OMG! WTF!? …and the future of brand advertising

David Brennan, Founder of Media Native, fails miserably to capture those magic OMG moments that real creative advertising can inspire. What’s going on?

I’ve been trying to do the impossible these last few weeks: to get material for a blog I’ve now decided not to write, for the simple reason that it no longer seems to reflect reality.

The ‘mission impossible’ I gave myself was to constantly monitor my state of being as I consumed television advertising. The reason? I wanted to identify examples of the new creativity in advertising; to consciously capture those moments of WTF?! surprise and OMG! delight that the best advertising inspires in us.

Of course, I failed miserably. Instead, I felt weighed under by the relentless ordinariness of it all; which is a shame, because as we now know, creativity drives brands’ financial performance like never before.

Admittedly, it is not the best time of year to witness the full flow of advertising creativity; the pre-Christmas schedules are dominated by seasonal archetypes and obvious emotional manipulation as the retailers battle it out to prove who can say nothing the loudest.

Consequently, there is very little to complain about, but very little to get excited about either.
One thing this new-found consciousness demonstrated to me was that, in one respect at least, advertisers have taken note of the new thinking behind marketing theory; they have pretty much all attempted to unleash the power of emotion, relentlessly.

I could work out the ’emotional take-out’ in every TV ad I’ve seen over the past few weeks, a sure sign that the mantra ’emotion sells’ runs round and round every marketing exec’s brain like a Kylie classic.

Sometimes it was beautifully integrated into the storytelling, but more often it was chucked on like a dollop of Angel Delight.

And that’s part of the problem in this post-modern, fast-paced, data-driven marketing landscape; everybody moves the same way at lightning speed, making the fringe mainstream before you can say “Cadbury’s Drumming Gorilla.”

And yet, if TV advertising can occasionally be tiresome in its desire to embrace, tickle, inspire or empathise, then online can only dream of such luxuries.

Although my level of online activity falls within the top 5% nationally, and has done for almost two decades, I’m still waiting for it to offer anything competitive in the way of real, sustained emotional engagement with a brand.

In fact, dare I say it, all of this emotional engagement which great TV advertising can create still seems, for the most part, to be completely detached from the online experience.

I think some of the blame here can be attached to the media agencies. I remember an article by Simon Marquis several years ago, predicting that media would become the new creativity as media touchpoints proliferated. But there are still disappointingly few examples of great TV creativity being turbo-charged by innovative and impactful media planning. Certainly not on any great scale.

Another reason, I believe, is that the power of the algorithm is so much stronger for the online world, especially display advertising, and it creates a constant ‘rush to the centre’ in terms of how it’s applied.

As somebody with a degree in statistics, I fear sometimes when I see the reverence attached to Google engineers and big data. Of course, the algorithms they develop create great efficiencies and occasional insights, but when it comes to brand display, they also appear to spawn an utterly predictable, over-targeted, sterile, uninspiring, message-driven space, with little room for creativity and far too few WTF?! and OMG! moments.

Or maybe it’s just that I am so out of everybody’s target demographic these days that the algorithms merely discount me. In which case; screw you, algorithms!

So, as I wind down from the strains of paying far too much attention to my TV ad consumption, I’ll continue to keep an eye and an ear out for those WTF?! creative delights and those OMG! media moments…but I’ll also learn to lower my expectations.