Alan Volk, who’s blog I’ve been enjoy­ing for a few weeks now led me to an inter­est­ing arti­cle he wrote for AdWeek (a few months ago) called “The Real Dig­i­tal Revolution”.

In it, he asserts that the Real Dig­i­tal Rev­o­lu­tion is the mor­tal enemy of adver­tis­ing and marketing.

“Because the real dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion is about con­sumer empow­er­ment, the abil­ity to research and learn about prod­ucts and ser­vices and make deci­sions inde­pen­dently from, and in spite of, any sort of adver­tis­ing messages.”

While I of course agree that adver­tis­ing is at best part of an inte­grated approach, I see two things differently.

The first is about the first half of the asser­tion that the par­a­digm has shifted from:

“Ad leads to purchase”

to

“Ad leads to Google leads to purchase”

I don’t think ads have led directly to pur­chases for a long time now. Good ads have always led to con­ver­sa­tions. In the period that Adver­tis­ing has had any pur­chase on it’s own at all, good ads have led to con­ver­sa­tions. They’re notice­able, mem­o­rable and ide­ally share­able. The British ben­e­fited from only hav­ing four chan­nels well into the era of mod­ern advertising–because adver­tis­ing was such a clear inter­rup­tion of their lim­ited pro­gram­ming, adver­tis­ers banked on engag­ing cre­ative work that would turn into dis­cus­sion over pints at the local.

The sec­ond dis­crep­ancy is that it’s not sim­ply the pro­lif­er­a­tion of infor­ma­tion and easy access to it that’s mak­ing the dif­fer­ence. It’s also the speed at which con­ver­sa­tion now travels.

Since we first learned that adver­tis­ers could con­ceiv­ably be putting their bot­tom lines ahead of our needs, we’ve turned to trusted sources to cor­rob­o­rate their mes­sages or oth­er­wise help us ratio­nal­ize a pur­chase. That one friend who’s a buff/fan, done the research, or some­how qual­i­fied to make a judgment.

Think about it, who did you con­sult before you bought your last camera?

What’s changed isn’t merely that the infor­ma­tion can be googled, it’s that we don’t have to wait until we run into that friend to talk any­more. Sure I was grate­ful for the amaz­ing cam­era research at dpre­view. But then I called our friend Mike, the com­mer­cial pho­tog­ra­pher, for the low down.

To my mind, refer­als, and all the ways we can get them are the real dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion. And the les­son is that adver­tis­ers should focus on keep­ing the experts we turn to in the loop. This should in the­ory make their jobs eas­ier in that there are fewer experts than info seekers.