There are some key problems with advertising in any form, whether broadcast or online:

 1.Consumers do not trust advertising. Dan Ariely has demonstrated that messages attributed to a commercial source have much lower credibility and much lower impact on the perception of product quality than the same message attributed to a rating service. Forrester Research has completed studies that show that advertising and company sponsored blogs are the least-trusted source of information on products and services, while recommendations from friends and online reviews from customers are the highest.

  2.Consumers do not want to view advertising. Think of watching network TV news and remember that the commercials on all the major networks are as closely synchronized as possible.  Why?  If network executives believed we all wanted to see the ads they would be staggered, so that users could channel surf to view the ads; ads are synchronized so that users cannot channel surf to avoid the ads.

  3.And mostly consumers do not need advertising. My own research suggests that consumers behave as if they get much of their information about product offerings from the internet, through independent professional rating sites like dpreview.com or community content rating services like Ratebeer.com or TripAdvisor.

Now it looks like Unilever are realising that the days of the (failed) one-way method of communications is certainly well past their sell by date:   Mr.Simon Clift CMO of  fmcg giant Unilever acknowledged that in social media, Unilever -- past digital accolades or no -- has fallen back at times on the same one-way-communications mind-set it's long applied to traditional media, only to learn that one-way communications are impossible. "We may be ahead of some of our competitors," Mr. Clift said. "But we're most definitely behind consumers."

Meanwhile in a lengthy article recently Ad Age had this to say of the pending demise of advertising - in whatever form. "Economies are unsentimental and denial unproductive. The post-advertising age is under way".

The average price of reaching 1,000 households in America with a 30-second spot in prime time, according to Media Dynamics, has jumped from $8.28 in 1986 to $22.65 in 2008 -- but effectively more like $32, because between 150 and 200 of those 1000 households use DVRs to skip past the ads.

Meanwhile the impression is that the advertising industry simply sails on onto the future seemingly unaware that their world is about to come to a shuddering halt!

Why will they not face up to the truth...advertising does not work...never has.. never will despite all the questionable research from BARB and the like!

At Shoppers Voice we also acknowledge the problem of ad avoidance, as evidenced by average click-through rates approaching zero on Social Media - conventional TV - just forget it. At TAG we insist there's a solution: "Better advertising. More informational. More entertaining. More beautiful." And TAG leads the way to a latter-day Communication Revolution, that is.   My book "Television Killed Advertising" is published (Amazon Books UK) and there you will discover where the Ad Industry went wrong and where Shoppers Voice went right with over $10m invested in independent research  which proves conclusively that we are far more accountable than any other form of marketing communication - I suggest you get it!