Mark Silveira in his book says: “Most advertising is neither awful nor great. It’s something infinitely more dangerous. It’s ordinary. So-so, as they put it. Or just plain average, like a lot of other things in the world—products, people, intellects, you name it. Seriously, if you took all $500+ billion in marketing communications that will bombard the world this year and plotted it on a scale ranging from great to awful, what I think you’d find is a pretty standard bell curve. A small percentage being extraordinary, an equally small amount being dreadful and the bulk of it being just plain average or ordinary.”
In T&T it’s no different. I will argue that we have very little that’s extraordinary, too much that is dreadful and a whole lot that is so ordinary. Who or what is responsible for this? I have worked on both sides of the table so can comment from both perspectives. Here are the top 5 reasons on both sides:
It’s the Clients’ Fault:
– No clear point of difference identified that they want their ads to communicate
– Lack of single-mindedness (they think the more ideas and details they put in the ad, the better value they get)
– Risk averse (we are conservative people, risk taking is not encouraged)
– Creative by Committee (everyone in the Company must have an input)
– Clients sometimes “play Agency”. They write copy and sometimes even do layouts (I did it when I was one)
It’s the Agency’s Fault:
– We don’t pay enough attention to strategy. Agencies, like clients, love tactics. Let’s meet the deadline even if we are not sure where we are going.
– We want to “eat a food” and go along rationalising our action by saying it’s the client’s right to decide even if we strongly dis-agree
– We like to “read and spell” for the audience. We don’t give our audiences enough credit so we “dumb down” too much
– Not enough insight based ideas. Too much vopping and hoping
– We have become creative factories, which is an oxymoron
In this environment, there is one very big opportunity for agencies to “eat a food” because their work is extraordinary.
