Advertising is Dead.
I was watching a commercial for some “gold-into-cash” website the other day. They used adjectives like, “the best”, “better”, “faster” and “we pay top dollar” (technically not an adjective, but who’s counting?) to describe their service.
My instant thought was: “How do you know?”
How do you know that your service is the best? Better or faster than the competition? How do I know you pay top dollar for my gold? Are you going to give me my gold back so I can send it to another company for the sake of comparison?
And here’s one for burger joints, how do I know you have the world’s best burgers? Or that your particular brand of burger is world famous? Really? You sure people in Bangladesh are going to know what I’m talking about when I say “Burgerland”?
Doubtful.
As a matter of fact, advertising seems to be having an adverse effect, with people simply tuning the “ad chatter” off. (Case-in-point: While listening to the radio, I heard a spot where they gave the phone number for the company three times in a row. I heard the announcer take a breath for the fourth round and promptly turned the radio off.)
Dave Winer shares my sentiment:
Assuming the economy comes back from the recession-depression thing that it’s in now, when it does, we will have completely moved on from advertising.
The web will still be used for commercial purposes, people will still buy things from Amazon and Amazon-like sites, but they will find information for products as they do now, by searching for it, and finding out what other people think, not by clicking on ads and buying things on the pages they link to.
No one needs advertising, and there are much better ways to sell products.
Where am I going with all of this? Simple. This little observation has massive implications for the church. For the way we “market” the church, if you will. (Although, Tony Morgan will argue that the church should give up marketing altogether.)
No longer can we depend on “Sunday Night Casual Service” or “Wednesday Night Potluck” to bring people into the pews. For the most part, a watching world has no idea what a church service looks like, let alone a casual one, at that. People will be drawn to your church - the Church - once they see life change flowing from it. And not before.
Amazon has a feature that suggests products to you based on what you’ve looked at or bought in the past. It also has customer reviews that tell the Average Joe/Josephine everything they need to know about the product and whether or not it delivers on its promises. A business may not always be honest about the benefits and drawbacks of its product, but a consumer always will be.
Could it be that the massive decline in American churches is because people are tired of a “product” that doesn’t deliver what it promises?
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