Jeff Rosenblum, author of a documentary on the future of advertising and co-founder of Questus, an advertising agency, gave a lecture at TedxLaSierraUniversity about the future of advertising. He called his lecture “Can Advertising Save The World?” and truly believes that brands have an important role to play, empowering their customers and improving their lives.
This lecture deals with the way in which companies can change their way of promoting their products not by interrupting people’s lives anymore but by empowering them. His main thesis is that brands’ advertising can take a useful place in people’s life and help them in several ways instead of interrupting them.
This type of advertising materialize by for instance tips given to the consumer by a leading figure of the field or courses taught by the brand itself. The idea is to give power to the consumer and to make him feel that he can learn from his experience as a consumer.
He shows that this way of advertising is profitable for both the company and the consumers, drawing our attention to many examples of brands which adopted that kind of advertisement and which are really successful in their field. According to the lecturer, the company can get great financial results from that and the consumers obviously gains knowledge or skills.
Mr. Rosenblum claims that companies should turn people into brand evangelists by making improvements in their lives and therefore creating a real relationship with them.
To achieve this major change, brands must use new and creative tools to get always closer to their consumers to make their life better and thus unconsciously convince them to promote their brand.
He concludes by saying that more than the half of the largest economic entities of the world are corporations and then showing that if they all adopted this kind of advertising, they could change people’s lives.