This week's blog post is brought to you by the letters M, S and O, by the number 2 - and by the late Paul Feyerabend of UC Berkeley.
One of the strangest (and, to my mind, most unedifying) phenomena in advertising today is the sight of ad-folk performing hideous mental contortions in their attempt to accommodate some recent advertising which does not, strictly speaking, conform to their own definition of "good advertising". M&S, O2, Dairy Milk.
The industry's attempts to reconcile these campaigns with its prejudices is a little like golf's adoption of Tiger Woods: "You don't look like you belong here, but God do we need you on the team."
But there is still discomfort. M&S, you see, 'doesn't really have an idea'. O2 is 'kind of design-led'. Cadbury's 'doesn't really have a clear-cut proposition'.
Just as Tiger Woods is the successor to Jesse Owens, these triumphant misfits are the successors to First Direct or Ronseal. Ads whose 'unaccountable' success unsettled the industry.
In other words, they are ads which don't conform to adland's rigidly-held view of what constitutes a good ad. As such they are seen as slightly unwelcome by the many Ad Fascists who believe that there is only one kind of great advertising and that moreover this great advertising can only be arrived at in one way.
Ad Fascists react to successful exceptions rather as Hitler reacted to Jesse Owens. They don't like them because they challenge their core beliefs. In this case it is the simplistic belief that advertising can be reduced to a few simple rules or 'a single theory of everything'. A neat, all encompassing definition of What is Good and Why.
These wholly artificial rules are rather attractive if we are to maintain the pretence that advertising is a neat and replicable science.
As it's Christmas, I'll make an attempt to enumerate a few of these rules now. You may like to add to them below....
1) No idea or campaign can be of any merit whatsoever unless it gives rise to award-winning ads (M&S's work - like the AA's First Emergency Service campaign before it - create a kind of creative nervousness here.
2) On watching an ad, it must be possible for any junior planner to deconstruct it, deducing the original business problem in question and extracting from each execution the same single-sentence proposition devised to address it.
3) Advertising has no other function beyond the tortuously slow creation of brand-value through repetition of one message.
4) Advertising only works in the long term. Indeed any communication that looks eager to obtain short- or even medium-term results (perhaps by scandalously including a price or promotional offer) barely deserves the name of advertising.
5) No great advertisement or brand should ever communicate more than one thing. Indeed every brand must be distillable to a single aphorism. Never be so foolish as to spend $2bn designing a car which has good acceleration and good cornering (we don't want to confuse anyone here now do we?). But, equally, every ad must always say *one* relevant thing - no gratuitous singing nuns, please. Even Levi's ads found it necessary to cite one product feature.
Now, just for a moment, I want you to consider something shocking - frightful. And it's this.
1) Maybe attaching your brand name to some singing nuns would work perfectly well. It wouldn't make any sense, but then neither does Christianity or Harry Potter, neither of which seem to suffer inordinately from the fact. Ordinary people do not demand rigorous sequential logic from their friends; do they want it from their brands? No Japanese advertising makes any sense at all. Logic is a client requirement, that's all.
2) There are many ways of arriving at good advertising, some of them involving sequential logic, others not.
3) Advertising can work its magic in many ways. And can do more than one thing for a brand at the same time.
4) These different roles of advertising may be complementary but they may also be incommensurable. eg it may be possible to have a good brand idea and a good idea about promotion without the two being connected.
5) The belief that there is only one means by which an advertising agency can add value to a client or a brand is massively limiting to the value an agency can add to its clients.
6) By submitting to advertising purists, we may be sacrificing a great deal of brand voltage on the altar of brand purity. Yet it seems to be that high-voltage, noisy brands are the more commercially successful.
7) That, in an attempt to appear purist and scientific, we are actually being very bad scientists. Our obsession with one true, purebred Aryan form of advertising is a massive brake on progress and invention.
And that's what brings me to Mr Feyerabend - former disciple of Karl Popper and self-described 'epistemological anarchist'; the author of many books, including Against Method. A little outdated now, but still considered the century's leading philosopher of science.
Now, if I understand this rightly, what Feyerabend said was that the insistence on a single approach to scientific discovery is actually unscientific.
Put another way, if you had retroactively applied the rules of scientific rationalism to all of the major scientific discoveries of the past 500 years you would have invalidated most of them. Perhaps most (penicillin, the X-Ray, the microwave, Aspirin, radio, Archimedes in the bath) were the product of 'inspired opportunism'. As he once put it, ' a methodology was an ideology Galileo could not afford.'
"To support his position that methodological rules generally do not contribute to scientific success, Feyerabend provides counterexamples to the claim that (good) science operates according to a certain fixed method. He took some examples of episodes in science that are generally regarded as indisputable instances of progress and showed that all common prescriptive rules of science are violated in such circumstances. Moreover, he claimed that applying such rules in these historical situations would actually have prevented scientific revolution."
When I recently talked to Paul Smith here about advertising in the late 1970s, he remarked that the great virtue of the time was that noone demanded the same tedious logic be applied to every message. Hofmeister had a bear on the logo - that was enough. Hovis wasn't even Northern - but let's pretend it is.... Hamlet had a message which was surely generic to all tobacco - indeed which was truer of cigarettes than cigars (cigars are rarely consumed at moments of stress). And so on....
Freed from the wearisome burden of self-imposed rationality, and by the tyranny of consistency, there's no limit to what we might do.
Don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting we ignore come basic precepts. But brands, like fugues, can carry more than one tune. And even the occasional dischord can sound better than a monotone.
In other words, get me some nuns.
