Reviews

Here are some reviews and responses to Joe Cappo’s "The Future of Advertising":

Once considered a glamorous, creative and positive influence on American popular culture, the advertising business has changed so dramatically it is almost unrecognizable today. Veteran journalist Joe Cappo uses a personal approach and an historical perspective to explain the problems advertising is facing. Two decades ago, some 20 major agencies, all independent and competing against each other, developed innovative, memorable campaigns for a variety of consumer products. But those days are over. Today, four global marketing communications holding companies control 55% of marketing expenditures. This consolidation curtailed creativity, which has resulted in agencies that produce very few memorable ads or integrated marketing efforts despite unprecedented resources. Refreshingly, Cappo does not temper his industry critique in this slightly disjointed, but well-written explanation, which is buttressed by short articles from other industry experts. Cappo sounds a wake-up call for agencies to reform themselves or lose out to more effective marketing approaches from upstart independent agencies or product manufacturers.we suggest that anyone responsible for advertising budgets or for developing marketing campaigns will benefit from Cappo's view of the past - and possible future - of advertising.

"I probably own over twenty books on marketing and advertising; weighty tomes written by the greats and near-greats. But Joe Cappo's crisply written new book is the best global overview I've seen yet. It clearly describes how the advertising industry has evolved dramatically over the past few decades -- and then speculates on the future twists and turns that may come to pass on the "advertising journey."

Will TV fade away and disappear? Of course not, and Cappo is the first to tell us that. But new ways of handling the challenges of commercial clutter (and of personal video recorders such as TiVo) must be innovated. Is the print medium at risk in the future? Perhaps, and that means newspapers most of all. (As this book points out, newspapers have a problem because they own their costly and inefficient printing presses, and are committed to an antiquated distribution system consisting of trucks rumbling through metropolitan areas to deliver their burdens to readers' doors.) The Internet, which came out of nowhere in the 90's -- and caught most advertising professionals flat-footed -- will continue to have a growing and enormous impact on consumers and businesses. (FYI, Cappo tells us that a study covering usage of all media forms revealed that by April, 2002 fully 25% of respondents were getting their daily dose of news ONLINE. Amazing.)

I'm sort of an old codger with a lot of years logged at advertising agencies. But Cappo's book makes me wish I were a kid of 21 again -- bright-eyed and launching into a career in the provocative and ever-changing world of advertising.

So if you're looking for an informative, entertaining, "short course" on the past, present and future of the ad biz, buy this book. I gave it 5 stars. (And I'd have given it 6 if Amazon allowed that over-the-top option.)"

(Padraig Burns gives his verdict on Joe Cappo's book on the future of advertising)

