• by Karl Greenberg , October 1, 2012

Monday's OMMA Global panel discussion on advertising may not have been about the purchase funnel (which by now is feeling kind of defunct), but it kind of had that shape, thematically: it started with a very general question -- what is advertising -- and quickly got down to brass tacks vis à vis the uses and misuses of social media. 

Shiv Singh, global head of digital for PepsiCo, said the beverage and CPG giant began by describing a problem: "We sometimes define advertising differently from how agencies and media companies think about it. It's not that one definition is more correct than the other, but all objectives are not aligned. The differences in definition translates into what consumers value, versus what the agency thinks they value. So there can be dysfunctional strategies in a large organization." He said that for the company, advertising is a means to an end toward driving brand health and volume. "It's one of the levers we have, but a lot of our partners, or some anyway, may not use that same measure; where we fall short sometimes is, we don't do a good enough job of explaining those measures." 

Ian Schafer, the CEO of Deep Focus, one of those PepsiCo agencies, said advertising isn't advertising anymore -- it's noise, and the real competition is consumer content. "Buying more ads means more clutter. We used to compete with other ads but now we are competing with things like Instagram -- with photos of friends, babies, and who is dating whom. We can make more impressions to sell, but we can't make more attention. So when we talk to brands about ads, we tell them the competition isn't just other ads, it's what people are saying to each other." He said the best approach is not to compete for share of voice with people, but to achieve reach through people.

He went on to say the story brands tell have to be as interesting as everything else out there. 

Molly Peck, the former director of advertising and sales promotion at Cadillac who now heads up advertising and sales at Chevrolet, said Cadillac's campaign for the new ATS sedan this summer was a good example of content-intensive marketing that Schafer was talking about. "We approached it quite differently than any campaign we have ever done since we approached it as a content package. We bid out to production companies, partnered with Radical and built elements with digital and video, broadcast and print. 

For Pepsi, diversity is everything, and the big idea, the media "cannon shot" is simply a way to get things started. "I feel in our business we sometimes put too much weight on the idea and not enough on the execution," says Singh. This summer, Pepsi ran a campaign around a series of branded premium concerts featuring people like Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry. He said that while hundreds of thousands watched the video stream of it when it happened, several million more watched it over ensuing weeks because of the digital media play around it. "Is advertising the 30-second TV spot with guaranteed reach, or the live event you make available to millions of people who are flowing in and out, not all watching at once?" he asked. He added that if there is one skill set that matters in the agency of the future, it's having a strong sensibility of what's happening in culture.

Calle Sjoenell, CCO at Ogilvy & Mather New York, likened it not so much to a cannon shot as to a pinball machine. "You get the idea out there and bounce it around as much as possible."

Peck said what it amounts to is marketers having to be content providers, which is now how brands interface with consumer. "It's building value so they consume it, whether it's a 30-second ad, or a concert. That we have to think of ourselves as producers of that content opens possibilities in terms of what we can do. Producing TV ads has become a niche."