Digital Stone Age: How the World's Most Successful Advertisers Use Traditional Thinking and Innovation to Drive Growth

By Bill Durrant

New Mid-COVID 2nd Edition for 2021!

 

Marketers often suffer from the misconception that to create effective advertising they must either become a modern, fully digital marketer, or double down on traditional marketing channels from the past. But is this type of black and white thinking really what drives extraordinary brand growth?

In a smart, easy to read guide, Bill Durrant proves that to create the most effective advertising in the 20's, the secret is balance. We are living in a rare inflection point in how media and advertising are consumed: The Digital Stone Age.

 

In this new, COVID-era edition of Digital Stone Age, you will:

• Learn why right now is a golden age in advertising effectiveness

• Uncover the Six Stories modern marketers tell themselves, and the truth behind them that the world's smartest advertisers know

• Find the motivation behind many 100% "traditional" and 100% "digital" advertisers, and why both are leaving money on the table

• Create an argument for advertising that even the most marketing-averse board can get behind

• Become the confident voice your brand needs to cut through the marketing hype and focus on advertising that works

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bill Durrant
• Release date: Dec 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781734187229

Bill Durrant

Bill Durrant is an award-winning media and advertising professional and writer based in Los Angeles, where he serves as President of Exverus Media. Bill’s mission is to help marketers and brands develop the most effective advertising. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Murisa, and his sons, John and Jim.

Book preview

DIGITAL STONE AGE

How the World’s Most Successful Advertisers USE TRADITIONAL Thinking and Innovation to Drive Growth

Bill Durrant

EMI

LOS ANGELES, CA

Copyright © 2020 by Bill Durrant.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

EMI

7080 Hollywood Blvd. Fl. 7

Los Angeles, CA 90028

––––––––

Ordering Information:

Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the Special Sales Department at the address above.

Digital Stone Age / Bill Durrant

ISBN 978-1-7341872-2-9 (Electronic)

ISBN 978-1-7341872-4-3 (Print)

GET YOUR FREE GIFT NOW!

––––––––

The official companion guide to Digital Stone Age is now available at DSABook.com.

With the companion guide, you will be able to shortcut to the key learnings in Digital Stone Age and see the latest thinking from Bill and his team.

Visit www.DSABook.com

to download.

Contents

Living in a Digital Stone Age...........................7

The Stories & Truths of Better Advertising.................17

The Innovation Equation..............................41

The Alchemy of Old + New.............................59

Guiding Principles for Modern Marketing..................65

Urgent Questions Marketers Must Face....................83

The Next Fifty Years................................101

Appendix: Practice Makes Perfect......................111

Notes...............................................138

About the Author.....................................147

Dedication

To Murisa, Johnny and Jimmy, my rocks.

The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.

—Bill Bernbach

2nd Edition: A Quick Note  

Little did I know in writing the first version of Digital Stone Age that a worldwide pandemic would soon be upon us, setting the world on edge and delaying our official book release. With deaths in the seven figures, we mourn the world’s loss while looking toward an uncertain future.

And little did I know that after weeks of researching the death of Harry Houdini for the opening chapter, my own appendix would burst. Lying in recovery for several weeks allowed me to absorb the strangeness of our new world and the suddenly accelerated shifts in the way advertising is consumed and bought.

We may not know what a true new normal is until years after the virus and its economic and social aftershocks have subsided, but critical changes have already happened that necessitated a new version of Digital Stone Age. The book that definitively linked peeable paper, Amazon’s Alexa and MySpace (chapter 3) received a small but critical refresh.

I hope you enjoy Digital Stone Age and use it to help you meet an uncertain but optimistic future.

Bill Durrant

[1]

Living in a Digital Stone Age

IN LATE OCTOBER 1926, the great Harry Houdini stepped onstage for his third act of the evening. Something was wrong with Harry that night; he was stumbling over his feet and had missed several of his cues. Eventually, Houdini signaled to his assistant to close the curtain. Houdini immediately collapsed and was carried to his dressing room, where he was diagnosed with appendicitis.

By the next day it was too late. Although Houdini was rushed into surgery and had his appendix removed, it had already ruptured. On Halloween 1926, Harry Houdini passed away surrounded by family.

Houdini was not killed by an escape gone wrong but by an organ in his abdomen. An obsolete organ that dates back to the Stone Age. The appendix is what scientists call vestigial, or no longer needed by the human body. Harry, like all of us, evolved away from its use.

