A conversation with Werner Herzog.
Hilarious/depressing hiring ad faux pas.
Every sample from 3 Feet High and Rising (thanks, A).
Some excellent insults here.
Animator and cartoonist draw Marvel characters from memory (thanks, L).
On LinkedIn there’s a fella who likes to post ads that have inspired him, offering them to others in the hope that they have the same effect.
Often one of the commenters under the ads is me. I find myself taking issue with the fact that the ads are usually ‘scam’, by which I mean they are created solely for the purpose of entering into awards, and not real answers to real client briefs that are intended to solve actual business problems.
The most recent example of this featured an expansion of our two viewpoints in the comment section, so have a look at both sides of the issue:
Here’s the ad…
Andy Lockley, ECD of Content at Grey London started things off:
I was doubtful that Chupa Chups actually briefed an ad agency to create a print/poster campaign to promote its lollipops. So I contacted Chupa Chups to ask if this was an actual advertisement that they had created or if it was just ‘fan art’. They confirmed my suspicion that is was the latter. I know you’re a fan of these type of simple visual articulations, but many are nothing more than vanity exercises by ad agencies / ad agency creatives designed to seduce awards juries in one big echo chamber. All a bit tragic really.
To which the original poster (OP) replied:
Think you might be missing the point of my feed Andy. This is about inspiration. I’m trying to expand people’s executional sensibilities. Sharing stuff that catches my eye or in this case visually expresses the feeling of enjoying a lollipop. If this is spec/student work, good for them for executing to this level. Looks better than a lot of real ads I see. Now if your point is that it doesn’t work as an ad…all opinions are welcome but if you are saying it’s doesn’t work as a piece of inspiration, I disagree.
I joined in:
Alas, I think it inspires people to take the path of Cannes scams instead of necessary ads for real clients. This would never sell a lollipop in a million years. But it is a nice illustration 😉
OP replied:
Really? I find inspiration in this and I don’t go on to make scam. I try to take the rails of any typical expected executional paths. It’s like gathering artistic references and looking at modes of expression for use down the line.
Me:
I didn’t say ‘everyone’. I said ‘people’. The celebration of scam breeds scam. Maybe not everyone, maybe not today, but its proliferation has helped bring the industry to its current sorry state. Let’s stop holding it up as anything to be inspired by. It makes us look childish and irresponsible. Beyond that, these ads just aren’t very good.
OP:
It’s advertising Ben. Why so serious? I feel like it’s that ‘tude in particular that’s taken the fun out of this industry. The shit work is based on shit strategy and phoning in the work. Blaming the industry’s faults on this is actually funny.
Me:
Just one of many reasons, which is why I said ‘helped’, not ‘brought’. We can produce good work on good strategies, but no one bothers anymore because they can do bullshit like this. Then you can put it up on LinkedIn, I’ll point out why it’s shit and the wheel keeps spinning. Then we can agree to disagree on who is part of the solution and who is part of the problem.
End scene.
I wanted to put both sides of the argument because I think many people in the industry see scam ads as harmless fun that can be inspiring (this is borne out by the supportive/complimentary comments).
So what’s the problem? Is my ‘tude a bad thing? Let’s go into the origins of scam and see if the answer lies there.
For decades creatives have altered ads for award entries. However, it used to be just the surreptitious removal of an ugly phone number or website from the entry proof. Or the two-minute director’s cut that ran once at 3am on some obscure satellite channel. Cheating? Sure. But the amended executions were based on real ads, and the alteration was relatively small, so they weren’t really getting an unfair advantage so much as presenting an actual answer to a real brief in its best state. Crime-wise it’s more parking ticket than GBH.
Then in the early 2000s awards seemed to take on greater importance. The Gunn Report provided a quantifiable measurement of creative superiority (even though it has never disclosed its methodology) that agencies could use in their pitch decks, or as PR fodder to trumpet how great their year had been. There seemed at last to be a direct financial benefit to the agencies and holding companies that were winning awards.
