Between a rock and a soft place.
Lately, it seems the advertising bloviosphere has been even more brimming than usual with sturm, drang, und despair about the state of our less than idealized industry. From comments about the sins of deckchair-shuffling holding companies (legitimate) to anger about the off-on-the-icefloe idiocy of institutional agency ageism (also legitimate) to observations about the threats posed by digital dystopia (not just legitimate, but existential), it’s clear that almost nobody posting on the subject is looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. The shade of choice—babyshit brown.
Well haters gotta hate, the opinionated gotta opine, and while The Reductionist is a proud SIM card-carrying member of the aforementioned class of blatherskites, I’m thinking this might be a moment to leaven the gloom with a few contrapuntally encouraging points of view:
Hard fact: for all the reasons listed above, advertising seems to have dialed FUBAR up to 11. Soft truth: pay attention to historian Jon Meachum’s lovely coinage, “the narcissism of the present.” Talk to both client and agency folks with any reasonable time on track and you’ll realize it was every bit as hard then, as it is now. If they could succeed in high hurdling, we can as well.
Hard fact: the value of the advertising investment is more suspect than ever before. Soft truth: efficiency—the ability to sell to two consumers at once, instead of going cave-to-cave—was, is, and will always be advertising’s sine qua non. While spending hard earned coin to get the word out may give pause, it’s only the 2nd worst option. The worst, of course, is doing nothing.
Hard fact: explosive media fragmentation, like the evil genie that it is, can never be contained. Soft truth: 3 TV networks or 3,000 online channels, stronger, more powerful, and memorable creative ideas are the only route to attention, interest, desire, and action. Same as it ever was.
Hard fact: the loss of cookies and the restrictions on the use of 3rd party data mean that advertising is going to have to start buying media like it was 1996. Soft truth: data-lashed granularity has been steadily killing both efficiency and creativity quality. Forcing us to concentrate on broader commonalities will reverse the downward trend.
Hard fact: the most successful advertising agencies in the world, aren’t advertising agencies. Soft truth: while FANG companies, especially Google and Facebook, are clearly dominant in today’s context, this Reductionist is increasingly persuaded they’re fundamentally at risk for the reason Maslow mentioned in 1966—"if all you have is a hammer, the solution to every problem looks like a nail.”
Hard fact: advertising won’t get well, or even better, by harking back to past glories, or even humming a few bars of “The Way We Were” (even if the original Streisand still gets you right in the kishke’s). Soft truth: instead, we need to recognize that the path forward is both evolutionary and adaptive — building on the true durability of human nature, but embracing the need for creativity in ways, means, and messages that will surmount continuously changing conditions.
And that said, especially given all the talented industry people out there (gloomy bloggers included), I’m thinking that’s a soft truth we can thrive with. Cheers.