Time to teach, Part 3

More intriguing comments keep rolling in. Thanks, everyone!

(First post on this subject here. Second post here.)

My friend Sung Chang at Ogilvy (NY), sent me this bit, which I think speaks to the heart of any course on advertising.

The evolution of marketing is not about advertising in the traditional sense of awareness and letting someone consume your idea or message. It's about connecting people with their own ideas and supporting it. We've been so obsessed with selling rather than giving people what they want. Rory Sutherland, our creative chief in the UK had this great photo of a road sign. It showed four city names all with distances of how far away each city was -- 10 miles, etc. But the last city was 3200 miles away. Obviously, a factual joke trying to be clever but completely innappropriate and unimportant to the driver looking to get to his her destination. And Rory said, "that 3200 mile message is advertising: completely innappropriate but we keep putting that damn sign up everywhere."

Thanks, Sung!

It reminds me a bit of a comment Benjamin Palmer from The Barbarian Group has made, that our goal should be to make things (to make advertisements) that are useful. Perhaps they even approach the utility of being a tool. But at the very least, what we create should help the user do something.

I think that's absolutely essential thinking for the future of advertising.

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UPDATE: Here's a fourth post with course title, description and objectives.