Evolutionary Change In Advertising

If you are a young person working in marketing or advertising, let's say you're 28, you probably think the world of advertising is changing at warp speed.

You would say that every day new technological breakthroughs in communication and media are changing how the advertising and marketing industry reaches and influences people.

You would point to smart phones and say that in just the past decade smart phone usage has soared and is now the second most popular electronic device we spend time with. This is something that didn't even exist 10 years ago. You would point to Facebook and say that here we have something that barely existed 10 years ago but is now the biggest media entity on the planet.

And you would be right to say those things.

If you were an old fuck like me, however, you would say that advertising and marketing are evolving  more slowly than you think. You would point to the fact that only about 8% of retail activity happens online, and that people still buy an overwhelming amount of their stuff in stores, and still spend more time watching television than all other leisure activities combined.

And you'd be right about that, too.

In biology, it has been suggested that evolution runs more quickly on short time scales, and more slowly on long time scales. This isn't just a cute sentence, it seems to be an actual scientific fact.

Think about stock markets. If you follow the markets all day you are witnessing wild swings minute-by-minute. It looks like ever-changing chaos. But if you check them once a month, they look pretty much this month like they did last month.

Yes, every few years there may be a bust or a boom that puts the punctuation in "punctuated equilibrium." But looked at from a distance, the changes seem to have a surprising smoothness.

As time scales expand, there is a fluidity to change that is not evident in the turmoil of the hour-by-hour mayhem.

This can be seen in trendy marketing obsessions that seem terribly consequential over short periods but tend to flatten out as time passes and perspective advances.

It's good to remember this when we start popping off about something being dead, and something else being the future.