But we soon found ourselves in a live illustration of Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Instead of awards being a consequence of good work, a certain kind of work was being created as a consequence of the benefits of awards.
I’m not saying these are all bad ads (although some, like the Chupa Chups example, certainly are). I’m saying they are not ads at all.
The skill and value of the job is in using some form of communication to solve a business problem on behalf of a product or service. If we’re just making stuff up, we’re not doing that. Why would Hot Wheels use sophisticated, conceptual double page ads to sell their cars to kids who don’t like or understand that kind of thing? Have you ever seen a Tabasco ad in real life that shows some kind of exaggeration of the heat of the sauce? Come to think of it, have you ever seen a Tabasco ad in real life? Or all the award-winning WWF ads? Or Land Rover ‘you can drive anywhere’ executions?
They are like the tree that falls in the wood with only an awards jury to hear it.
But maybe I am just being Mr. Buzzkill, and this is essentially a benign exercise in showing what advertising people can do when all the circumstances are right.
Sorry, no. Here’s why:
So is it inspiring, harmless ‘fun ‘tude’ stuff, or another nail in the coffin of the credibility of an industry whose standing has never been lower?
Cast your vote with your next piece of work.
Advertising is an industry fueled by simplicity. At our best, we create simple messages, via a relatively simple process: work out what a client wants to say, say it persuasively, get that message out to the people they want to hear it. The more we add complexity, the worse our output becomes.
Complexity is difficult to grasp, annoying to process and off-putting to engage with, but for the last twenty years it’s become a more significant element of what we do.
So join me as I slip back through the mists of time, to a gentler, simpler epoch…
When I started off there were generally four media channels: press, posters, TV and radio. (Coming up on the outside were the ‘ambient’ media opportunities, but let’s face it, most of these were awards-fodder bullshit.)
Let’s just think back to that time with a collective ahhhhhhhh…, as if we are now sinking into a soft leather armchair, accompanied by a Whisky Sour and a bowl of kettle chips. Just imagine: if you had to think up an advertising idea, it only had to exist in one of those four forms, two of which were pretty similar to each other.
The work was better then (see all the other posts in this series). That’s not just my opinion, there’s a graph I can never seem to track down (if any of you have it, do send it my way) which has collated many answers to the question, ‘Do you think the ads are better than the TV shows?’. The line starts at a healthy spot in the early nineties, with quite a few people saying yes. Then it starts to head downwards at the kind of pace that would put the shits up Matthias Mayer. Yes, the TV shows have improved, but let’s not kid ourselves: the ads have become worse.
Is that because of complexity alone? Of course not. Budgets, brain-drains, the internet, open-plan offices, the rise of the holding company, globalisation etc. have all played their interconnected parts, but at the root of everything else is the spiraling growth of an overall complexity.
Let’s return to those media channels. With only four, they could, to a certain extent, be mastered. Some of us were informally allowed to specialise still further, with creatives being recognised for their abilities in TV or press, and fed more exclusively with those briefs. But most of us might be handed a poster brief one day, and a radio brief the next, or we’d be asked to come up with a mixed-media campaign that had to work across all four channels.
The advent of ‘digital’ changed all that. like water seeping in under a closed door, the digital briefs started to become more numerous and take on a greater significance. Banners started off as a little joke, where you’d kind of pat them on the head and send them on their plucky way before returning to the real stuff of billboards and TV commercials.
But then they became a more integral part of things, added to many briefs, and not to be sniggered at. In 2007, industry commentators told us that if we didn’t have digital in our book we were in danger of becoming dinosaurs. Places like R/GA demonstrated the need for explaining things like ‘UX’ on lots of whiteboards, and we were certainly not in Kansas anymore.
Year after year, digital rose, and with it, complexity. Here’s a chart that sums it up nicely:
To me it seems self-evident that the ability to maintain quality over those 15-20 channels is far harder than doing so over the span of the original four.
