What is Advertising in the Post-Advertising Age?
Let me tell you a story.
Over a year ago, we purchased a bunch of URLs for a new site we were dreaming about. We were going to call the site postadvertisingage.com or post-adage.com or something similar. The site was going to be a place where people could openly discuss the realities, implications and contradictions of what we have been calling the “post-advertising age”—this moment when traditional advertising and media are faltering and, increasingly, getting ignored as entirely new marketing strategies and new media emerge daily.
The baseline question for us is pretty straightforward: Big media, big ad agencies and big brands owned the advertising age, so who’s gonna own the post-advertising age?
But before we could launch the site, pose the question and start the conversation, lawyers representing Crain Communications, owners of the weekly Advertising Age, sent us a letter claiming THEY own the post-advertising age. They think they’ve trademarked it, and they want us to turn over all our URLs. They wrote, “...we demand that you immediately transfer the Domain Names to Crain.”
Their attitude, of course, packs a certain amount of entertainment value. Crain, after all, has a big economic stake in preserving the hegemony of big agencies, big ad budgets and traditional big media. Turning over the post-advertising age to Advertising Age would be like giving Fox News ownership of the “truth.” (Yes, Fox thinks it owns "truth" already. But that’s no reason to make it official.)
So, as a public service, our lawyers wrote Crain back and declined to cooperate with their demands. Subsequently, thinking it over, we proposed a compromise to Crain: We’d keep the URLs, but we wouldn’t use them. On the other hand, we informed them that we’d go right on using the phrase “post-advertising age” in any English sentence we could compose. The First Amendment, we informed them, gives us that right.
For better or worse, the letter got us going and, as you can see, we finally have launched our much-dreamed-about site. This one. Post-advertising.com. No “age,” so the entire Crain family and its subsidiaries should be appeased. But lots of “Welcome to the post-advertising age.” We’ll see what happens.
Keep us company while we wait to be sued (or not). Meanwhile, enjoy the first-ever musings on the post-advertising age at post-advertising.com, where we’ll link to things that seem relevant, post ideas and examples of non-traditional stuff that’s being tried. To submit something, contact our editors here.
Sincerely,
The Folks at Story Worldwide
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