Since its inception, the web has primarily been used by companies for advertising purposes. For close to two decades now, large media conglomerates and agencies have been battling to put together the most creative campaigns while spending as much of their client’s budgets as quickly as possible.

In the past year, things have changed. Advertising as a whole is facing a true identity crisis. Diminishing budgets are only hiding a much more profound shift in the way companies are or want to relate to their markets.

Pushing the brand and its offering in front of clients is no longer enough. People are overwhelmed with information and adding to it is not going to help sell a product.

And then there is social media. Arguably one of the biggest  myths of all times. Do we really think that people are going to spend their days talking about our brands? Do we believe we can fully control when and what they are going to say about products or services? And finally, can we assume that because they talk about a brand – they are also going to buy its products? For all questions the answer is basically no.

Social media can do a lot of great things it also presents a high propensity to waste people’s and the brand’s time in the process.

What we should all be focusing on is offer people better ways to use information and live their lives. This can take many shapes: providing filters for relevant content, prolonging offline experiences online, offering more personalization, and allow each person to control the experience. By doing so, companies are offering a clear, tangible added value, which in turn is the best way to offer service. Service – as it happens – are what ultimately sells most.

Advertising may be “too big to fail”. The point however is not let it die but to turn it into something else. Senior executives who understand and apply this idea of service will gain a tremendous competitive edge. They will end up selling more than their competitors and – paradoxically – at a lower cost.