Once or twice towards the end of Winston Fletcher's new book, I felt a little like a cancer patient who has just emerged from an hour-long session in a $30m PET scanner to be told he is suffering from bad humours and a choleric temper and should therefore eat the gall bladders of finches during a full moon followed by an intense session of cupping.
This tremendous book is a detailed dissection of the British advertising industry, with the emphasis on the last forty years, and I am quite sure it is as accurate as it is detailed. For a business full of young people, it is also very necessary: even industry train-spotters will learn a huge amount of stuff they won't have known before, while most new recruits will be intrigued to learn that some agencies actually predate the Thatcher era. And, aside from the peculiar incident of Allen Brady & Marsh not being mentioned once within its pages, there doesn't seem to be much Mr F has overlooked.
Do go and buy this book. You'll enjoy it, and it's important that you read it. But just be prepared once or twice to come across the odd paragraph where (hence my analogy of the PET scanner) the author's diagnosis and treatment don't quite seem to live up to the depth of knowledge.
Page 253 is one case - in which Mr Fletcher blames the decline in British creativity on the conflict between old and new media. This seems both strange (surely this conflict would have affected many other Western countries equally) and horribly over-simplistic. Moreover it seems never to have occurred to the author (he cannot quite hide his disdain for new media) that maybe, just maybe, some of the spectacular British creativity now found on the interweb might compensate for a small decline in the quality of advertising on TV. Or that perhaps the scripts for TV commercials are not by default the only acceptable form in which a brand should do its working out while seeking to perfect its forms of self-expression.
Besides it seems fairly clear to me that most of the big campaigns Mr Fletcher loves (he never hides his belief that the 70s and 80s were a kind of Shakespearean age for British advertising) would have worked rather well in media other than TV, had people at the time wished to adapt them to other media.
Actually I am not even sure that there has been a decline in British creativity, except that relative loss of outright superiority which is simply inevitable in any competitive field as the rest of the world catches up. And, if there has been a falling off in absolute terms, I would also suggest that a more likely culprit is the forcible separation of media and creative, which prevents many advertisements being shown at the length the subject matter deserves. Fletcher seems to think ads have become shorter and faster because young people want messages in a telegraphic form. Yet is it not also possible that ads are now shorter because nobody in any media buying outfit seems capable of justifying any length greater than 30 seconds, nor has any incentive to do so? Do young people really have such fleeting attention? The hormonal little bastards seem perfectly capable of playing Grand Theft Auto for five hours straight without even taking a piss. That doesn't look like wandering attention to me.
But let's assume for the sake of argument there has been a decline. There are other explanations, of course, which are touched on before the dreaded page 253. Strictly imposed financial targets for agencies value predictability over risk (the book is excellent on holding companies, clearly suggesting their purpose is great but not eternal). There is also a marked shift in which industry sectors are advertising nowadays (awards-rich areas such as tobacco, beer, spirits and aftershave have either disappeared on been regulated out of existence, to be replaced in many cases by new advertisers in less erotic areas). Advertising for categories - as opposed to brands - Go to work on an egg - has all but disappeared; Mr F claims this is because it rarely works, although I don't see any reason why this should be so - particularly when advertising for government issues often works very well. Finally there is media fragmentation, which may simply reduce the odds that we get to see some of that 1% of all advertising which is of genuine creative interest.
Oh - here's one more possible explanation for this creative decline - that the unbelievably simple propositions to which creatives worked in the 1970s (eg "Beer X makes you happy", "Beer Y makes you manly" etc) would today never survive the layers of overcomplication added by the protracted modern planning process. Discuss.
Outside page 253, my only other beef is that he too much uses levels of media spend to determine which areas of advertising are important. This would have been fine in 1953 when all advertising had a media cost attached, and where agency income was derived in strict proportion to media spend. But this simply doesn't apply any more.
Today, a company may create 40% of its brand value though visits to its website at a media cost of nil: this does not mean the website is unimportant, it merely means it is inexpensive. (Perhaps 70% of my food expenditure takes place in restaurants, but this does not mean I get 70% of my nutrition there.) An agency may now derive significant income from activities with no media component at all. I'm not an economist (though I play one on the Internet) but it would seem likely to me that the substitution effect of new media will accelerate in a recession, and may not return to old levels.
Anything else? Fletcher patently loves the IPA Advertising Effectiveness Awards, but should perhaps ask whether, through wholly unintended consequences, the cult of accountability is bad for advertising. From a recent talk by Peter Field, it suddenly became clear to me that if you only use one metric to measure the success of your advertising, and if you believe an advertisement should be devised to serve one predefined purpose only, you will be massively under-realising its potential. A great ad works precisely because it works to many audiences at many different levels, and has multiple effects simultaneously. Therefore the pretence that an ad must do one thing at a time (see my previous blog for discussion of the one-bird, one-stone bias in human activity), while developed with the best intentions, could be fatal.
"I know this ad has doubled our price premium and doubled sales to existing users, but it wasn't supposed to do that - it was supposed to bring in new users. So I'm afraid we've failed"
This is the problem with imposing ever more metrics on a creative business. I hate to say this, but most people in advertising and many people in marketing are simply too innumerate and ungrounded in scientific understanding to be trusted with any figures more complicated that a lunch bill. They are arts graduates. They truly don't know *** about this stuff.
