To save advertising we need to stop selling ourselves short.
I’ve been reflecting recently on that Havas video from like 6 months ago where Jason Peterson and Paul Marobella shit all over advertising. You know the one.
A friendly recap: legacy agencies are tired, old behemoths; YouTube & Instagram influencers create work for 1/10th the price; consultancies are eating agency retainers and get away with producing one-tenth the work.
We could — and do — talk about these symptoms ad nauseam. But I want to talk about the underlying problem.
Done right, advertising creates culture.
We seem to have forgotten that. Think of how many seemingly dumb catchphrases have transcended into mainstream culture. Like “Hump Day” (Geico), “Dilly dilly” (Budweiser), or “Oh shit, next weekend is Mother’s Day” (Hallmark).
For whatever reason, I get that damn J.G. Wentworth jingle stuck in my head about every two weeks. Thankfully for all of us, that never became a cultural moment.
As advertisers, we’re at our best when we have the opportunity to tell stories; to frame and reframe our clients’ product, to create cultural currency, and to build long-term brand health.
But that’s not how we describe advertising anymore.
The narrative of advertising has become another sales pitch.
Listen to how holding company CEOs describe the future, or look at any agency new business creds deck. Data-driven. ROI-based. Results oriented. Data. Data. Data. (I hate when people talk about data like something we discovered at the store last week. Advertising has always been rooted in data.)
We’ve lost the narrative to the Facebooks, Googles, Deloittes, and McKinseys of the world. The ad industry is trying to pivot to catch up with them. But that’s only driving us further into this short-term ‘everything is about sales’ rabbit hole that we’ve dug ourselves into. Which means we’re simultaneously fighting three battles:
- With Consultancies who really only care about the next quarterly earnings report,
- With Influencers who charge (relatively) cutthroat prices for resoundingly mediocre content, and
- With the digital ad ecosystem that prioritizes the immediate ROI of a banner ad over long-term salience.
And we’re walking into every trap they’re setting for us. We’re trying to do what they do, when we need reframe what we do.
We need to evolve from an industry of selling to an industry of solutions. It’s how the ad industry started in the first place.
Think of how we (and our clients) describe the products we advertise. Briefs are chock-full of RTBs. Reasons to Believe are the ways we try to convince consumers to buy our product — not solutions to the real problems our customers have.
But what about creating culture?
Humans are hardwired to tell stories, and to seek them out. Stories help us make sense of the world. To explain things we don’t understand. To solve problems.
And that’s culture, fundamentally. A collection of stories that we tell.
Culture, real cultural staying power, comes from creating solutions. The Black & Blue or White & Gold Dress had its 15 minutes of fame. The Ford Model T changed how society operates.
Not every product is the Model T. But any brand can create and add to culture if it solves a problem. Brands can inspire us to achieve, like Nike’s “Just Do It.” Or they can tap into undercurrents of unrest, like Wendy’s “Where’s the beef” campaign. Both were successful not because they created culture, but because they created solutions. Solutions create culture.
There’s a great quote from Steve Jobs quoting Henry Ford:
Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse!” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
Let’s show our clients the things not yet on the page.
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