The original ad
agencies came into being for the same reason that most business ideas do: To
fill a gap in the market.
That gap was the
lack of unfettered creative thinking available to businesses: Ad
agencies proved to be invaluable for marketers who, as a
collective, tended to have a more rigid and linear mindset tethered to their
bottom line.
At the risk of a
slight over-simplification, the core of the original ad agency was ‘the goose
that laid the golden egg’ – the creative person who was able to transmogrify a marketing
(communications) issue into an invaluable brand asset.
These ‘golden
geese’ adhered to a saying that I like to repeat ad nauseam: A great
idea doesn’t care who has it; in a few rare instances top creative people were just like any other
office worker – reliable, timely, even-keeled - but the most extraordinary creative
people tended to be eccentric.
Fun-loving,
relentlessly curious, brilliant, mercurial, inconsistent, precious, bad-tempered,
drunk, inappropriate, all perhaps contained in the word ‘bohemian’ - the sensible folks handling ad agencies' accounts didn’t always know what kind of creative partner they were going to get.
Understanding
that and having the personal wherewithal to contain it while getting the best
from the golden geese, used to be the talent that formed the bulk of the ad agency account handler’s
job.
Such challenges
created incredible account handlers, great operators with people management
skills on a par with Hollywood producers.
In fact, the
creative/account handler relationship was a time-honored dynamic that
pre-existed advertising, going all the way back to the original showmen and
theatrical/movie producers and artists.
Talent was
talent, a byword for idiosyncrasy, and managing it – however difficult - was
the job.
Damnably, more
often than not, the more brilliant the talent, the more difficult it was and is
to handle.
But then, if finding, mining and refining diamonds was easy everyone would
be doing it.
This reality is
something that every single creative industry understood and continues to
understand.
Every one, that
is, except advertising.
Instead of protecting
its unique position as the independent creative force and source for marketers,
Madison Avenue (for want of a better collective phrase) shifted culturally ever
closer to its clients under the
perfectly reasonable guise of partnership.
Perfectly
reasonable.
Two words as
innocently correct as you could ever hope to find.
And sheer deadly
poison to creativity.
Few have ever
summed up the creative task of engaging people more succinctly and accurately
than town fire chief CD Bales in the 1987 Steve Martin vehicle, Roxanne.
CD is going to
write a love letter to Roxanne on behalf of the hopelessly illiterate and
love-struck Chris. As he considers the letter, CD says:
“… for Roxanne you need something
startling... something so strange it would make her incapable of being
reasonable.”
Replace ‘Roxanne’ and ‘her’
with ‘prospective customers’ and ‘them’ and you’ve defined the marketer’s
challenge, the creative act at the center of all salesmanship.
It’s something as old as the mating ritual itself, entirely to do
with addressing the heart and knowing that the mind will follow.
It’s impossible to say which came first: the realization among Mad
Ave management that brilliant creative people were too scarce, too demanding and too expensive for comfort; or the fear of other parties such
as management consultants making more headway with senior clients via the 'perfectly reasonable' route of professionalism, partnership and MBA-based expertise.
Ironically, it was one of the world’s foremost creative ad agency networks
that sat at the center of Mad Ave’s problem: Saatchi&Saatchi.
By the late 1980s/early 1990s, this London-based agency powerhouse had become so successful that they even eyed the takeover of a clearing bank! (A suicidal move as it turned out.)
Mad Ave was envious of the Saatchi model's business success and strove to copy it. But the Saatchi model was a schizophrenic masterpiece: Less
creatively-driven but highly profitable clients like P&G were kept unwaveringly separate from the creative
side of the network (something nobody has come close to emulating as successfully).
The coming of the digital era was the other shoe dropping for Mad
Ave. It convinced agencies that ‘businessification’ was indeed the correct course; creativity, Mad Ave decided, was an unwieldy offering in the face of Big Data.
Though the belief that knowing everything you can possibly know about
someone, including where they’ll be at any given moment = sales, may be workable in limited circumstances, I can't see CD Bales telling Chris that he doesn’t need exceptional
courtship skills to make Roxanne fall in love with him, he just needs to know every
detail about her, her every desire, and always turn up wherever she is. I think they call that stalking.
An increase in adblocker adoption to 600 million devices globally last year (according to PageFair), represents a 30% annual increase – with an even bigger
increase forecast for 2018: People, while not necessarily feeling stalked, are clearly
feeling annoyed enough to take steps to avoid online advertising.
Increasing numbers of marketers are displaying the same
old-school sales/marketing thinking that led to the nation’s physical postboxes
being crammed with mostly unwelcome sales and marketing ‘literature’.
Is this really the optimal use of the internet, the most important and marvelous
communications development in history?
The science of Big Data and its brilliant analysis is one (essential)
thing, the art of creating desire is quite another.
One requires perfect reason, the other the rare ability to engage the heart, to supersede reason with want – an increasingly precious ability in a sea of sameness swarming with me-too products and even me-tooer advertising.
The latter art has absolute zero to do with age, ethnicity, sex -
or so-called digital nativity.
It’s an art that once powered Mad Ave, but has now been almost
entirely repudiated (other than via lip-service) in favor of technological know-how.
It’s as if television came into being and became
entirely the remit of television manufacturers and repairmen, while writers and directors were
considered too tied up in old-fashioned, traditional ideology and typewriters.
You may laugh and scoff but this is precisely the situation in
which Mad Ave now finds itself.
The so-called 'digitally-savvy' are legion (and getting more so every day).
If you’ve visited the Cannes Advertising Festival recently, then you’ll know what a horrible, massively-overpopulated scrum it’s become, the only creative credential required: A laptop.
If you’ve visited the Cannes Advertising Festival recently, then you’ll know what a horrible, massively-overpopulated scrum it’s become, the only creative credential required: A laptop.
Marketers, embroiled in the most complex and challenging war in
history need a little more than young people with laptops - you know, the folks who proudly brought you the Pepsi spot ‘starring’ Kendall Jenner.
No, marketers need precisely the creative brilliance that’s been
roundly culled from Mad Ave in favor of the above. And they’ve never ever needed
it more.