On the Death of Advertising As We Know It

This is about advertising. It’s about an industry in flux. What does that have to do with middle-age? The “Back 40”? A lot. We choose our careers when we’re young. I got my first advertising job when I was 23 years old.

At the time I thought I was delayed. I felt like a loser. Everyone I knew already had some kind of “career” type job–office with air conditioning, company credit card, an actual title–while I was detailing cars in Boulder, Colorado trying to figure out what i wanted to do with the rest of my life.

I thought about lots of stuff. Architecture (too bad at geometry). Law (dismal college grades). Landscape architecture (come to think of it, I didn’t want to go to grad school and rack up more debt anyway). So I came back to advertising.

When I was about 14, my dad suggested that I research careers and start thinking about what path I wanted to take in life. I thought about the things I was good at and liked to do. I was a decent writer. I liked art, music, comedy and movies. I liked making things up. So, one day while wandering the stacks of the Orlando Public Library, I came across some books about advertising. I picked up “Bill Bernbach’s Book” and “Ogilvy on Advertising,” pretty much the textbooks on advertising in the late Eighties even though they were relics from the Sixties. I was blown away. The ads were fun and funny. Smart and thoughtful. they were nothing like the screaming car salesman idiots or corny toy ads that interrupted my favorite TV shows. That’s what I wanted to do. But I was 14. Unless it had to do with girls, skateboards, music, or surfing it wasn’t going to stay on my radar for long. So I forgot about advertising…until I was 23 and desperate to not feel like a failure.

My first ad job was working for a car dealer in Denver. Even though any snobby ad agency professional would look at the work I did during this time and declare it shit at best and corny at worst, I learned a lot about writing copy and producing TV ads. I also learned a lot about branding. These lessons have served me well, even though I’d be embarrassed to show my reel just about anywhere.

Back then, we were still living in an ad world that Bill Bernbach and David Ogilvy and Leo Burnett would have recognized. TV ads were the big thing. Need a campaign? Three print ads with clever headlines, a little copy and a logo. Maybe throw in a radio spot and a couple of billboards, too. Done. There was the Internet, but it was still seen by the people I worked with as a fad, something for kids. The word “website” was spit out with a laugh whenever it was mentioned.

Even when I managed to land my first agency job, I presented a spec print ad campaign for a bank, just like an aspiring copywriter would have done in 1963, 1973, 1983 and 1993. But in the past ten-plus years, the advertising world has turned upside down. The work isn;t what it used to be. It’s not the business I got into and, as I slide into the “Back 40” I’m not so sure if I want to stay.

So what the hell happened? Yeah, the internet happened. A good thing overall, the Internet. But over the long run and looking into the future, it’s been bad for the kind of great, clever, smart, polished brand ads that have attracted so many people to the industry. I’m not bitching about digital. It’s an evolution that had to happen. There are people doing great work in the new channels that have been developed over the past several years. My problem is that these new mediums, or platforms, or channels aren’t of much interest to me. And that’s fine.

The problem I see is that creative (the thing I love the most) has been shunted to the background. With the rise of social and digital (especially programmatic media buying) media has taken over.

As creatives we now churn out “content.” We have gone from being conceptual thinkers (creatives!) to content producers. It’s a big shift. Timelines are shorter, budgets are smaller, as are the spaces our creative work occupies. Gone are big budget mass-market TV ads and splashy print placements in favor of precisely targeted, A-B tested programmatically bought (and fraudulently seen) digital banners and Facebook sponsored posts. Small thinking for small spaces. Plus, there is no shelf life for digital ads and Facebook content posts. They are posted, then forgotten as a viewer scrolls to the next thing. Why are you going to waste thousands and thousands of dollars in concepting and producing something that has a life shorter than the average housefly?

Add to that that digital media is cheap. In the past production budgets were a percentage of a media budget. The bigger the media buy, the bigger your production budget for a campaign. Media is cheap. Why? Because ads are everywhere. The more ads there are, the less valuable they are. It’s like real estate. When you restrict building to certain areas, prices for homes go up. When you allow mass development everywhere and embrace sprawl, you get cheap houses, but you also get the problems that go along with it. There are ads everywhere you go, online and off. Ads, all day, every day. When ads are ubiquitous, they’re cheapened. And no one wants to sink production dollars or time into ad space that costs less than a Happy Meal, that might only be seen by a handful of people who have been hypertargeted. Why build a mansion in a trailer park?

So that’s where I am. What to do? I don’t mind content creation, but I just have to wrap my head around the changes that have happened in the industry. I have to be satisfied with less-polished, less-smart, faster-produced work. I have to embrace the new mediums, platforms, channels that are now at the heart of our business. It has to be done whether I’m in the industry or not, because now everyone is a marketer.

But I think a lot of us who entered the industry before the digital revolution are having a hard time adjusting our expectations of what good creative advertising is as it relates to the new media platforms. It’s not the shit Bernbach would have liked. It’s much, much different. It’s not the clever headline with wordplay or the really polished image as product metaphor. It’s not “perfect.” It’s now “good enough.” And I’m honestly not sure if that’s good enough for me.