There will be red faces in the continuity suite at ITV this morning. The coverage has been scornful. (Note how the mainstream press is mining message boards for comments; also note how many complain of difficulties emailing ITV itself with feedback) But the mistake illustrated a powerful point. Interruptive advertising really sucks. I don’t want to leave the action to see your messages. You have the banners round the ground, you have the players shirts, you have sponsorship of the Cup itself and of the coverage by EOn. Why cut away from the action?

On shows which are not live events TV is currently suffering from its viewers habit of recording on the hard drive, and then skipping ads when they watch them. It seems clear that advertisers are going to need to get more ingenious at understanding how sponsorship, product placement and celebrity endorsement work on TV. Interruptive commercials are going to show a diminishing return, forever. Last night’s débacle was just another milestone on the way.

The structure of communications in large companies is that comms and marketing directors come and go. They have between 18 months and 3 years to make their mark and they depart for another brand and another gig. The agency world is structured to respond to this. Every few years a major account is repitched as the new guy or girl comes in, and everyone does their best job of reinventing the brand, putting a new stamp on it. All of these pitches are done on spec, rather quickly and with very little budget for detailed research. The results can sometimes be wonderful, but they are overwhelming driven by anecdote, by instinct and by sheer creative flair.

Brands and businesses in all the all the other aspects of their existence operate a very different ecology. They try to acquire parters, resellers, customers with long term value, cherish them, develop them, nurture them. An 18 months or even a 3 year relationship would indicate a major failure. Real value comes from consistency, honesty, trust built over a long period. The lessons learnt by brands who listen to online conversations are that their good name is hard won and easily lost. Social media marketing when it is effective attempts to build on the micro-interactions (thank you David Armano) of brand and customer. Spending is on good customer service, small but incremental improvements in product. Not on bold statements.

So the big agencies like Tribal DDB are launching start ups (step forward Radar DDB) created from a core team based on one techy, one adman and one PR person. The structure of the new agency has to be more geared to creating longterm value by doing small things well over a long period. Customer understanding is very important, as is a longterm relationship with the client.

This creates a challenge on the client side too, because the client to be effective needs to be in place for longer. Marketing people need to be recruited from customer services, from product research, from PR. The marketing of brands and companies in a bold, splashy cycle with a 2-3 year interval won’t go away, but it will gradually lose ground to an approach based on slower, incremental changes. This is the “everyday value” idea of the retailers. It brings us closer to a view of the brand being driven by customer experience, not by billboards.

The business of Market Sentinel and companies like us is not data, but intelligence. It is about discovering the relationships between brands, businesses and their stakeholders and helping our clients find the right metrics to discover what they need to know to grow their business. What we have been discovering in the summer and since is that there are some agencies, or teams within those agencies, who instinctively get the importance of using the technology of the web to understand and link with the customer. Beeline Laboratories, Edelman, Web Liquid, KMP all do a good job here. But their lives are still difficult. The world is still set up for the old way of doing things.

In the meantime the impact of the credit crunch is like a glacier bearing down on the industry, ripping apart traditional structures and budgets, destroying the fabric of the old agency. My hunch is that these techy agencies, with their emphasis on technology and long term relationships and with their lower cost structures, will inherit the world.

We were talking to a pharma client yesterday about the rules of online communication. They were discussing how difficult it is to put across “negative” messages, being specific about the problems drugs are supposed to address: back pain, bad breath, period pains etc. This is only an issue with “push” ads, though. Clients should be educated away from using virals to address these kinds of problems. Search is much better. Customers with young kids go to the web to search for the answers to all kinds of problems.

Motrin had a perfectly sensible idea – a Mom with a bad back might need a painkiller – but the way to communicate it was not through a viral ad. They should have created “pull” resources for young mothers, about common problems experienced by young mothers and put the information about Motrin into an FAQ. Their target audience would have found the content through Google and noted the benefits of the practical information about motherhood, as well as the association with Motrin. Positive, warm feelings would have resulted.

Not the current mass freakout by angry Moms.