(AKA It’s time for advertising to grow up)
The advertising industry as we know it is dying, and for good reason. Just … not the reason many ad people would have you believe.
Over the past year, I have noticed a lot of ad people lamenting the rise of big data and technology in advertising, arguing that data and analytics have hurt the work by somehow stifling creativity.
Nonsense, I say.
If anything, creativity without accountability is what has ruined the ad industry.
I’ve been saying it for years. “Creativity” is not the goal of advertising. The goal of advertising is to sell.
“The purpose of TV advertising is to sell goods and services. That means creating engaging and enjoyable experiences that respect the audience while connecting people to brands and communicating reasons to buy.” —The Cranky Creative
But over the past many decades, ad people have forgotten their jobs. They’ve lost sight of what consumers want (and need) to see and hear, and what their clients are paying them to do. (See Jaguar and Pepsi and TurboTax for some on-the-nose examples.)
As the roof starts to fall in around their ears, these ad people keep telling themselves that the solution is to bE MoaR cReATivE. (This, as they hide their ineffectiveness behind squishy metrics like “awareness” and “engagement.”)
No. What their clients and the industry really need are creative ideas applied strategically in the service of selling.
As in this famous Ogilvy ad for Rolls Royce, “At 60 Miles an Hour.”
Now this is great creative. Far from being “creative” for creativity’s sake, as we see in so much advertising today, this is creative derived from a strategic insight to serve a singular purpose.
Not to be cute.
Not to be clever.
Not to be funny or cool or socially conscious.
Not to create art.
To sell.
Sadly, that seems to be the last thing on advertisers’ minds anymore.
Advertisers, it’s time to grow up
You want to turn the industry around, Mr. or Ms. LinkedIn thought leader?
You can start by putting the needs of your clients (and consumers!) ahead of your own creative diddling. By cutting out the silly gags, stupid dialog, and joke characters from your ads. By using technology and data to test and optimize the effectiveness of your work.
And of course, by respecting your audiences and giving people real reasons to buy.
Unless and until you start doing these things, the advertising industry and its jobs market will continue to burn.
I have little reason to believe the industry will make these changes, but you know, I’m also not too bothered by it, either.
Given the extent of the rot, maybe a cleansing fire is for the best.
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Thank you! It drives me nuts when an ad is so clever and full of itself that I have no idea what they are selling.
Ah, yes — the “artsy” ad made by people who wish they worked as filmmakers or playwrights or in any other field but advertising. To me, this ranks among the most blatant forms of marketing malpractice. If these people don’t want to create ads that sell, then they should do us all a favor and get the hell out of advertising.
It’s happening anyway. The Purge is happening now.
I didn’t think these annoying, obnoxious, and overplayed LIBERTY MUTUAL commercials on TV, with that NO talent jackass DOUG, could get any more unwatchable, however they have now come up with some other idiot who is even worse than that irritating moron Doug!!! How can the ad agency that creates these ridiculously stupid TV insurance commercials even stay in business???
Oh, Gary, I feel your pain. While I’ve been blessed to have not seen a Liberty Mutual ad in months, I still wear the scars from “Wet Teddy Bears” and LiMu Emu and Dumb. And now they’ve conjured something worse, you say? Hard to believe, but I’m sure you’re right.
On the positive side, by beclowning their brand so much, I have hope that Liberty Mutual will eventually see sales drop to the point where their ad budgets shrink and they are unable to fund their near-endless sorties of carpet-bombing stupidity. Or, hey, maybe someone in the C-suite will eventually come around and demand to see some actual results from their advertising.
But I’m OK with the company going bust, too.
Take care and keep your TV mute button ready, Gary!
I fear the worst is yet to come. Addiction to and reliance on tech is changing the human brain. Our creativity has atrophied. If you don’t use it you lose it.
Now that AI has discovered how to lie, this decline will only accelerate as it reminds us how smart we are when we allow it to think for us. Here is an interesting article about AI’s recent dark turn.
Scary stuff indeed, Jerry. Have you seen the stories about Microsoft’s Bing AI professing its love for some users and threatening to “blackmail” and “ruin” others? Or Google’s AI, Gemini, telling a Michigan college student to “please die”? I don’t know where all of this is headed, but the genie is out of the bottle and there’s no putting it back now.
Cranky
Just wait until AI can freeze your bank account or shut off your utilities. It’s coming…
Oh, no doubt. Wrongthinkers like me are in for a tough time. I’m sure Google and Facebook won’t be content with merely tanking my search traffic in our dystopian future.
But thanks for the reminder. 😛
Well said, Cranky. Well said.
Thank you, Haines! Appreciate the kind words.
I read every word of the RR ad. And I enjoyed it. But I’m old – I grew up memorizing what was written on the back of cereal boxes.
And it’s my take (perhaps wrongly) that most younger people spend very little time reading – they would rather have their ears tickled momentarily to entertain themselves for a brief moment before moving on. I think the pros call that a “sound bite”.
Could things change? I hope so.
Oh, no, Jim, you are absolutely right — the younger generations’ attention spans are definitely shorter. But the idea behind the headline — that Rolls Royce’s precision engineering has produced an automobile of unquestionable luxury — is so good that I think the ad could be shortened for today’s audiences pretty easily. Keep the headline, expand on it with supporting copy in the subhead, lose all 13 bullet points, and keep the all-important call-to-action. Voilà — a shorter, more digestible version of Ogilvy’s masterpiece made especially for modern audiences, without any of the goofy trappings of today’s dumb ads.
And Jim, I had to smile at the admission that you used to memorize the copy on the backs of cereal boxes. I used to do the same thing with video game cartridge boxes and video game console descriptions in the Sears and JC Penny catalogs. Those were the days!
Thanks for reading.
So true! I have a collection of magazines from the 1950’s~1970’s that belonged to my grandparents. The ads were stylish, smart, & didn’t talk down to their potential customers. 💁🏻♀️
That sounds wonderful! It’s a real treat to dive into those vintage magazines. The advertising from that era often possessed a timeless quality, a testament to the art, science, and craft of the industry. It’s such a shame that much of today’s advertising seems to lack this sophistication completely.
Preach!!!
Early in my career, I realized my agency’s creative team was submitting receipts and labor billing to produce materials —for inclusion in personal portfolios — based on concepts that had never been approved by clients for production/placement. It was pure creative masturbation at the clients’ expense. Agency senior leadership had no idea this was going on. The creative rot you’ve so aptly described has been going on for decades, but seems to have gotten more overt recently.
Thanks, Julie. Yes, the amorous self-diddling of some creatives is shocking, but not surprising. And I appreciate you sharing that experience. Over the years, I’ve seen it myself with creative teams that propose the same pet concepts over and over in search of a client who will fund their vanity idea, and graphic designers who spend days upon days perfecting new graphics techniques also in hopes of finding a client who will buy it.
If I didn’t know any better, I might even say that the advertising industry is filled with too many artists and too few marketing strategists who have any interest or skill in selling.
Thanks again for taking the time to comment.