A renaissance in creativity?

I wonder why I and all of the people I worked with believed – naively it appears – that ads would get better and better as time when on.

Research continued to demonstrate the importance of emotional connection, entertainment values, respecting the audience and so forth, so why wouldn’t ads get better? The joke US ads of the '50s (the salesman in the living room model - shouty, repetitive, ear shattering) would gradually give way to the sophisticated, witty, popular ads pioneered by Doyle Dane Bernbach in New York in the 1970s. (Every creative giving a presentation during that period had the famous VW Beetle getting to the snow plow ad in his/hers presentation – what an irony – and subtlety, flattering the viewer, assuming an intelligent audience were the way agencies thought about advertising.

Indeed, the Advertising Association’s annual Ad Tracking research regularly showed very high levels of liking or approval - or whatever positive attitude was being measured - for advertising. It was a commonplace to say ‘people like the ads better than the programmes.’ An exaggeration perhaps, but people did enjoy many of the now famous ads of the '70s and '80s – Heineken, Stella, Oxo, Hamlet, Nescafe Gold, etc.

I’ve just returned from three weeks in the US, shocked senseless by the drivel passing as advertising. The quantity is breathtaking – every 7 minutes a barrage of shouty, repetitive, patronising ads. Nothing, repeat nothing has changed in 50 years. Clearly the salesman stabbing his finger in your chest is the default mode for the new generation of advertisers. In fact, if anything, things are now worse than the early days, which at least were likely to have contained real content.

Kraft , for example, sponsored Masterpiece Theatre and regularly produced quite long ads featuring instructions about recipes to be made with Kraft products: respectful of the audience and genuinely useful. I think I could count the number of ads that could be classified as ‘strategic’ on the fingers of one hand. And this was in the middle of the opening game of the NFL season, presumably with a massive audience. As for the prescription drugs ads: hilarious standard format praising the advertised brand but legally required to list a vast number of possible side effects: cue voice over intoning -bleeding, death by infectious diseases, lymphoma, hair loss, depression etc.

Enter Ad blockers. They should be hailed as the frustrated creative person’s salvation. A coming issue of Market Leader will feature an analysis of the growing effects of ad-blockers, along with bots and other forms of digital fraud. And, perhaps not surprisingly, the dislike of the tsunami of digital ads crawling all over our tech devices has been showing up in the Advertising Association Ad Tracking surveys for many years now.

Will this finally shake clients out of the notion that digital messaging is the answer and that we may just see a new age of creativity in conventional advertising? Is it possible that creativity that we took for granted pre-digital may be ready to flower again? Whether it is on TV or online, consumers are ready for something better.  They deserve it and now have the tools to demand it by punishing what they don’t like.

Read more from Judie Lannon in our Clubhouse.