Advertising has largely been about putting together a compelling, catchy, funny, thougthful or otherwise efficient message to convince the target audience to buy a product or a service. It’s been about “selling the dream” – telling people what it would be like if they had the product, or used the service.

And that idea of what advertising is about also matched the communication technologies that were at hand through the 50′s, 60′s, 70′s, 80′s and on to the 90′s. Print, TV and radio are all one-way communication, mass media that can deliver a message to the masses, but doesn’t expect or allow the masses to easily interact with the advertising there and then, at least not by immediately “talking back” to the message.

Now, as we all know (but often still have difficulty utilizing), interaction with online devices has changed what mass media can do. And the audience has changed, too: we live in a post-industrial economy where people, through decades of exposure to it, have learned a great deal about advertising. People have learned to ignore and avoid a lot of it.

Interactive media should, indeed, be interactive – it should allow people to work with the content they receive. If you give people a service or a tool, a platform for expressing ideas, a way of working with the product or service you are trying to sell, people can get involved in your message, and once that happens, it’s so much easier for them to understand your offering than if you were just telling and showing something, expecting the audience to listen. Once your audience gets involved in what you do, you become part of their story, and they become part of yours.

That’s why services is the new advertising. Instead of just pushing out the message, you now need to build a service or a tool first and give it to people to interact with it in order to get them convinced to buy the bigger product, service or tool from you.  That’s the new way to “sell the dream”. One-way messaging and display advertising will still have its role in creating some awareness, reaching audience in places where it’s not possible to offer complex interaction, but it’s not the way of advertising that creates significant brand loyalty or deepens customer relationships anymore (if it ever really did?).

Many people with any kind of history in the advertising industry of the past will argue that developing services and tools and promoting utility isn’t advertising – it’s product design and service development instead. And they’re right – what we have got used to perceiving as advertising hasn’t got to do with complex interactive platforms. But because the old model of advertising isn’t efficient anymore, and because, in the meanwhile, technology offers us great new opportunities, isn’t it time to change the old models without worrying about breaking the definition of advertising?

Karri Ojanen