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The Independent’s media sec­tion today has a fea­ture on “Why we don’t make good ads any­more” – you can read the online ver­sion here.

They’ve inter­viewed the usual adland sus­pects (Frank Lowe, Mar­tin Sor­rell, John Hegarty, Trevor Beat­tie etc). The premise behind the arti­cle is that ads today aren’t as good as they used to be – in the days of the Milk Tray man, Hovis bread deliv­ery boys, Smash and all the oth­ers that make up the pan­theon of golden age greats. The respon­dents are some­what divided. Frank Lowe’s com­ment reads as a lament for times past, the oth­ers tend to crit­i­cise the lack of time that per­vades the indus­try and are split on whether online is cre­ative enough yet.

These kinds of arti­cles are not new. Each gen­er­a­tion of cre­ative seems to feel a need to talk up the dumb­ing down of the lat­est crop of work. More recently there has been a flurry of rants as tra­di­tional adland has seen dig­i­tal begin to eat its lunch and many cre­ative direc­tors find it dif­fi­cult to adjust to a world where many peo­ple really, really don’t like TV ads (and where they can almost totally avoid them should they so choose).

There is also the wide­spread per­cep­tion that good work = awards. And, of course, some awards high­light some very good work. But, per­son­ally, I fear that many awards cre­ate a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy – estab­lished cre­atives award­ing work that they would like to have cre­ated (ie tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing). I remem­ber some years back being on a judg­ing panel where the dis­cus­sion got round to “Is this an (insert awards’ name) kind of ad?” and to what would get the best reac­tion at the awards’ night din­ner. This can’t be healthy.

Of course things are chang­ing (it was ever thus). There has cer­tainty been a shift in the kind of work that gets us most inter­ested these days. It doesn’t tend to be the big ad cam­paigns so much any more. It’s the dif­fi­cult, gnarly prob­lems that need clever, ele­gant answers. It’s the left-field, asym­met­ric cre­ative strate­gies that refuse to fight on a level play­ing field.
It’s the ideas that are not only media neu­tral (or any of the other buzz terms) but which seek to cre­ate new media and forge new connections.

Time, as many in the Independent’s arti­cle point out, is an issue. We don’t have the lux­ury of long, draw-out devel­op­ment any­more. But is this such a bad thing? I don’t know. Yes, I love to see beau­ti­fully crafted work that’s had oodles of lov­ing care taken over it. But on bal­ance I’d pre­fer to beat a com­peti­tor to the punch with some­thing quick, dirty and effec­tive. Bet­ter still, I’d pre­fer to get in early and set the agenda for a prod­uct or cat­e­gory. All the kern­ing in the world won’t match up to ben­e­fits like these.

Every­thing these days is in beta (as Rus­sell Davies com­mented some time back). The days of 100% fin­ished, totally locked down cre­ative cam­paigns are his­tory. Instead, today’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions are messier, trick­ier and more inter­est­ing for it. Cre­atives might make fewer good tra­di­tional ads any more but with so many oppor­tu­ni­ties to do some­thing bet­ter and faster I can’t say I’m going to lose sleep over it.

Related posts:

1. Nav­i­gat­ing Mar­ket­ing 2.0 (part 3): open source