Rance Crain: Mass Market Not Dead

Writing in Ad Age, Rance Crain claims, contrary to popular belief, the mass market is alive and well. It’s creative that’s dead. Crain feels advertising simply isn’t creative enough anymore to move product. While creative does seem to be, well, creatively challenged these days, last we looked, there seem to be more than three TV networks, not to mention all these other things called cable channels through which one must psychotically surf to make sure the latest groundbreaking episode of The Ashlee Simpson Show isn’t missed. Oh, and there’s this thing called the Internet too. It has tons of these places called “websites.” Not sure what they are but it everyone seems to have one. Oh, duh, we get Rance’s point now.

There’s still a mass market because the market is so massive. Phew. We felt stupid there for a minute.

Oh, and speaking of massive. There’s such a massive amount of magazines now too. That helps the massive market too. Back in the day, there used to be this really big magazine called National Geographic that, like, everybody read. It was so cool. The pictures were neat too. But now there’s so many other important magazines like, oh, Star and Radar that everyone has to read to know the really cool stuff like whether their number is in Paris Hilton’s Sidekick.

Oops. We digress. Crain was talking about creative sucking too and the need for yet another CxO title – the Chief Creative Officer. Better go read his article to see what that’s all about.

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Steve Hall

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