Leadership and the Law Reflection 1

Go watch The Greatest Movie Ever Made, and maybe it will help you deep dive into thinking about marketing and advertising. At the least you might find it entertaining how much marketing and advertising are intertwined into our daily lives.

Advertising is everywhere. It's impacting everyone's life, and if you spend time on social media you world has been infiltrated more than you probably realize.

Most people have never given thought to the relationship they have today with marketing and advertising. As my future career aspirations gear towards marketing and communication, this relationship is something I have pondered. Some believe it's a good relationship while others think it's bad. Personally, I think it might depend on the campaign and the intentions behind the advertising. I think advertising has given consumers and suppliers a unique opportunity to inspire viewers and connect them with new brands, products, and services. Though sometimes advertising skates by a thin line around disillusion and deception and being a positive interaction.

The Not So Pretty Side

In my personal opinion, I think many marketers and advertisers have pushed the envelope a little too far, made a hard to keep promise, or outright lied to gain the attention and financial backing of consumers. These are the people that give the rest of marketing a bad rap. We all know that product we bought off TV or saw in the store that made a big promise, and when we went to try it, the product didn’t reap the benefits we expected. Maybe it was a teeth whiter pen or a baby doll who was supposed to act real. Sometimes the packaging is just too good to be true. That… that is why I think so many people think of marketing as deceptive and cunning.

This reluctancy to trust the package or the amount of doctors that back a product has amplified in recent years with the growing age of social media. Bloggers. Influencers. We have come to glorify people online who post worlds we dream of living. Does society know how to separate the real from the fake when it comes to influencer marketing? When influencers first gained momentum in earning financial gain for posting a product or service on social media, the identifying fact or fiction element went out the door. No one really knew if famous person X really enjoyed a product. Maybe they just made a percentage if you bought the product with their code or link. This fed into the deceptive tactics that have morphed society’s outlook on marketing in a somewhat negative manner.

The Sunshine and Rainbows Side

BUT… it’s not all bad! Marketing and advertising can help people find products or services for problems they didn’t know had solutions. Sometimes simple solutions are found solely through a targeted ad campaign. As seen in the Greatest Movie Ever Made, ads can help support and solve problems. In terms of the movie, they needed funding. Well, ads grant funding dollars like no other in the movie business. I don’t think that giving publicity for an ad campaign in exchange for funding is selling out. I think its business. Each party is gaining from the partnership, and if no lying is involved, the partners genuinely support the other business or product. Look around High Point University. ALL of our buildings have names on them that correlate to a donor. Those donors supported the product, a specific major or school, and gave to build up the HPU brand and their philanthropic efforts. Marketing and advertising is about the producer and consumer coming together and finding a join solution for the problem at hand. So if done correctly, marketing and advertising should just lessen the required work on the consumer to find what they may or may not have been looking for.

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*Post written for Leadership and the Law Course*