This ad ran on the back page of The Daily Telegraph in the UK a couple weeks ago.
I’ve cropped in so you can ‘enjoy’ the copy.
(Apologies for the smudging. I think my cat dragged something across it. Possibly her contempt.)
This ad doesn't have a daring bone in it's body - and thus, by association, neither does the product.
But it's typical of advertising these days; and by no means the dullest or worst example.
When I briefed my lil ol Chat GPT4, it came up with five equally ‘good’ ads for this watch in roughly five seconds.
Which means one of two things:
Either this ad was created by nachines with their artificial intelligence (ai), or the next one will be and the creators of it will be out of a job.
The latest spot from Nissan Europe for its punchily-named Quashqai (is that Latin for cash cow?) electric vehicle is another ‘ai or not ai?’
You tell me.
The amount of social media posts from advertising creatives bemoaning/puzzled by the steep lack of work and thus revealing their obliviousness to a rapidly ai-shaped reality reminds me of a joke my old Polish dad used to enjoy telling against us Poles:
How did the Russians invade Poland? They marched in backwards and said they were leaving.
Or there’s that other old one about recognising who the mark is in a poker game: If you don’t know who it is it’s you.
The ad agency creative community became ai's mark through a process at once complex and simple.
Essentially, we were crushed by ad agency bosses’ decision to throw their lot in with machines to realise their dreams of industrialisation.
Throughout the second half of the 20th century, ad agencies were a license to print money.
Hiring levels were off the hook.
Problem: Top tier advertising creative talent is hugely scarce - as is talent in any field.
Eg. The football field: From all the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of kids throwing a football in their yard deep in dreams of themselves in SuperBowls, only 32 will end up as starting quarterbacks in the NFL in any given season.
And a recent ESPN fantasy football analysis declared only four (!) of that 32 as top tier.
Thus the law of top talent scarcity demands that quite early on in the gold rush hiring process, ad agencies had to be hiring less-than-stellar creative talent.
Meanwhile, The Information Age gathered pace; and the explosion in data gave client company bosses the intoxicating whiff of the possibility of certainty.
Advertising is not art because, of course, art is an end in itself, while advertising is a means to an end.
But the greatest advertising is closely related to art; not even cousins, closer, like brother and sister.
It’s the art of the ad that engages.
Otherwise, your advertising loses potency.
Look at it this way: You want to give someone or something medicine in a way that isn't unpleasant?
Crush up the pill in tasty food until it’s undetectable.
Too much pill it gets spat out, not enough pill it doesn’t work.
There you have the crux of great advertising: it’s a matter of judgement.
But increasingly the question was who is the judge?
Data, said the clients.
Creativity, said the ad agencies.
But – and here’s the kicker – ad agencies said that with rapidly decreasing conviction due to the above law of top creative talent scarcity.
This law meant few agencies had top creative talent. And where they did it was not only expensive, but damnably demanding and exacting.
Top creative talent trotted out stuff like, “Don’t ask me if it’s ready yet, ask me if it’s great yet.”
And there were next to no instances of these golden geese ensuring their work was data-friendly - charts or diagrams of teeth and gums/people in lab coats/lingering car interior shots etc tended not to feature.
Meanwhile, less-than-top creative talent quite rightly seized the opportunity to fill the vacuum: An opportunity is an opportunity and nobody with a career to build, a family to feed and car/mortgage payments to make can be vilified for seizing whatever comes their way.
Let’s face it, ran the prevailing philosophy of the late 20th century ad agencies, we are businesses designed to help businesses with business issues.
And data were a critical element of all that, the cake, art the icing at best.
Thus did the machines march in backwards and the judgement of creative work shifted from the primacy of captivation to the rational modern demand for accountability.
This was music to the ears of agency suits and bean counters.
They shared their clients’ love of certainty and harbored their own dreams of industrialisation.
Remove the massively expensive speed-bump of top creative talent and suddenly you have a factory.
A huge, smooth-running, fully automated, money-spinning factory.
By the mid/late-1990s the die was cast: Machines and their familiars were now marching in backwards at the head of the digital age.
Its implacable leaders largely culled, creative advertising became less and less, well, creative, even leading Advertising Age to revile it as ‘traditional’.
The new advertising now poured through smartphones within an arm’s length of billions of people whose every movement and action and expressed thought these cute indispensable little machines surveilled and reported on.
Extraordinary people-stopping ideas were deemed inessential because advertising was now a conversation, excellence defined in terms of so-called relevance and timeliness, a brand’s Holy Grail something by the name of 360-degree user experience.
I saw a social media bio from an ad agency creative today where they describe themselves as “good at words, not bad at ideas”.
Clearly, they're obilivious to the fact that they’re describing the current stage of ai ability; and they (along with countless others like them, I’m afraid) are the mark.
