Paul Lessing: Advertising in 2012 A.D.

April 26, 2010 in Advertising, copywriting, Creative and Design, Des Moines, Iowa, Lessing-Flynn, Marketing, Paul Lessing, That's Kinda Cool, Web Analytics
Tags: advertising predictions, fortune teller, future, Marketing, predictions, telepathy, the future of advertising

Look over a magazine or farm paper of only two or three years past and the advertising copy appears crude.  What was then considered snappy is now worn and old like a garment.  Three years from now will the same be true of this year’s copy?

Copy is constantly improving.  The cry always for something newer and better.  The obvious question arises, “What will be the style of advertising one hundred years from now?  When we present writers of copy, encased in an advertised coffin are resting in an advertised mausoleum, what will the newer generation do?

“Will they have something better than anything now dreamed of?  Or, is there a limit to improvement and will advertising, moving in cycles like apparel fashions, swing back to some plan that is now considered superannuated?  Will the coming century usher a renaissance?”

This topic is admittedly impractical but it is irresistibly fascinating.  The writer has dreamed a little on the subject.

Judging from the present trend of advertising thought, one is inclined to think that the dominant note of 21st century advertising will be accurate forecasting of results.  Psychology will become a more necessary factor in the qualifications of the advertising man.  He will learn to read the human mind almost unerringly and when he inserts an advertisement, he will know almost down to the last inquiry just what results it will bring.

By the time 2012 rolls round the public will doubtless be better educated on art and good taste so that many of the present outre layouts which, violating all canons of art, scream to high heaven, will be eliminated.  The public already recognizes the good and true in advertising.  By 2012 it will also recognize the beautiful.

Media?  This is hard to answer, even fancifully.  It may be that the present tendency toward consolidation on the part of some of the national magazines means that in the future there will be fewer magazines and they supremely good.  Experiments have already been made in Germany looking toward printing by electricity, without ink, and there is no doubt but that the next hundred years will see many improvements in printing and engraving.

If airships become practical many advertisers will doubtless distribute advertising literature by the simple method of throwing it overboard as the airship passes over a populous district.  Professional advertising men know from bitter experience that indiscriminate distribution is wasteful but there will always be some who will insist on this method.

None can foresee the advertising methods of a century hence.  It may be that telepathy will be so developed that the advertiser by a feat of thought transferrence can convey his selling talk to the minds of his prospects.

Then again, some mighty cataclysm may wipe out our civilization as a mother wipes the lips of her child.  We may go back to the days of barter.  We may even be back to the days of cave men when no advertising is needed, when the rule is “Let him take who may and let him keep who can.”

Who knows?

Author: Paul Lessing
Lessing Advertising Agency
Des Moines, Iowa
January, 1912

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