Post-modern, post-Celtic Tiger and now post-television. The latter term had been unknown to this reviewer until I read a book by Joe Cappo, a former publisher of Advertising Age. But like a lot of Cappo's observations it left me asking how long before it happens on this side of the Atlantic?
Retailer Strength: Although Joe Cappo's The Future of Advertising was written for the US market, the book addresses a lot of issues which would be relevant to this part of the world, not least the increased power of retailers and the consolidation of the agency business.
The post television age describes a media landscape where it is virtually impossible to reach a mass TV audience because of the proliferation of channels. Cable television with hundreds of channels is now in 70 per cent of US homes. Its equivalent, satellite TV, is now in 28 per cent of Irish homes and rising.
Even though this book is written for the American market it does have a lot of relevance here, as the opportunities and threats facing the advertising industry are the same on both sides of the Atlantic. Retailers are getting more powerful, the agency business is consolidating, the commission system is on the way out, technology is changing the way we communicate. Cappo addresses all these issues in the book.
The most important chapter for ad agency personnel is 'Integration: Key to the Future'. In 1997, 90 per cent of ad agency revenue for the four major holding groups came from advertising. By 2002, the picture had changed radically with half of all revenue coming from activities outside of traditional advertising.
This is a major change in the way ad agencies earn their income. Cappo calls for agencies to re-position themselves to assume more strategic roles for their clients where they would be "media-neutral". They would be free to recommend sales promotions, sponsorships, direct mail.
The writer warns that if agencies do not assume this role there is a danger that management consultants will fill the role. This is not the first time an advertising commentator has advocated that agencies should take greater control of the marketing communications strategy, or suffer the consequences.
Cappo has some interesting points to make about why, in spite of the logic of the argument, agencies appear so hesitant in taking up the challenge. Apart from the fact that too many agency people are still temperamentally incapable of being genuinely media neutral, or, more accurately, marketing communications neutral, there are other more practical difficulties to consider.
For a start, there is the question of capacity, or if you prefer a current cliché, skillset. Most account management teams are simply not equipped to evaluate or adjudicate on the relative merits of relationship marketing sponsorship or public relations. Until this position is rectified the marketing communications strategy vacuum will remain.
'When Cappo refers to the increasing important of product placement, he gives the example of Federal Express in Castaway with Tom Hanks'
There is another interesting chapter on how technology is changing the way we consume media and Cappo got my attention when he talked about the new PVR technology which allows viewers to "programme their units to eliminate all commercials". This chapter also covers digital publishing and interactive television.
The book is a practical guide to the changes taking place in the industry. Most trend information is plotted to mid-2002 and the author uses a long line of case studies and anecdotes from his 40 years in the media business.
There is also a section called 'Another Voice' at the end of each chapter. In this section the author re-prints articles from Advertising Age by different writers which are considered pertinent to the subject at hand.
American cultural imperialism also means that we can understand almost all his references. When Cappo refers to the increasing importance of product placement he gives the example of Federal Express in Castaway, the movie with Tom Hanks.
When he mentions the few TV programmes that still attract big audiences he refers to such 'reality' shows as Big Brother and Survivor. Even though the trends in the advertising are similar on both sides of the Atlantic this book does illustrate that the US is still a few years ahead.
So if your future is in advertising, it might be worth your while dropping into a book shop in the near future and investing $24.95 to see what that future might be like.
Padraig Burns is an account director at McConnells Advertising

ROAD signs on the ad highway warn of a `curvy and treacherous' stretch ahead, and good maps are `in short supply.' "Does advertising have a future?" you wonder, but that's the title of the final chapter in Joe Cappo's book The Future of Advertising from McGraw-Hill (

Although individual companies have folded in the face of competition, "print medium itself has not gone away." What is the secret of a secure future? "Good management." If that doesn't answer fully, ask, "What do we manage?" Cappo replies: "We manage people. We manage money. We manage technology. We manage real estate. But what we must really learn to manage is change." That means, "We must learn how to anticipate the change, how to recognise it, and how to respond to it." At a higher level, "We can create the change in the marketplace. We can have competitors respond to us, instead of vice versa."

Call it `change' but the blurb paints the gloom: "Gone are the days of the 15 per cent commission on media buys, the three-martini lunch, and 100 million viewers tuning into the same TV show every Tuesday night at nine." Why? "The proliferation of new media, escalating competitive pressures, and the emergence of alternate marketing disciplines have transformed the advertising industry."

Advertisers get into the editorial mould, but they should realise that they "aren't buying the editorial product when they place an ad in a publication." So? "They are buying the attention of its readers." On the other side, "a good editor is a marketing expert at heart. He or she knows what the reader wants and can achieve this by many means, ranging from deep research to good, old-fashioned instinct."

Commenting on how ad agencies are compensated, the book decries the system that was "based on how much media the client bought" as a faulty one. "It is analogous to a sales manager paying the sales staff a commission based on how many lunches they bought for their clients. In the real world of business, salespeople are paid on how much they sell." Likewise, "at least a part of agencies' compensation should be based on the success of the campaign they created for the client." But `success' is a tricky word to measure.