And by 1926, most people understood this. There were no awareness campaigns, blue ribbons, or donation drives to fight appendicitis. It was simply seen as bad luck.  

Far more interesting to the people of 1926 was the new medium of radio. With the first commercial radio broadcast having taken place just six years prior, and the invention of the first electronic TV less than one year away, the world was on the cusp of a media revolution. These were exciting times for everyone. Well—everyone except newspaper editors.  

Newspaper editors of the 1920s lived in fear of the new broadcast technology,¹ calling it a gimmick and laughing nervously as its popularity grew. But while radio did ultimately kill the timely extra editions of their beloved newspapers, and TV killed the evening editions, the editors were unaware that we would use their newspapers for another eight decades and their jobs would be secure.

Something similar is happening today. Many marketers think digital marketing tactics have made traditional marketing tactics obsolete. They have rushed into the digital age like the first broadcasters of a hundred years ago. They look at media channels like TV, radio, print, and outdoor as Stone Age tools that are not part of the modern marketer’s toolkit.  

Some of their counterparts, like the newspaper editors of the 1920s, think these digital marketers are evolving too fast. They are content to use what has always worked. To them, digital marketing is best viewed as a test, with headlines about privacy breaches and unsafe content proof that innovation is a double-edged sword. They act like those late-1920s newspaper editors: distrustful of new technology.

The truth is, both of these mindsets leave serious money—and brand growth—on the table. It is innovation combined with classical thinking that generates the best results from advertising and marketing.

For the traditionalists, these laggards think they can TV-and-radio their way out of any problem with their business. They may be right—but is avoiding innovation costing them opportunities?

Conversely, many digital marketers feel insecure about their ability to keep up with innovation. Due to this insecurity, they listen to anyone with a strong opinion about the future of marketing. They cling to whatever floats to keep above water. And even garbage floats:

Quit wasting your money in TV.

People don’t pay attention to ads anymore.

Podcasts have replaced radio.

They repeat these sound bites, share them with colleagues, and hope no one thinks they are on the wrong side of the Digital Revolution. But are these statements supported with real empirical data? Better still, is anyone asking what does work at driving brand growth?

Several years ago, I cut down on reading articles about the hot, new social-media tactic of the day and the overnight TV ratings and started spending more time learning what drives real results in brand growth. Admittedly, this path was more work—most of the research was buried across the internet and lacked sexy headlines—but what I learned changed my career forever. By focusing on what drives the most efficient brand growth—and measuring it relentlessly—I was able to grow my company from a part-time consulting job to one of the strongest boutique advertising agencies in the world. ²

Here are three facts many marketers do not believe:

TV and traditional advertising work better than ever, even with the rise of digital media. ³

Consumers don’t actually mind advertising ... if it means they can stream entertainment for free. ⁴

COVID-19 led to a massive decline in digital audio and radio listening, a surge in Linear TV and a pullback in outdoor – but none of these trends will last.

It seems we are living in a Digital Stone Age: On one hand, we flock to new digital technologies on which consumers are increasingly spending their time; while on the other hand, the tactics and strategies of the Stone Age remain among the most effective.

Given this disparity, it seems the real challenge in advertising is not,  How do we keep up with innovation? but rather, How do we harness innovation alongside proven strategy?

And the next several years may be our last chance to take advantage of this. The Digital Stone Age—and the opportunities it affords from its combination of robust traditional and digital media opportunities—will not last forever. Later, I will offer a vision of advertising and media in 2030, but as we embark upon the ’20s, the clock is ticking on this opportunity, which took shape less than a decade ago. Compounding this is the impact of COVID-19, which sped things up by 2-3 years.

If you are a brand marketer, advertising professional, or even a student of marketing, you have never had access to more information about how to be successful in our field. But is it all accurate? Is it true that social media is the only media channel you should be spending in, as people like Gary Vaynerchuk claim? Are old-school marketers who only run in traditional channels right to keep doing what works instead of innovating how they reach consumers?

The purpose of this book is to teach you just that: how to combine innovation and traditional advertising strategy to accelerate your brand’s effectiveness and growth.

And lest we forget an original Stone Age tool—the appendix—it turns out that it may not be vestigial after all. New research has shown that the human appendix plays a substantial role in strengthening our immunity, which has helped us survive since the Stone Age.⁶ Traditional media is in a similar position; combined with innovation, it is helping brands survive and thrive to meet their full potential.

Who