Adsnob

Advertising's unlikely revival

Green shoots grow in the strangest of places. With Western economies buckling under the weight of their indebtedness, and with George Osborne predicting another 6 years (at least) of UK austerity, conditions may not appear ideal for a creative revival in advertising, but an air-pocket is opening up and if we’re quick there might be just enough oxygen for the 5%.

 

This is not a backlash, or the emergence of a new avant-garde. The past few years have not been a punk-spawning era of constraint. It is simply this: the principal effect of marketing, in a period of sustained austerity, is to maintain consumer spending.  Stagnation, in a recession, is a far bigger enemy than the progress of a competitor brand in your marketplace.  Marketing, unusually, finds itself working best at a category level. 

 

Suddenly we fret less about the possibility that some of our investment might benefit others.  Suddenly, brand leadership is the only tenable position to adopt – regardless of brand size.  Suddenly, all the hair-splitting differentials that separate brands in prosperous times evaporate.  Suddenly, advertising’s job is to remind people of an idea that would ordinarily be dismissed as the public property of a category. Suddenly, appropriation of the generic is a high art.

 

And this has given advertising some much needed breathing space.   John Lewis is advertising Christmas.  Yeo Valley is advertising dairy goodness.  Thomson is advertising holidays.  T-Mobile is advertising togetherness.   Old Spice is advertising manhood.  Heineken is advertising social success.  Lurpak is advertising butter.  And, most recently, Freeview is advertising telly.  

 

In fact, the majority of high profile advertisers are accepting the trade-off. The confidence and scale of a category generic seems to be worth more nowadays – as a creative jumping off point – than the precision and persuasion of a finely tuned (and often falsely derived) USP.

 

The resulting work is better because it is focused on one task instead of seven; better because it favours intensity of feeling over aptness of benefit; and better because it is built to overcome the growing public disinterest in salesmanship.

 

Had you been asleep in an airing cupboard since the 1970s, this might all look a little unreconstructed.  But with the benefit of those missing decades - the crisis of differentiation, the sophistry of segmentation, the goose chase of targeting, the engineering of benefit, the sponsorship of entertainment, the fragility of value-sharing – this recent chapter is not only welcome, it is eminently reconstructed.

 

Some brands, of course, have always approached things this way.  Nike has always sold the idea of athleticism. Kodak has always promoted the value of the image.  Coke has never worried unduly about the fact that other fizzy drinks could, theoretically, make you happy.

 

But they are the minority.  The recent creative surge is, for the time being, a fair-weather project.  When prosperity returns, advertising will doubtless resume its convoluted courtship of the buoyant consumer.  For now, let’s make hay.

 

According to the Chancellor, we have five or six years to play with.

Bridging back to content

When I was ten I was given a ZX81 and encouraged to learn a computer language called BASIC. The assumption was that we would all acquire and apply this new language, for if we did not, we would be unable to construct any sort of identity, environment or livelihood in an increasingly programmable and underwired world.

By the age of eleven I could write a fifty line program that generated a simple scrolling Space Invaders sequence. By this time, BASIC was obsolete, processing power had doubled, and computer language had achieved a level of sophistication that made it illegible to the lay coder. Code was now part of the arcane underbelly of consumer electronics, and amateurs relinquished all hope of ever understanding how technology actually worked.

Like a Lutheran bible translation in reverse, technology became a form of magic for consumers in the early 1980s. And it has been a form of magic ever since.  Nobody knows how it works. Marketing directors at IT companies don't know. Retail assistants don't know.  Even teenagers don't know (they just know what buttons to press to set the magic in motion).  What happens on the screens of  PCs and tablets and televisions and games consoles and smart phones is effectively a form of magic, because nobody knows how it works.

And magic is what has made technology so welcome in our lives. When one device succeeds in communicating with another, or when one blog automatically publishes to another, the magic acquires a new dimension. Part of the fascination with technology is that it appears to work independently of our ability to deconstruct or understand it. It is outside our cognitive range, and all we can now do is enjoy it.

The same was true of the advertising that was running back in 1981 when I was ten. It was beyond reason. It came from somewhere we didn't know existed, to say things we didn't know mattered, in ways that we hadn't thought possible.  Advertising was a form of magic. "Will it be mushrooms, fried onion rings, we'll have to wait and see."  It was better attuned than the media around it to the subtle fabric of the popular imagination. "Watch out, watch out there's a Humphrey about."  And it understood that its mystery was half of its power. "All because the lady loves milk chocolate." 

The magic was supported by a production industry whose entire raison d'etre, since the glory days of the post-war film industry, had been to achieve effects and construct realities that were beyond the technical and optical scope of our everyday.

The technical magic of advertising came from the confluence of three things. Firstly, the short-form discipline of the television commercial; secondly, the focusing of a world-class production industry on something so creatively distilled; and thirdly, the economics of mass marketing by which it was feasible for advertising to cost more per second than even the most lavish Hollywood blockbuster and yet still deliver a strong return on investment. Advertising was a form of magic because it was an unfathomably high value form of content.  It still should be, and it still can be, because the three drivers are still intact, should we wish to exploit them.

My principal disappointment with most of the marketing that surrounds me today is that for all its cleverness, for all its countless moving parts and their seamless interconnectedness, there is often not a single moment of content magic anywhere in the program of activity. We have become so adept at extending ideas and prolonging conversations, that we have neglected the thing that makes ideas worth extending in the first place. We have convinced ourselves that the wisdom of the crowd and the limitless banality of the real unfiltered world are more interesting than the creation of desire and the weaving of mystery and the summoning of visceral and unconquerable impulses through the art of words and pictures.

And yet the really good work, the work we celebrate, the 5% that sustains the ambitions and identity of the hundreds of thousands employed in creative business, the perfect shiny steeple up to which we all gaze and to which we all aspire one day to climb - this work remembers the magic of content, and somewhere at the heart of all the best marketing nowadays there still sits - be it discovered or unrequested - something that is compelling beyond reason; something that is so well made that you can't see the joins.

I recently sat down and looked again at the Black Pencils awarded this year by D&AD. They support the theory that we are in the business of magic. A light bulb that sculpts energy-saving tubes into the elegant form of a giant tungsten filament. A pop promo that personalises before your eyes to the place where you grew up. A shower gel ad whose narrative self-propulsion is verging on inexplicable.

Talking of self-propulsion, Old Spice won a Black Pencil in film, not cyber. And this supports another theory. That the web and all that happens there is a powerful PR channel for ideas, but not a replacement for them.  Too much of the advertising that is shared on the web needs an echo chamber because the source content itself lacks resonance; it needs the viral efficiencies of youtube because there is nothing inherently infectious about it; and it needs the endorsement of pyramid referral because on its own it has little to recommend it. 

At the beginning of every assignment there is an extra question worth asking nowadays. Where will the magic come? Once it's there we can bridge from it, and we can bridge back to it, and we can summon all the swirling energies of the public Hadron Collider to accelerate its diffusion through time and space. But if there is no magic, if nothing that a brand puts in front of people prompts a powerful and involuntary response, then all the social undercarriage in the world cannot rescue it from the mediocrity of the 95%.

And this simple thought is what finally drove me to start a blog, and why Adsnob is dedicated to the 5%.