People love to talk about advertising. They always have.
In 1931, when film was still black and white, and talkies were a novelty, Frank Tuttle shot a movie. ‘It pays to advertise’ starred Norman Foster and the soon-to-be screen goddess Carole Lombard.
In the movie, a young man has a theory that any product -even one that doesn’t exist -can be sold if it is advertised properly. So he gets together with his father’s savvy secretary to market a non-existent laundry soap. Complications ensue when their “product” turns out to be more successful than even he imagined–and now he has to deliver.

People love to talk about advertising because great ads capture the imagination, and poor ads make us cringe. They are part of the currency of everyday life. They help shape our world – despite the people who deny it. ‘I am never persuaded by advertising’, they insist. Then they go home to a Kenchic chicken, flavoured with Royco, served with Tilda Kibimba Rice and washed down with glass of Del Monte Passion Juice. Heigh ho.
Talking about advertising is a conversational badge. It can make you look ‘in touch’, and business savvy. Sometimes wittier and cleverer than perhaps you are. There is nothing better than sharing the gist of a new ad campaign with friends who have not seen it yet. Why, you might almost have written the scripts yourself.
Long may this continue. And to help it along, let me share with you some thoughts on how the ad industry might develop, culled from a number of very insightful colleagues of mine from around the globe. In doing so, I hope to inform you.  While suggesting to you that I am wittier and cleverer than perhaps I really am. Let’s start with something close to home.

Emerging Markets will come to dominate.
The massive growth of marketing in developing markets around Asia, LatAm and Africa has been masked by the collapse in value of their currencies after the emerging markets crises of the late nineties. If currencies ever do move to purchasing power parity, expect the revenue contribution of emerging markets to global ad agency groups to become more and more important.Small comfort, to those of us wondering who has stuffed up the Kenya Shilling recently.

TV will become better targeted.
Television advertising has become steadily less efficient over the past forty years, as marketers have abandoned the mass-market strategies of the 1960s, and have sought to target narrower and narrower segments. Television cannot cope with segmented audiences because it is a difficult-to-focus broadcast medium.

Expect this to change as digital TV enables advertising to deliver digital targeting.
The ads that play in breaks on web TV services like Hulu.com already vary depending on who is watching them.Expect ads for Range Rover only to play in the homes of the rich in the future, and ads for quick loans to play only in the homes of the financially stretched. Bad news for media salesmen in Africa, who only sell their channels by the bucket load. But of they evolve their skills we might reasonably expect TV to become a more efficient, narrowcast medium as a result.

Look out for new kinds of brands.
Around 40 per cent  of Unilever’s brands were invented in the 1950s when television became a mass-market medium.The medium of television – which for the first time allowed marketers to communicate simple positionings memorably, repeatedly and cheaply to mass audiences, was an integral part of these brands.
Expect a new generation of brands to appear in the digital age, each leveraging the capabilities of digital devices and media to target intelligently, to reward loyalty, and to know where their customers are in GPS terms.

But expect the eternal to triumph.
Expect local marketing to become more and more important as GPS devices and capabilities like Buzz, Twitter and Foursquare become more and more important in Africa.
But the ad campaigns that win through will be those that, in the words of Bill Bernbach, continue to ‘focus on the eternal’, upon appealing to human nature. (www.thecitizen.co.tz)