Press, posters, TV and radio still need to be fed and watered, so we’re clearly having to spread the same talent and money over a much larger area. Except it’s not the same talent and money, is it? The grind, and the fewer opportunities to produce big, famous work, has put many people off taking up residence in adland, so the talent is of a lower quality. And the fun and games of neo-liberalist capitalism have left the financial side of things… now, what’s the technical term? Oh yes: fucked. A tweet from Saturday should illustrate this neatly:
So there’s less money and less talent, but far more stuff to make.
That situation has complicated staffing. We now have comms planners, digital production, digital strategy, gif makers, social ECDs, CRM experts, search arms of media companies, influencer network advisers, content producers and many more. All paid, on average, less than their counterparts would have been a decade earlier.
And we have more agencies for those jobs. Some big companies have consolidated the new needs into their existing departments, or created new departments, and a bunch more complication. But many new, specialised companies have arrived to cover the new disciplines. And then they have to try to work with each other to span the new varied ‘needs’ of the average client, complicating their own working systems, especially as each was trying to eat each other’s lunch and protect their own.
Adding these layers has taken attention and money away from the ads, which themselves have become more complicated: one ad in one medium keeps an idea simple, but each new medium adds a additional degree of complication in terms of maintaining the integrity of the idea. It may be the case that the new channel expands the depth of a campaign, but it also adds a need for other skills, along with their attendant practitioners, each with a specific set of opinions and agendas. Extra human beings can complicate things at the best of times. These are not the best of times.
Of course, when I said ‘one ad in one medium keeps an idea simple’, that’s much more in theory than in practice. Clients and planners have always struggled to keep to a single-minded proposition, explaining that ‘We’re the fastest safe car in the world’ is single minded, while giving you a withering look of condescension. But when you proliferate that multiplicity over numerous strategists, channels, comms plans and agencies, you vastly increase the potential for complication.
We can say that in India but not in Brazil, so change it. They’ve moved the media budget from CRM to social, so change it. The experiential agency just had a similar idea turned down, so change it. Two planners from the telco hub in Detroit like the idea of ‘conquering fear’, while two others at the media agency in Austin prefer ‘expanding bravery’, so change it, etc.
Mix that lot up, chuck it out all over the place for all sorts of people, and good luck making it simple enough to be effective.
I get that we need to be where the eyeballs are, but the eyeballs are now everywhere, and each location has its own best-use advice. You might think a banner is just a digital location for a poster, but is it rich media? Do you go programmatic or white list? Which shapes and sizes have you bought? Does your line or visual fit all of them? If they’ve just been added to the media mix, have you bought the talent out to a sufficient extent? What are the KPIs? How do you measure them? When will it reach the desired clickthough rate? Is the Shopify UX ready? How do you know if the increased sales came from the banner or the radio ad? Does the smaller additional media budget justify enough production cash to make the ad properly?
And on, and on, and on, through many clients, CDs, creative agencies and media agencies, each with different answers that might change from hour to hour, or even from minute to minute.
And I haven’t even got into the different payment terms, or how HR staff have keep up with the needs of the people required to produce this campaign, but not that one. Maybe you can maintain a flexible, freelance workforce, but do they deserve healthcare, or an invitation to the agency Christmas party? What about their plus ones? What venue do we book if they all say yes? Can the budget stretch to that? If that means sausages instead of prawns, how will that affect the vegans?
See what I mean? Questions on questions on questions, all of which need to be answered, but many of which are tedious, time consuming and expensive, adding further to the complication.
Ernest Hemingway, that stellar practitioner of utter simplicity, once wrote the following exchange:
“How did you go bankrupt?”
“Two ways. Gradually then suddenly.”
And that’s how we found ourselves in a web of complexity more fiendish than a dozen intertwined spider webs.
I have no idea what the solution is, but when we finally come across one, I bet it’s simple.
Back in the 1990s your average D&AD annual was filled with work from British advertising agencies. In fact, it was called British Design and Art Direction. Around this time it also contained a smaller ‘International’ section that gradually became subsumed into the main annual/awards.
So what? It’s just some silly old advertising awards.
