Even if you think Jeremy Clarkson is the spawn of Satan, you will grudgingly find yourself sharing one or two of his opinions as expressed in this review of the Range Rover TDV8 Vogue SE. (I am fairly safe in this belief since my father, who generally regards Clarkson as the embodiment of materialistic vulgarity, sent it to me approvingly the day bit came out.)
What Mr Clarkson is saying is that he is a bit of a Platonist. That, while most categories contain many variants, and very nice they may be too, all are defined by a kind of archetype - a conception of a thing at its most perfect. He lists a few of these: France, the iPhone, Bacon & Eggs. The "Who's the daddy" campaign for Holsten Pils a few years back played off this same thought. It's a game you can play with any category: brands (Coke), classical composers(Bach) or Prime Ministers (Churchill).
Now I have to confess something here. While I think originality is a wonderful thing, and while I'm all for stretching envelopes, pushing boundaries, throwing out rule-books, thinking outside boxes, casting off strait-jackets and generally pissing against the wind, I do still believe there is a Platonic archetype for press advertising. In short, I still feel the Full English Breakfast of a press ad involves a big pikkie at the top, a headline (and even a subhead) underneath, with two or three hundred words of intelligent, characterful chit-chat leading smoothly towards a logo or coupon at the end.
You might think of this as the David Ogilvy layout. Funnily enough I don't. I often think of it as the CDP layout, since it was their ads in the Sunday Times colour supplement of the early 70s which made me first want to work in this business. Back then press advertisements were polite enough to engage you in conversation, rather than just barking out their proposition before drifting off to find someone more interesting.
What's odd about this wonderful approach isn't that it's rare - it's that it's almost completely bloody dead. Why? It certainly isn't consumers themselves - in fact I was amused to see this recent eye-tracking research which completely vindicates this layout even fifty years on.
Ten years after David Ogilvy's death, I think we should ask ourselves what went wrong here.
One problem, I think, is that people have started to conflate creativity with brevity. This is absolutely wrong. Good creative work has an immense respect for the value of the reader's (or viewer's) time, true, but that need not mean it is always brief: too much brevity can be as much of a discourtesy as too little. Someone weeks away from buying a car will probably be happy reading a few hundred words about any car under consideration. (Someone who has just bought the car may eagerly read a full treatise on the thing for reasons of reassurance). In any case, noone is forcing you to read copy: it's simply there for those who want it - and prospective buyers often do.
Other possibilities? That noone can write long copy any more? I don't entirely buy this, although it's a contributory factor for sure. International awards - and the hurried way awards are judged? These probably have an effect. I certainly find it interesting - as someone who never went to art college - that Cannes entries often expect a ludicrously high degree of visual literacy in their audience (every year there are a few winners that I simply cannot understand) whereas very few make much use of language.
Research is also partly to blame, especially since all press ads are researched without body copy - an approach based on the moronic belief that you can research a proposition in the absence of a surrounding execution. Moreover every focus group nowadays contains one certified tyre-kicking twat who seeks to establish his superiority to his fellows through his disdain for all marketing. "I'm not reading all that crap" is a fairly typical way of expressing this.
And we should not forget the absurdity of client approval processes - without which all account-handling departments would be half the size. David Abbott was supposedly first driven to produce posters for the Economist since getting press ads approved simply took far too long. And clients seem to have an aversion to running long copy ads. Whenever we write them and present them, clients always seem to love them in theory, but not to the extent of running them in practice. Why so?
I would value more and better explanations below. People don't read ads - said Howard Gossage - they read what interests them: and sometimes it's an ad. Here was a truly innovative man - whose ads were almost all as wordy as hell. The Internet, rap music, talk radio - these booming media forms are all copy driven. Email marketing seems to work a treat. Why does everyone love words more than we do?
