Age of Persuasion gives way to new radio show.

What can listeners expect from the new show? How does O’Reilly see the industry changing? The industry veteran explains.

What should listeners expect when Under the Influence makes its debut on CBC Radio One?

The first season of our show was called O’Reilly on Advertising when we thought we were just going to be a 10-episode summer replacement series. But there was such a wonderful reaction from CBC listeners that the CBC asked us to stay on. When we knew we were going to have a bigger tableau, we became a much wider scope and the Age of Persuasion started. So this is really the start of my seventh season. Because [the show] was six seasons deep, I wanted to freshen it up – a new name, new theme music, slight structural changes, et cetera. It will still be a show that investigates marketing and advertising. The 30,000-foot view of the show doesn’t change.

But so much has changed in our industry in the last seven years that we’re really as an industry moving away from overt persuasion, from big one-way conversations with consumers and moving towards being subtler and using sway. You know, it’s product placement, it’s ambient advertising, it’s digital. It’s all these other things that aren’t big advertising television campaigns being thrown down a one-way street. I want to reflect that. I want to talk about influence and talk about the subtleties of how this business is changing and that’s really the slight skew change in it.

Why not evolve the content under the Age of Persuasion name?

Rather than just slightly changing direction, I really wanted to change everything so people feel, even in the sound and feel of the show, this whole business is changing, not just keep everything the same and address it. I want the whole show to change.

I’ll even say this, and this is a much lesser reason: even in the last seven years, you know The Globe and Mail has come up with a Persuasion page, and then there was that TV show that started the year after we started called AdPersuasion, Arlene Dickinson has come out with her book called Persuasion, I just got a book sent to me by an author in New York and the title is Advertising in the Age of Persuasion. I’m going to zig. I’m going to do what some smart advertisers do and not sound like everyone else. Everybody has jumped on the bandwagon, so I’m going to change trains.

In a post on your website, you say “We leave the age of persuasion and enter the era of sway and leverage.” What did you mean by that?

I feel that advertising is becoming more of a dialogue, so that means it’s a lot more of a delicate process now. There’s so much engagement with consumers now that it has a different tone – it can’t be the sermon from the mount anymore. It has to be much more collaborative. It’s less about persuading with a capital ‘P’ and more about trying to influence a conversation or trying to figure out where you can plug into somebody’s world. In some ways, it’s a softer, more collaborative tone that the industry has to strike now. I mean, a 12-year-old girl with an e-mail can actually get her message to a CEO of a top corporation and actually affect his thinking on something, which would never have happened 10 years ago. It was out of the question. So that’s what I want to reflect. It’s all sorts of subtler ways that brands are staking their claim on real estate. It’s a very interesting time.

Which brands are getting it right?

I think Nike has always been the leader. I think they connect with their customers in such wonderful ways where they do it in websites and big ideas and ambient ideas. When I give keynote speeches I find myself talking about ambient ideas as much as I’m talking about print campaigns and television campaigns. The opportunities to communicate have gotten so much wider in our business. The guardrails aren’t just traditional media anymore, and it’s not just digital either. I [Nike does] it really well.

You got to tip the hat to Old Spice for one of the toughest tasks, which is dusting off an ancient product that my dad used to have in his medicine cabinet and now I actually think it’s a pretty cool product and I have it in my medicine cabinet now. I love the idea, but more than that I love what they did on YouTube when they answered questions live that day when they didn’t even tell people they were going to do it. They just showed up and started answering questions live. That had never been done on YouTube before. The influence of that, meaning how cool and smart and how much chatter that generated for the brand that day and then for the next couple of months was exactly what I’m talking about. It’s not overt. It isn’t an overt ad. They were actually having a conversation with their customers in the most novel way. Just when you think you’ve seen it all on YouTube there was something nobody had ever done.

Earlier this year Age of Persuasion was picked up by WBEZ in Chicago for American broadcast. Has that deal then come to an end? Or has a deal been hatched to include this new show?

We’re just coming up to the end of our first full year. They re-signed us again and we’re going on for another year. I’m trying to get them caught up on the series. So from the first half of 2012 until June they’re going to be hearing all the last Age of Persuasion episodes they haven’t heard, and then in June they’re going to start picking up my new show. So they’re doing a slightly different sequence than we’re doing here and then they’ll be caught up.

In the spirit of the season, what should marketers and advertisers expect in the year ahead?

Here’s my wish list: I hope it gets a little freer creatively out there. I really think we’ve been conservative over the last two or three years. I know that’s coming out of a recession and we probably have a recession hangover that nobody really thinks is still lingering, but I think it is. There’s still great work, but there’s less of that calculated risk and someone really swinging for the fences.

Originally published by MarketingMag.ca on December 15, 2011