Now let's talk about the ads that run in them. Invariably, business ads run counter to the spirit of the editorial environment. While the articles engage the reader, the ads seem to hold him at arm's length. They are usually formulaic or forbidding, devoid of humanity. And there is absolutely no reason why this should be so. Business ads often contain very important information. As such, they rank with the articles in terms of their potential value to the reader. But looking at the majority of ads you'd never guess that.
They employ a funny kind of "adspeak" that has become the convention of much corporate advertising. The tonality rarely varies. Either it's rigid, or self-congratulatory or so false.
Visually, too, it's always a big colour stock shot: factories at sunrise, skylines at sunrise, very intense people having meetings, the done-to-death metaphoric water drop, et al. And if it's not one shot, it's a montage of them!
Now I'm not for a moment suggesting that the pages of AWSJ, The Economist or IHT should suddenly be filled with clowns and off-the-wall humour.
Nor am I suggesting that financial tombstone ads should be tarted up; they have a time-honoured purpose that is excluded from this debate. All I'm saying is, if the publication can talk to its readers as intelligent human beings, why can't our ads do the same? It seems to me that the editorial environment sets up a very special relationship with the reader which we, mostly, choose to ignore.
There's no denying that many business ads are charged with communicating similar concepts: security (banks, insurance), or enhanced productivity (office systems, IT products), or speed and reliability (couriers, freight companies). So maybe we have to start by reinventing marcom strategies.
If your brand communications strategy is a cookie-cutter replica of every other strategy in your category, it follows that your ads will be cookie-cutter replicas too. The great British planner Jon Steel articulated another obstacle in his book, Truth, Lies & Advertising: "People on the inside of any company assume that all those on the outside share their own level of knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, the company's products. It often falls to the planner to break that illusion."
Savvy marketers and agencies got onto this a long time ago. Research - not those flawed focus groups, but research using the principles of ethnography - can be conducted in a businessman's venue over drinks or dinner, probing their needs, concerns and attitudes. We can do the voyage around the businessman's mind, the same as we'd do around the consumer's mind. Out of that would come a totally unexpected insight to point the advertising in a fresh, new, but relevant direction.
Then there's the Disruption methodology. TBWA's Jean-Marie Dru devised it to "reframe, restage and reshape, by rejecting the obvious". His starting point is to identify the conventions that surround every category: the established practices, the specific characteristics. He challenges the way things are done "by developing new hypotheses and unexpected scenarios, by searching for unprecedented angles of attack ..." Dru's goal is to create brand visions that have the power to transform markets. The more powerful the vision, he believes, the more it vitalises the brand, citing campaigns like Apple's 'Think different' and IBM's 'Solutions for a small planet'.
First things first. Let's agree to abolish the ridiculous myth that business press readers are somehow not actually human beings. After all, you're reading a business publication now. And as a very individual human, don't you think you're entitled to receive something better than 'Tomorrow's technology today'?
Jim Aitchison is the author of Cutting Edge Advertising, Cutting Edge Commercials and Cutting Edge Radio