Why does everyone hate advertising (these days)?
Greg Grimmer: In a bid to make advertising fashionable (again) today’s column will be optimism peppered with ads for advertising – instead of my normal service of cynicism peppered with attempts at humour…
Why do I go to parties and pretend I’m a traffic warden to avoid abuse?
Why does everyone want to describe their career as: “I work in… social, mobile, digital, experiential” – and not just admit they work in advertising?
Why does everyone EVEN IN advertising pretend they don’t watch TV, click on sponsored search boxes, or have ever seen a banner ad?
Why are there over half a million sites on the world wide web devoted to hating advertising? (Osama bin Laden by comparison only has 31,000!)
Why is it my non-advertising friends feel sorry for me? And why am I asking all these questions?
Well I can answer the last one very easily… I went to the Advertising Association conference last week where there was a concerted call to arms for the ‘Advertising Army’.
Now contrary to popular belief I am not a big fan of conferences. Many have accused me of turning up for the opening of an envelope but if the truth be known I tend to avoid them unless: a) I’m invited to speak or b) I’m paid to attend (or c) they are MediaTel events – Ed).
However I was enticed by the AA’s first conference for ten years entitled LEAD. It was billed as a gathering of the great and the good of advertising and attempted to do the impossible – make advertising fashionable (again).
The content of the conference was patchy (isn’t it always) but it started with a flourish. Keith Weed, Unilever’s head marketing honcho, was impeccably professional; Matt Britton from Google was charming and informative; though the real star of the show in the morning was Cilla Snowball of AMV.
Cilla’s theme was Death of Glory – neatly illustrated by a Clash t-shirt. (It wasn’t just Cilla’s excellent presentation that gave me new found admiration for advertising’s first lady… who knew she was a Clash fan!?).
What I now want to know is whether she realised that the lyrics from Mr Strummer in this particular track are about him wrestling the responsibility of adulthood… so it perfectly analogous with the current state of the advertising industry. Awkward child, precocious teenager, awkward mid-life crisis and now we must glory in maturity.
According to Cilla, advertising has the army, the ammo and very nearly a battle plan. So instead of my normal service of cynicism peppered with attempts at humour today’s column, as ordered by Cilla, will be optimism peppered with ads for advertising.
Cilla showed a number of strong examples of the positive power of advertising – and made a plea for the Government ministers sat in the audience to go back to parliament and remind their colleagues of the power of advertising to educate and save lives.
Following the initial speeches I then sat and watched an interesting panel on the internet privacy debate but my mind wandered off into the previous speech again . Google, Facebook, Twitter – three of the most powerful brands on the planet are driven by what the digerati call the freemium economy. Freemium is only possible due to their ad-funded model. Remind your friends of this. Fenton was bought to you by the advertising dollar.
Of course the internet is the ultimate destination of choice but let us not forget that whether it is cars, comparison engines or FMCG, brand advertising can buy you consumer consideration, shelf space and even column inches.
One of my favourite adland anecdotes is the fact that good advertising will kill a bad product very quickly and this is as true today as ever. An old colleague of mine once used the example of ‘Free Dog Shit Pizza’. Very high awareness but extremely low sales.
Before the internet there were media that only existed due to advertising support – and even in the digital age titles such as Metro, Shortlist and Sport are flourishing due to the support of advertising. Commercial radio is stronger than ever in the UK and has always existed purely on its power to attract advertising investment.
The big one: there is such a close correlation between economic growth and advertising expenditure it is a wonder that the Bank of England didn’t just run a big multi-media ad campaign rather than its elongated period of quantitative easing.
And while this is a global story, let’s be parochial for a moment… we in the UK remain bloody good at this stuff – we have the fifth biggest ad market in the world, number one in creativity, exporting talent and work at a rate other industries could only dream of.
To paraphrase Renton from Trainspotting: Choose life. Choose a career. Choose a fucking big television. Choose advertising.