On the impact of the Net, Cappo writes: "Publishers already have the technology to deliver subscriptions in PDF format, including full editorial and advertising interactivity, as well as audio and video capability. It is only the diffidence of advertisers and consumers that has delayed the widespread implementation of this technology." What is the option for newspapers that prefer to "being distributed via the current archaic system"? They will have to change the nature of the product they deliver to their readers, suggests the author. "In most cases, the product isn't news, but it can be business information, entertainment, advice, literature, or anything else the reader needs."

Here is a take-home idea: "Senior citizens will live longer in retirement than any previous generation. They will be richer and in better physical condition. People over 65 are more likely to own their own home than any other age group. They also are more financially stable and less indebted." So, if you put "shapely women in clingy dresses" or "model-handsome young hunks" in ads, would you get their attention?

Rapidly developing new technologies, media outlets constantly proliferating and changing, markets dissolving and re-emerging almost daily, consumers becoming more skeptical by the minute - by the time you say future, its already passé! How can advertisers, agencies, and traditional media outlets adapt to and thrive in an environment that just keeps changing?
In The Future of Advertising, veteran advertising columnist and publisher Joe Cappo develops a series of surprisingly straightforward and practical strategies for anticipating and managing change in a turbulent industry. Addressing major issues such as the impact of cable TV, direct marketing, and the Internet; the emergence of alternate marketing disciplines; and the disappearance of the mass market, Cappo outlines a variety of innovative solutions.

Joe Cappo’s book, The Future of Advertising: New Media, New Clients, New Consumers in the Post-Television Age traces ad agency consolidation, the impeding demise of television as an ad force, and more -- then lays out a startling yet ultimately logical roadmap for the future of bran marketing and advertising. Cappo recently retired from Crain Communications, Inc., where he was senior vice president. He was publisher of Advertising Age, and is a world-class speaker. Few people know the industry as well as Cappo does, or have as intriguing a perspective on what’s to come. Here’s another piece of the transcript of his conversation with moderator Doug Weaver, president of Upstream Group, at the iMedia Brand Summit in February.

DW: What I wanted to talk about here for a minute was television, specifically, the 30-second spot. Yesterday, Jeff Cole from the UCLA Center for Communication Policy got up and brought up the novel notion that advertisers are paying as much or more to be on ‘Friends’ now as they were on ‘Cosby’ 20 years ago, and while they’re getting a 12 share, which is a fraction of what they got on ‘Cosby,’ the advertising, in his opinion, was only getting about a 5 share. The efficacy of the 30-second spot. We saw a really, in my opinion, abysmal parade of 30-second spots at the Super Bowl last weekend. What are your thoughts of the 30-second commercial? Is it going to be with us for a while? What’s going to drive that?

JC: About two years ago, Hal Riney, who is one of the great creative genius of the latter part of the 20th century -- and the voice of many of them, was quoted in Advertising Age as saying the 30-second spot is dead. Well, it’s not dead. Things like that don’t die. What they do is they lose their strategic significance, and what’s happened -- a typical example. Here’s television’s erosion. Twenty-five years ago, if you took a 30-second spot, ran it in prime time on ABC, CBS and NBC, you would have reached 90 percent of the households watching television, which is basically the whole country.

Today, if you made that same buy -- the three networks -- and you added the FOX Network, you would reach less than 40 percent of the households watching television. The proliferation of the media, the growth of cable, the growth of satellite, video games, the VCR, the DVD, everything else that’s counted among that universe of households watching television, that is what has happened, and that’s why the book is titled In the Post-Television Age. Television is no longer the 800-pound gorilla that’s pushing all of this stuff ahead. In fact, I might even say that right now, what’s going on e-commerce and what’s going on the Internet is rapidly becoming the 800-pound gorilla.

Now, why are they still advertising on the Super Bowl? There are still companies out there who reach mass audiences. They want to reach as many people as possible. The number of opportunities to reach huge numbers of people is declining. So they will overspend in order to get an audience of 20, 30, 40 million or 90 million, in the case of the Super Bowl. They will overspend in order to get that amount. That’s why the up-front area -- that’s like in April and May when the clients start negotiating with the broadcasters -- still generated a lot of money for television because they want to be on Friends and they want to be in the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes, et cetera.

