

For example, stereotypes severely limit most marketers’ opportunities with Boomers. People over 50 are redefining what it means to age, and they hold 70% of American wealth. Yet only 10% of marketing spending goes toward courting their affection, and that advertising falls flat because its creators misunderstand the people. Marketers envision rocking chairs at teatime when Boomers are out playing sports, launching second careers, pursuing advanced degrees, and jetting off to vacations (increasingly on their own). 

 AARP finds that half of Boomers bridle at advertising stereotypes, and one in five have stopped buying from those brands. 

They’re rushing to embrace Dove, though, thanks to the brand’s “Beauty Never Gets Old” campaign. Bringing out the sex appeal in older women, backed by a hard-pumping track, counters stereotypes in every element. It’s not just about models and scenes or devices, tips, and tricks. It’s the energy they’re expressing. Because it’s empowering and true to their lives, older women invite the brand in.  

 To make share of life a standard, we need to reorient several pillars of advertising.  

Research: Study lifetimes, not touchpoints.

We need to understand people’s life journeys, not just purchase journeys. Today’s prevailing mistake is betting a brand on behavioral data and attitudinal surveys. We need to understand where people come from to accurately interpret what they’re doing individually and collectively.

To use the Boomer example, they’ve collectively gone through The Cold War, Vietnam, Civil Rights, Women’s Liberation, counterculture, and environmental movements, and the dawn of the technological age. That shapes a predisposition to disruptive ideas. It’s in their communal DNA. We have to get one-on-one with more people to really get who they are. No amount of behavioral data will tell us such qualitative truth.

Strategy: Think care, not contact.

The route to transforming, not just transacting, is to focus on people’s needs as a continuum. That reveals ways to support their daily lives which have nothing to do with nudging them toward a checkout counter. Amazon neither knows nor cares that your cat died. Chewy registers a cancellation, asks about your cat, sends you flowers, refunds your last order and encourages you to donate the unopened food to a local shelter. Amazon can fill your pantry but Chewy will fill your heart.

Creative: Leap from the label.

We need to create from shared experience to tell stories that fit people’s individual contexts. That means we need to use the products and share questions with many brand loyalists, so our empathy comes through in communications. When emotion leaps from the label, we can meet people everywhere they are with assurance, gratitude and human value. The “can’t live without” loyalty marketers look for depends on a deeper emotional exchange. To produce meaning, we need our creative teams to envision experiences and moments, not just ads and messages.

Media: Plan value exchanges, not transactions.

The key to inclusive—not intrusive—media connection is reframing media from a customer experience point of view. When we plan touchpoints, we’re typically focused on intercepting people to plant messages that support a transaction. If we understand people’s lives as continuums, though, we can transcend commerce to plan value exchanges. That’s why today’s best brands today tend to be intrinsically social; the platforms make sharing natural. Likewise, in measurement, we need to look at how people are using and sharing as much as what they’re seeing and buying.

Faced with unrelenting financial pressure to prove advertising’s worth, we’ve doubled down on transactional markers. It’s time to change the conversation to a higher frequency. When marketers talk about future-proofing brands, they typically emphasize product and technology. Instead, we need to direct them to share of life. When you have a share in my life, I take you wherever I go.

About the Author
Andrew Graff is CEO of Allen & Gerritsen.