Michael O’Reilly

Copywriter/director, Guerrilla TV

As screenwriter William Goldman once said, ‘Nobody knows anything.’ And this certainly seems to hold true for the future of advertising. Yet the one conclusion we can draw is that we live in an age where people are starving for information.

And as someone given the daunting task of informing, selling and educating mass audiences, this era would seem to be one fraught with opportunity.

After all, someone will always have something to sell, especially in a world with 2,000 channels and an information superhighway. But advertising as we know it will have to adapt and discover new ways to communicate with the consumer.

Until now our job as copywriters has been to talk at consumers, not with them, so the next viable stage in broadcast advertising will be to establish a dialogue.

In the future, we’ll have to create a stronger bond between the consumer and the client, given that the decision to purchase will increasingly change from the store aisle to the home. Therefore, we’ll have to become better salespeople, because we will in fact be those salespeople. Our job won’t be just to get consumers to remember our product and visit the store, but rather it will be to incite immediate purchase. In doing so, we will have to convince viewers to play along.

An interesting example was the recent Nissan commercial in which the actor encouraged viewers to participate by means of their remote control. Granted it was just a simulator, but this sort of interaction will soon become a reality.

Yet despite these new demands on advertising, some fundamentals remain intact. The need for great ideas for one. Given the competitiveness of the environment, this will become even more crucial.

The need to understand brand character is another.

As consumers begin to embrace in-home shopping, they’re becoming more and more removed from the products they’re purchasing. That means consumers will most likely buy only the brands with established reputations. Our task will be to build upon that inherent trust.

It’s an interesting challenge for creative people. One that certainly demands evolution. But I can take solace in the fact that my job description will basically remain the same: to get people’s attention and motivate them to buy product.

Now if I could just find somebody to help me fax this to Playback I’d be a happy man.