Jeff Goodby, co-founder of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, writes a provocative piece today in AdAge.com on the chasing of awards in the advertising business.
http://adage.com/cannes09/article?article_id=137525
I found the question posed by one of the posters on Jeff's column very interesting and thought-provoking: "Is it even possible in 2009 for an ad to be famous the way ads were in 1979? The audience is gone: back then, more than 90% of viewers watched network TV in prime time. Today, it's less than 32%. We still watch TV, but we're also in a billion digital places at once..."
The question does beg the question, can there even be a "where's the beef" (Wendy's) equivalent ad campaign in the new century? Or, are media habits so fragmented that the well-known campaigns from prior decades are mere memories of what advertising used to be?
On the other hand, we now live in an age in which target audience members actually engage with the ads (and brands) they like (or dislike) by posting them to their blogs or content sharing sites, tweeting or Facebook posting about them to their friends/followers, or even creating knock offs, homages, or mash-ups of them. Maybe the audience itself now giveth (or taketh away) the awards?
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