But what we see now is that there are fewer of those instances. A top-rated show is now getting half the audience a top-rated show got 25 years ago, and this makes it harder on the agencies because they have to look at these narrower little segments of markets in order to reach people. That’s why, in my opinion, media and media selection is becoming far more strategic than it ever was before.

JC: And it should drive the business. Why? Because if you believe in the principles of integrated marketing communications, the message does not start with the client. The message starts with the audience. So in a perfect world, you would say, ‘I’m going to advertise on the Man Show.’ You create a commercial for me to run on the’Man Show, which sure as heck is going to be different than the commercial that runs on Oxygen Channel, even though it might be the same product.

And so it should be a consumer driven situation as opposed to the past where we created this whole image, we created million-dollar commercials, and then we ran them all over the place. Well, now they should be more targeted.

DW: A lot of us thought that quality television was over until the ‘Man Show’ came along and (inaudible). We have a question back here.

Question: Hi. Chris Theodoros from Google. Quick question: as Sarbanes-Oxley has clearly changed many industries out there, advertising stands to change, in many ways more than most. Can you comment on that? Is the billing scandal that we just saw with ONDCP the tip of the iceberg? And how else do you think the advertising business is going to change as a result?

JC: Well, it’s going to change in many different ways. If it continues on this same track, it’s going to decline in importance in the marketing structure because the old-fashioned principle of we start with our advertising, then we put the sales promotion, then we do this and then we do that -- everything else is extra in addition to the advertising. The world ain’t like that anymore.

What’s happened now is that clients are creating huge, global types of sales promotion campaigns, and they even have the sales promotion agency… creating the commercials that run to promote the sales promotion effort.

McDonald’s does it all the time. That’s why you see so many different messages from McDonald’s because you don’t have the same agency creating all these commercials. The fast-food business is a very sales promotion driven business, and giving away Beanie Babies, people will come into buy the Beanie Babies. They don’t care about the damn hamburgers. They want the Beanie Babies, which is, I believe, a big flaw in the whole marketing picture.

So I believe that advertising, as we have known it, is declining and will continue to decline in importance. It will become a provider of advertising services the same way a printer prints your brochures -- not part of the strategic thing. They just do it. And it’s already evidenced in advertising.

In fact, there is what I call a fungibility of advertising, and I’ll give you a typical example. A couple years ago…. the chief creative officer of BBDO, I was sitting at a conference he was doing. He played a Pepsi commercial and he played a Coca-Cola commercial, and he played them, and everybody is there and watching the commercials. He said, “Did anybody notice they put the soundtrack for Pepsi on the Coke commercial, the soundtrack for Coke on the Pepsi commercial?” and nobody even got it. People are singing, happy, kids running around and stuff like that. Now, that’s fungibility. It means being able to substitute one thing for another thing, and that’s what happening in advertising. You get your generic ad.

The other thing is you see a commercial. There’s a grandfather, he’s smiling, and he’s holding a kid, and then they're walking down and fishing at the pier, and then there’s a family walking down the mall. What’s the commercial for? Could be a bank. Insurance company. It could be for ADM. It could be for GE, which brings good things to life. It’s the generic commercial. We have all of these pictures and images, and then at the end, we say, ‘Welcome to’ whatever it is. That’s the fungibility of advertising, and that’s what’s wrong with it because it has more to do with writing lines and slogans and funny pictures and everything than it has to do with identifying an audience and communicating with that audience.

Question: Alan Gerson, iMedia Communications. I understand what makes the media channels new -- new media. I understand even new clients. What, in your judgment, makes the consumer new? Your subtitle is New Channels, New Clients, New Consumers.

JC: Actually, a few years earlier I wrote a whole book about what makes people different. If we just take our market, for example, the US , a tremendously different ethnic mix in the US , a tremendous difference in education among Americans, a difference in taste of younger people. If you don’t know the difference between a generation Y and a baby boomer, you’re talking to two people who come from different worlds, a Martian and a Venusian. That’s the way these are.

