A Kind Anonymous Soul Saves Me Writing A Post Today By Leaving A Long, Intelligent, Thoughtful, Well-Written Comment On Yesterday’s Post.
Anon writes:
On a serious note…here’s a list of points and ideas why, some obvious, some hopefully not in reply to your post. Sure others might have commented already on some of these but hopefully not all of them. There might be a little repetition in some of points too but they’re all intertwined ideas and hopefully it sparks further debate.
1. It’s about making money not the creativity.
2. It’s obvious from your post that too many layers of bureaucracy in agency model destroys creative idea now.
3. Clients have got agencies by the balls.
4. Clients are uneducated, ignorant and dumb as in anon at 13.04 – this is so true.
5. Many CEOs used to be marketing managers and know what they want and get exactly what they want for as cheap as possible. Pay peanuts, get monkeys.
6. No trust in creativity, clients terrified of losing their jobs. Play safe. Combine this with point 4. It’s always this double whammy.
7. Weak agency creative leadership to stand up to clients. No charming, engaging, persuasive personalities anymore.
8. Controlling account directors, in the layer of bureaucracy point, using the excuse of keeping creative away from client, kills ideas as there’s not a proper relationship between the two. There’s no passion of persuasion anymore. Does anyone actually know if the Mother agency model client/creative relationship actually work?
9. Unstoppable tidal wave which is the net and increasingly mobile taking away monies for traditional TV budgets. Disrupting and diluting all traditional channels of mass communication and many can’t quite see how to yet make (easy) money in this new complex world of consumer engagement. They’re all clinging to traditional moneymaking models so making bad, safe ads, scared of change.
10. Media split from creative. Took all the money and power. Squeezing creative further. It used to be different. Crazy to think that media usually has nine to ten times more money to buy TV media space (that most of us sky+) than a creative agency has to spend on a decent creative idea.
11. Has TV ad had it’s day? New talent going into new digital media. Producing more exciting, more interactive cross/transmedia ideas. You wrote about this before I think.
12. Attention overload. There’s just too much content nowadays with the net and we take it all for granted. Who cares now? I have 20K songs on my itunes but only listen to new music podcasts now and only once usually. Content is virtually free too. There’s no value in it anymore unless it’s a visual orgasmic experience like Avatar.
13. Planners. If they have a say in a creative idea they should all first go and run on a commercial and be treated like a runner and understand from the bottom up what it is like to physically and practicably create a narrative, storytelling idea then they can go and look down on us all. Might just balance their myopic (read patronising) outlook, instead of pretending that they know what they are talking about when it comes to opinionating on a script.
14. The power is in the relationship too (see point 8) not the creative idea. Clients become our friends, our kids go to the same schools, we sometimes even marry them.
15. This is a big point, needs expanding. Ridiculously shrinking production budgets doesn’t help creativity, not to mention ‘cost controllers’ squeezing even more money away from budgets just before shooting. The true creatives when it comes to shooting a script are producers nowadays. They can work miracles.
The question is why doesn’t media give creative more money to spend on the creative and production of ads? Maybe it’s because there are better ROI, more direct and cheaper ways to connect with the consumer now. Brands are slowly diversifying their marketing budgets into new forms of consumer brand engagement, producing user-generated content (free – Doritos – superbowl), short films, documentaries, contextual brand-funded TV and useful branded utility like phone apps which will increasingly feature video too. Creatively exciting times.
And I leave you with a link to all last nights Superbowl ads as an example of the appalling state of creativity in the TV ad industry… http://adage.com/superbowl10/article?article_id=141954
Ta very much.
If anyone else would like to write a post for this blog, just do one of those.