Advertising Dogma Is Alive & Well
The advertising industry faces a very real problem when it comes to creativity.
It’s not working hours, globalisation, client pressures or the insidious side effects of internet bingeing.
It’s that we’re human.
Every single day we wrestle — and often give in — to basic human impulses that sap our creativity and push us down the same path as the last campaign.
We simplify without even thinking. Using the same processes and assumptions that delivered a result last time. That’s natural. It’s how our brains are wired. We learn, we repeat and we save time next time.
But this behaviour starts to become far more troubling when it leaps from a habit into a world view. When we refuse to acknowledge an alternative because of a school of thought, a piece of research or a trend.
I saw this first hand with an opinion piece I wrote last year. The premise was simple — Facebook’s push to turn over more user data to advertisers will make your targeting tighter and therefore likely to be more effective. My opinion was clearly wrong.
One of the first comments was “Just about everything in this article was wrong”. The commenter came from a school of thought with a certain language, approach and world view for advertising. When I read their comment I’ll admit my stomach lurched — was there a massive mistake in my piece? Had I skewed some numbers or some sick spellcheck apocalypse had replaced “Facebook” with “Twitter”?
No.
My argument used a different language to his school of thought. Yet when I researched that school I found we essentially said the same thing. Human nature drew him to a set of words, filled in the blanks and allowed him to bang out a quick comment disagreeing without digesting.
I see this more and more in our industry. People are reverting to dogma and shortcuts to make sense of a more complex media landscape. In some corners of the trade press you mention “programmatic” and you’ll be stoned by a proud adman of 30 years who says it’s smoke and mirrors.
We’re slipping into lazy thinking because we’re human. It’s not only easier to subscribe to industry dogma (see Year of Mobile, Year of Content Marketing, Year of Wearables, Year of Cloud Based Solution and Year of Video) but it’s comforting too. By closing off our brains to new information we can be confident we’re doing the right thing by doing the same thing.
If we’re truly passionate about working in advertising we have to be conscious of dogma creeping into meetings every day.
It will never be easy. But with patience and constantly pushing yourself to ask questions rather than state conclusions it’s possible.
We’re human after all.