I was born in the Depression. I was part of the reason it was a Depression because I was born then. But I grew up during World War II. I was ten years old at the end of the war. I was affected by that. In no way are my kids or even my younger relatives affected by it in the same way I was affected by that, and we are all products of the era in which we were brought up in.

How about a kid today? I didn’t see a computer until I was 35 years old or something. My kids had a computer when they were nothing. That’s the way it is, and that’s going to change. These are new consumers.

DW: One of the topics, when we were talking yesterday at dinner -- and I suggested Joe write a book about this -- was the idea of media graphics -- that people will be defined by the media they consume and how they consume it. So I think that when we look forward, we may end up seeing people who are really defined by how much they rely on wireless communication and so forth, and the strategy for reaching them will almost be completely dictated by what media they choose.

JC: We went from mass media to class media, and we’re moving very rapidly to individual media. If you take TiVo, for example, you can create a profile of a person just the way they have their TiVo programmed, and that’s what TiVo is doing. TiVo is now talking to advertisers about communicating with people, based on the types of programming they watch because that says a lot about the people, and we’re in that era.

What gets me about most of you or business is that you’re not really taking great advantage of the individual identification nature of the Web, and many of you think of yourselves as mass communicators, and you should be thinking of yourselves as individual communicators.

DW: One of the things I read recently, I think it was last week, ABC and NBC came out and said that they wanted to blow up the programming schedule for the year. They’re no longer going to have TV seasons. They’re pushing back on the idea of the up-fronts and the sweeps period and so forth. TV keeps making these incremental steps to change themselves, and it reminds me of Gorbachev with communism back in the last ‘80s – “We’re going to make communism better, a little bit at a time, till it’s happy and friendly.” Doesn’t TV really need a Yeltsin at this point? Isn’t it time to rethink television in its entirety and how it works for marketers and how it works for consumers?

JC: I think they deserve an Osama bin Laden rather than a Yeltsin at this time. Here’s what television is doing. We’re getting this money in, and audience is shrinking. So they rationalize, “We can’t spend as much money on programming. So we’ll get ‘Friends’ off the air because that’s costing us millions of dollars a week, and we’ll put on ‘Survivor’ and ‘Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire’ and ‘Who Doesn’t Want to Marry a Millionaire’ and ‘Average Joe.’” I mean, I’m the average Joe. They don’t have me on there. So they’ve gone toward cheap programming. Cheap.

If you watch all of these reality shows, the MCs are always not ready for prime time or beyond their prime time players. Monty Hall will come on on the next kind of reality show because they don’t want to spend a lot of money on programming. So that’s why television has become tawdry. The sexual innuendo in television is just incredible. The violence factor on television is -- how many dead bodies you have to see on ‘CSI’ to say okay, I know. I was a police reporter for the first six years of my career. I saw a lot of dead bodies. I smelled them too. You don’t smell them on ‘CSI.’ If they had smell-o-vision, you would never watch that show again because you want to take your clothes off after you’ve been through that.

Overall, I found this book an enjoyable read (not to say I should never enjoy doing serious work) - it worked chronologically and had all the basic details about advertising tied in. I would say it is a recommended read for a newbie like myself.

The first couple of chapters were mainly about the history of advertising and how it has always been around and the earlier years of the industry. That gave me a crash course in the area of which before now I had no idea about.

The middle chapters were all about technology and its development - how the industry was going to keep up. It gave examples of how different companies (of different fields) have walked away from their re-invention made adaptable to new media successfully or just plunged straight to rock bottom.

The middle section also began to offer insights as to how advertising on television is no longer the main source, how prime time is no longer prime time and worst of all, how ad-zapping has been made available in the past decade and how this has affected the industry itself.

The end chapters were mainly about the future of advertising (as promised by the title) - the reinvention of new media and the way we communicate.

Overall, a good read and very useful in filling in gaps.