What things look like and what they mean are often hopelessly unaligned. This is especially true in the marketing of technology.

Arty creatives look at technology and recoil in horror: it’s a world of pain, all dual core chips and IP and propeller-head stuff that’s hard to stomach. So, campaigns boost everything that telephony and computing isn’t: which means that our Telco brand will be birthed of a friendly and Utopian campaign flush with saturated colours and ditzy soundtracks where gorgeous hotties float through an imagistic world in a disassociated blur enabled not by illegal chemicals but by portable media.

If the product’s shown, it’s as a gorgeous box of multi-media tricks that—hold the presses—is rammed with lots of clever apps! There’s no worthwhile narrative, only a technicolour wash, like being trapped in a fancy elevator with Moby muzak on stun.

Sometimes we see dopey twenty-somethings literally moulding the world as they float by; windows, walls, pavements, cleave around him or her; or a heroine who blunders through a grumpy world in which accidents will happen, but not to her, where she narrowly misses—without noticing!—pianos crashing to the ground or walls collapsing as she sashays by in a daze– all because she has a mobile phone that plays music! Sometimes we see wholesale lifts from High Art in which technicolour bunnies or balls or ribbons shoot about, telling us that, yes, we only have to imagine and our mobile data and comms device will make it so. Always dreaming. Never working. Young. In a world of infinite opportunity made in your own image.  

Sadly, won over by this tosh, a visit to your Telco website will pop your multicoloured balloon; it’s all skinny generic content, news nugget feeds ‘n’  bite sized trivia overwhelmed by product data sets and hard sell designed to get you to that basket in record time. The disconnect’s startling. Caught on the TV ad hook, all we get when we interact with the brand is the same old same old. Impact is high, engagement is low; the visuals are a thrill; the reality is banal.   

In the post-ad age, audiences have lost patience. They want content that’s worth spending time with. They ask whether the Madmen’s dreams come true. With open eyes, consumers won’t be doing with brands broadcasting to them as a lumpen mass, telling them how to behave or what to think, however pretty the pictures. They’ll ask their buddies or social networks  or harvest the wisdom of crowds to uncover the truth. If there’s a nasty surprise hiding under a rock, it will be found. If the brand promise of Utopia is just an alienating call centre experience it will out. If the product doesn’t behave like it should, it will be exposed. Appearance and reality must line up.

Now, when authenticity and trust are paramount, broadcasting like this is so over. The new marketing has to be grounded in honesty and present not just an ersatz look and feel but an testable experience which is nuanced and genuine. Why? Because we only give trust to brands that long for our touch and that have authority to publish. These sad adland parades have no authenticity nor story worth the telling. Bye-bye, buy, buy.