Deja screwed. Or not.
While Dickens may have hit the irony in “the best of times” co-habitating with “the worst of times,” everyone knows there’s always the third option: “the times that really suck.” Circa now, anyone parsing the signs, portents, and augurs would have to give long odds that the year in front of us will totally qualify.
Let us count the woes: a near-term battle for disease dominance between delta, omicron, and whatever our unvaccinated neighbors let mutate into the world. A mid-term election that, partisan preferences notwithstanding, seems calculated to enshrine power in the hands of political fringes. The prospect of short-term inflation, supply chain disruption, and HR shortages turning into a long-term economic anchors. Continued division, dissent, and dysfunction. Bad news here, worse news there, ad nauseum.
Not that adland, festive as we may be, is immune to the urge to angst. In fact. judging by the tenor of what many of our leading lights are writing, it seems like we’ve all sailed off on the bitter boat to a point where there’s no dog paddling back to shore.
Jeff Eaker, who pens the “Kingdom of Failure” blog with what’s almost a Kerouac- or Farina-like like vibe (okay, look them up) writes, “There used to be this thing called advertising,” an acid-tinged ode to the industry that was and the jollies we used to have (www.kingdomoffailure.com/post/there-used-to-be-this-thing-called-advertising). In a subsequent post, he mentions the piece got 25,000 reader views; proof that the cynical newspaper homily, “if it bleeds, it leads,” works just as well to get readership in niche industry screeds as it does IRL.
Others, thoughtful minds one and all, are all over this topic—by turns despairing, chastising, finger-pointing, blame-assigning, outrage-inducing—all delivering the same basic message: what we’re doing now just isn’t as good, rewarding, fun, valuable, aspirational, or inspirational as it was then.
So, yeah, there really do seem to be intractable riddles confronting us everywhere. But let’s hang hellfire and damnation for a moment and ask ourselves: what if it isn’t as bad as all that? In fact, what if all our glum musings were more self-fulfilling prophesy than unfixable truth?
Stick with me on this for a moment, and then you can go with the “Lilly-Livered Pollyanna” trope. Damn, I’ll even turn that meme into a free NFT, worth exactly what you pay for it, if you play along. Let’s start by asking “what if we looked at the current Weltschmerz and decided, this too, can pass?
What you might wind up with is something akin to the1980s-style strategic planning construct called “future perfect planning”: identify the best end result based on existing conditions, and then figure out how to intersect with it. This is a longer conversation for the year ahead, but here’s a few random thoughts to kick things off:
What if we came to grips with the reality that the only way to address unstoppable media clutter and unrelenting platform expansion is produce radically more interesting creative?
What if we also grokked that’s not necessarily about any one specific channel as it is digging deep into the cards you are dealt (https://davedye.com/2019/01/09/dont-be-ashamed-to-s/)?
What if we, the agencies, started becoming smarter in using the mountains of proof that better creative works better to wean ourselves and clients from ephemeral consumer turn-off advertising (https://hbr.org/2013/06/creativity-in-advertising-when-it-works-and-when-it-doesnt)?
What if we stopped lining up at the edge of the data cliff like bobbleheaded lemmings, instead, enlisting our supposed allies in promoting a more evolved perspective on how it all works (looking at you, IAB). Ben Franklin’s pungent rationale, “we must hang together or surely we hang separately.”
And, what if we stopped buying media “on trend,” and put our bucks where the audience with bucks actually is. Hell, Willie Sutton would have understood the wisdom of that, and he wouldn’t have known a flowchart from the hole in his prison.
Finally, what if we gave clients more reason to help us meaningful address our pernicious DEI problems—ageism included—by baking those considerations into smarter bargaining with strategic sourcing?
There’s a lot more where this came from, and you’re right, the plan is to keep flogging onward. Be fun. But maybe the best way to end this ramble is to talk about what got it started—a quote from the celebrated American historian Richard Hofstadter. Ruminating about the lack of consistent good government in our past, he observed that the country, somehow, keeps summoning the talent and the good will to persist. His conclusion:
“The nation seem to slouch onward into its uncertain future like some huge inarticulate beast, too much attained by its wounds, but too strong and resourceful to succumb.”
Maybe that’s where we are, as well. Then again, we’re anything but inarticulate. Let’s discuss.