The High price we pay for such a profligate business!

When you consider the billions spent on marketing and advertising automobiles why is it that the major car companies are going cap in hand to Governments for massive handouts - after all marketing and advertising does work so they say.
Well, generally speaking Marketing and Advertising has failed, yet again, by allowing too many brands to proliferate.  Marketing has been too late in developing small cars, they have not used their Marketing budgets wisely, and in the Western world marketing has not been alive enough to the threats posed by their Asian competitors.
Why? Because General Motors, Ford and all else continue to live in their own world.
Just how out of touch are these people?
In America it would seem totally out of touch.  A fine and outstanding example of that is the fact that the automakers were flying into Washington DC with tin cups in their hands, in private luxury jets!  General Motors recently announced that they were selling two of its Corporate jets leaving them with only three jets to choose from when they next fly to Washington DC tin cup in hand once again!
Then there is insurance giant AIG who very recently spent $440,000 on a retreat for executives near Los Angeles just days after receiving $85 billion in Government aid to stave off bankruptcy!
Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships. Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.
Up until a few years ago advertising was the province of a privileged few to the passive many. Now the ownership of moving images has passed into the hands of practically everybody and the articulation of moving images has passed into the hands of everybody with access to a phone, laptop or digital camera. We can now have our say."
In essence, the behaviour of the audience is moving from passive to active participation so that TV watching or listening to radio in the future will be a very different and less sedentary experience than it has been in the past 80 years.
Ultimate power isn’t with brand owners or even with broadcasters, and most certainly doesn’t exist with the Advertising Agencies at all! It's with the viewer. And it's the on/off switch.
 Given that the traditional interruption model of TV advertising is no longer as effective as it was a decade ago, and coupled with the rise of personal video recorders (PVR) that permit viewers to record programs free of advertising, broadcast sponsorship is potentially more attractive for brand owners than traditional advertising.
. As a result, brand owners and their agencies have started to explore other hybrid-broadcast sponsorship models, such as product placement, advertiser-funded programming (AFP), as well as controlling their own TV and radio channels.