I just finished re-watching the movie… “Don’t Look Up!” It is a funny, accurate and excruciating examination of the warped priorities and agendas of the people who have the largest control over our lives… i.e. Politicians. Those douchenozzles who invariably care more about how events, fads, fashions and attitudinal changes will impact their polling numbers and off-shore bank accounts, rather than doing their job.
Then, hey, I thought, that just about sums up the current state of the ad biz! Because, unlike my ancient Mad Man days of the sixties, seventies and eighties, when much of the creative work agencies created hewed to the famous David Ogilvy maxim..“The consumer isn’t stupid… She’s your wife.” Today, much of the work produced by agencies treats consumers as morons whilst their clients are buried in mountains of mostly meaningless data. Every ad is measured immediately. Clients know click-through rates, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, return on ad spend, etc, etc, fucking etc. Inevitably this encourages the optimization of previous wishy-washy efforts, rather than the creation of new and original ideas.
Further diluting the effectiveness of the campaign is that it then has to be bastardized to work in everything from TikTok videos, to influencer content, to personalized email! This leads to the fragmentation of the central concept and the weakening of its effectiveness. The end result? Instead of growing a brand, it diminishes it.
As a final word… Never forget that many years ago Bill Bernbach threatened to throw himself out of a twenty first floor office window if the CEO of Avis didn’t sign off on the “When you’re number two, you try harder.” campaign. Fortunately, the CEO signed off on it, and it ran for nearly thirty years until a newly hired CMO arrived and in her infinite wisdom did the old new broom sweeps clean routine and dumped it. The new campaign, “What drives you?” lasted two years, then along with the CMO, was dumped.
Today, Avis is still telling everyone they are still trying harder.
The moral of the story? Come up with a great idea, (you only need one.) Grow a pair of balls and threaten to jump out of windows if the client won’t sign off on it. OK… Don’t actually fucking jump… Just threaten you will.