Well, that was just one tiny piece of a much larger jigsaw puzzle called globalisation. Feel free to read an absolute shedload about the idea, but the TL/DR is that over the last 30 years, the world has become more centralised and, as a result, homogenised. This has happened in all areas: politics, commerce, art etc., and advertising has certainly been part of the process.
Clearly I’m not going to go into the whole kit and caboodle, but the parts that relate to our industry have been a corrosive shit show. Here’s why…
To start with, let’s go back to those D&AD annuals. They’re a good metaphor for all the other guff.
As a rule, the fewer people an ad talks to, the better. Obviously an ad aimed at a single person will work better than one aimed at a million. You can leverage nuance and cultural reference to greater effect, and your messaging will have no need for the kind of lowest common denominator stuff that turns persuasive messaging into vanilla blancmange.
For example, an ad like this one played well in Britain because it took the piss out of an historical antipathy between England and Germany. Of course you can argue that prising open old wounds to sell beer is irresponsible and damaging, but that’s for another post that I won’t be writing. The 1990s were a different time, and although I don’t want to excuse a kind of low-level racial stereotyping, that ad was a perfect answer to that brief at that moment.
Let’s fast forward to 2019. Of course there are still ads that target national audiences, but they are becoming fewer and further between. Instead we are given briefs for communications intended to be as effective in Singapore as they are in Swindon. Many have to appear online, to be viewed by the multicultural, international audiences of The New York Times, Guardian and Pornhub.
More companies are becoming subsumed into other companies, and those bigger companies tend to sell stuff in multiple markets. They also like to save money by creating one ad that can run in all those markets. They can then claim this aids global brand consistency, which is great, because if you’re in Mongolia and you want to buy a Heineken, you won’t think it’s entirely different from the bottle of piss you bought in Mogadishu.
This leads us to the holding companies. I debated giving them an entire ‘things are worse’ post to themselves, but there’s not that much to say, except that, like all big, homogenous companies, they’re leveraging economies of scale, monopolistic conditions and international reach to achieve to the most cost-effective ways of things.
Is there really any difference between WPP’s Ogilvy, Grey, BunchoflettersY&R and PlaceThatUsedToBe JWT? Maybe you think so if you work there, but the rest of us just think they’re a bunch of agencies that WPP gets to pitch against each other so it doesn’t lose accounts (money).
But back to the ads. In my time working on the worldwide rollout of Apple’s commercials I was asked if the need for language and cultural adaptation would mean that we would be unable to make another Mac vs PC if someone thought of it. I weighed up the extra script writing, production, budget and resources required and replied that the odds would be low. Yes, globalisation means that a campaign named as the best of the 2000s would now be virtually impossible.
Of course, global ads can still be brilliant (including Apple’s). From Independent Litany to Dumb Ways to Die most of the Cannes Grand Prix winners of the last twenty years, could record a new VO and run all over the world. But they are the exception rather than the rule.
The default position tends to be the kind of thing you experience in an airport: dull kaka that uses big, abstract concepts, such as ‘connection’, ‘synergy’ and ‘progress’ to say nothing much at all. That’s what globalisation really means: jack of all bollocks and master of none of the deep, engaging human truths that are an essential element of what we do.
And the awards thing is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. D&AD is simply another version of Cannes, with every member of every jury coming from a different country. So the Croatian copywriter will never understand the power of the Peruvian insight, and the Nigerian ECD will be left non-plussed by the reference to Mrs. Brown’s Boys.
But if you stop awarding the esoteric, you start to encourage the homogenic; ads with no words that can be understood by every juror in every (non) language. And the vicious circle starts to spin even faster: blander work, created for more people, rewarded by juries that have little choice but to pat it on the back, leading to even blander work etc.
Add all that to everything else that has makes 2019 advertising bland and the handcuffs are tightened still further.
We now have a smaller playground to play in, and if you want to ask that kid if he wouldn’t mind pushing you on the swing, you’d better be prepared to ask him in Esperanto.