THE STORY SO FAR: PART 290: TUESDAY

MANY YEARS AGO—BEFORE I BECAME A WRITER—I WORKED IN ADVERTISING FOR A WHILE

RECENTLY, THIS HEADLINE GOT MY ATTENTION “Advertising Loses More Jobs Than Any Other Industry”

I never like to think of anyone losing their jobs—we writers are intimately familiar with financial insecurity—but I have to admit that I strongly believe the the U.S. does advertising to excess, so that if less ad people means less advertising, I’ll be delighted. The whole damn thing is completely out of control—and brainwashing is alive and well.

It won’t, of course. Such people will re-emerge as Social Media experts or similar. Hustling is too endemic to the U.S for the flood of propaganda to slow. Does it affect how we think and behave? You bet it does. Just look around—look at the choices we make—and weep.

But here are some figures from a blog on the matter by Dan Lyons.

September 4, 2013 at 3:30 PM

A lot of the job categories that have suffered over the past decade did so because of the recession and slow economic growth. In theory, some of those lost jobs will come back as the economy improves.

The loss of jobs in advertising speaks to something else altogether. Unlike, say, jobs building houses, jobs in advertising aren’t coming back.

Advertising and promotion managers are people who plan ad campaigns and decide where to make media buys. A decade ago, there were about 81,000 of these jobs in the U.S. As of 2012, that number had fallen to just over 28,000.

“Likely a major factor in the decline of such positions has been the decline of advertising in print media, such as newspapers,” the report states.

That decline in advertising in newspapers and other print publications has been well documented. That situation is never going to get better. It is only going to deteriorate.

This issue, however, goes beyond print publications. The real problem involves advertising itself, which simply does not work as well as it used to, no matter what platform it’s on. That’s the gist of The Naked Brand, a documentary made by Jeff Rosenblum, the CEO of Questus, a digital marketing agency.

Of course the waning power of advertising has huge implications for marketers. It means we need to move away from interruptive and more traditional tactics -- advertising, billboards, direct mail -- and embrace new ways of attracting customers by creating content that has real value.

According to the 24/7 Wall Street report, more than 50,000 jobs in advertising and promotion have vanished over the past decade.

To ride that wave, you need to think less about putting ads next to content and think more about creating the content itself.

Hmm! I guess I had that thought a very long time ago.