Jimmy Gilmore

I’m writ­ing this from the set. I’m a day and a half into the pro­duc­tion of a series of infor­ma­tional videos for a B2B client. Trust me, if you’re not in the auto­mo­tive whole­sale remar­ket­ing busi­ness, you prob­a­bly won’t ever want to see them. And that’s totally fine.

Over the past six months, I’d say half of the projects I’ve worked on haven’t been tra­di­tional brand­ing or pro­mo­tional, they fall into the cat­e­gory of con­tent. They are cre­ated to directly inform the audience/customer about the cat­e­gory. That’s right, mostly-unbiased information.

This is a huge swing com­pared to when I first entered the busi­ness. Then the inter­net was new and brand­ing was all the rage. The major­ity of the work we pro­duced was to rein­force the brand name and its unique sell­ing position.

Now Mark Earls is telling us the big idea is dead. And the 30 sec­ond spot is also dead. So is it time to con­tem­plate the future of adver­tis­ing mes­sag­ing? I’m going to go on the record and say that this more altru­is­tic form of “solu­tion sell­ing” is here to stay, espe­cially in B2B cat­e­gories and for high-involvement pur­chases. Frankly, peo­ple would much rather buy from a help­ful teacher than a class clown or a loud-mouthed sales­man. Espe­cially when the pur­chase matters.