Why advertising isn’t what it used to be

We don’t get advertising like we used to. I’m tempted to say that a lot of what passes for advertising/marketing/branding lacks creativity, but that’s probably unfair.

Part of the reason for this change in advertising is the emergence of ‘personalization’ as a strategic mantra. Essentially, what you sell, and how you sell it needs to be tailored to specific audiences. The great TV ads of the eighties (even the nineties) weren’t ‘personalized’. True, they were made with specific demographics in mind, but arguably these demographics were much broader and less fragmented than they are today. After all, in the eighties and nineties,everyone was watching TV — probably the same TV shows. The advertising that was made fitted with a much broader concept of ‘audience’ than we have today (you could probably link the idea of the eighties TV audience to civic society or the public sphere, which has arguably declined with the internet and the fragmentation of demographics, but that’s for another blog post).

Because of this framework of personalization (we can pretend it’s a real concrete thing that we are able to do because of data, but it’s ultimately a concept with certain presuppositions about how people identify themselves and identify things), the creative task of ad people, branding agencies no longer has the same scope of those early ad men, from Don Draper to the Saatchi and Saatchi team. In a way, it becomes more reactive — you develop a list of ideas and things (you’ll probably use data!) to characterize your chosen demographic and use all that ‘stuff’ to inform what you do. I don’t want to sound pompous (I kind of do) but you could say your horizons of creative possibility become limited.

Does this mean personalization is bad? No — it’s simply a response to the way the world has changed, largely driven by technology. That said, it is certainly worth going back to the ‘golden’ days of advertising (maybe Bill Hicks would disagree) as a reminder that there’s some value in thinking big, rather than just ticking off a checklist of grime, selfies, social media, vloggers for your youthful demographic.