It is a shame that the Marketing Director of Kellogg s appears to be protecting advertising agencies for this is a moment of fundamental assessment of what advertising agencies should or should not do.

Certainly redefining advertising is the right thing to do however it is not going to be easy.
After more than fifty years of advertising, Advertising Agencies have accumulated yet another ill-designed feature, poorly co-ordinated with the rest.

Advertising should emerge from any reassessment with a policy and design on clear principles. Does advertising continue to serve a public interest? Does advertising have a legitimate role at all? Could it be made more efficient?

To retain consent for their advertising programmes agencies are going to have to do more than create advertising, they are going to have to be totally accountable and show a complete understanding of the word “communication”!

The tradition of advertising originated many years ago in a far less complicated time than to-day with far less clutter but once that benign period passed they went on doing it. It had no purpose but they persuaded themselves that it looked good. Human beings are good at justifying their mistakes to themselves keeping them going when they really shouldn't !

Together with the fact that confusion is good business because when consumers are confused Marketing experts, advertising gurus become indispensable, nowadays the only way to avoid marketing/advertising is to block your ears.

The food industry is a classic example of the need to ignore whatever they say. So eating well comes down to choosing real food and avoiding industrial novelties; if it comes from a plant eat it, if it was made in a plant – don't despite what all the advertising may tell you! The fact of the matter is eating for good health is much simpler than the food industry would have you believe. And don't...don't eat food advertised on television!

That is one of the reasons why the advertising industry needs to ensure that advertising truthfully serves the public interests.

Then there is the frustrating aspect of customer service!!

The world would not end if we stopped all advertising, the capitalist system survival does not imply that the pre-crisis faith in the wisdom of financial markets and the efficiency of free enterprise will again be like it was before the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. What then, will replace global marketing that crumbled in the autumn of 2008? The answer is interactive communication, but of a new kind.

The melt-down needs to be put into historical perspective. Certainly the traumatic effects of 2007-09 have neither destroyed nor diminished the the fundamental human urges that have always powered the capitalist system, Advertising needs to be redirected to create a new version of advertising and marketing that ultimately will be more successful and productive than the one that is currently under such severe strain. After all advertising and marketing are not the perfect means of communicating with society. It is a very imperfect system but crucially one that is adaptive. Like a living species, it evolves in response to a changing environment. Once we recognise is not an idealised and static set of institutions but an evolutionary one that reinvents itself through a form of natural selection.

My recently published book "Television killed advertising" is now available @ Amazon Books UK. In the book I detail just how much more effective interactive communication is when compared to conventional advertising and details the results of a research investment in excess of £5 m. It also discusses where we went wrong in the past and where we are going to go wrong in the future unless we learn the real meaning of the word "communication."

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A substantial research investment has proved conclusively that one exposure to an interactive "event" is far more effective in all key measurements, than traditional advertising. Interactive Communication, properly executed, can be totally accountable, unlike all other forms of advertising! You can contact Paul at: paul.ashby@yahoo.com Discover more (including research) on http://interactivetelevisionorinteractivetv.blogspot.com or: http://effectiveaccountablecommunication.blogspot.com