On Steve Harrison's article in today's Campaign...

879296 — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:32:00 GMT

Not all change is good in adapting to a digital era

I think I agree with everything he says..... well nearly....

First here are a few areas where I agree entirely.

On our woeful lack of reverence for the past: while there is no need for advertising practitioners to engage in ancestor worship, the widespread indifference towards our heritage is sometimes breath-taking. There are perhaps only 25 essential set-texts in the entire advertising corpus - and unlike the corpus on, say, accountancy or tort, they are mostly extremely enjoyable to read. And yet it is not unusual to meet people in our business - university graduates, too - who haven't read one of them.
The disdain for craft and the celebration of a kind of devil-may-care philistinism is a fair target. While there is a certain kitchen-table style of advertising whose job is to appear completely artless, it is of limited application.
Like Steve, I find the scientific rigor which once suffused direct marketing seems less in evidence. The old practice of continually refining work through rigorous testing has given way to a kind of fire-and-forget approach to communication, with each salvo largely uninfluenced by the results of its forerunners.
The decline in craft skills has a terribly limiting effect on the advertising solutions we propose: for instance, people who cannot write long copy will never propose long-copy ads.
It is true that large tracts of human behaviour and temperament, having evolved over a few million years, are hence immutable. Direct marketing - in its rather limited way - was once quite good at uncovering these constants, and it is terrible how much of it has been forgotten. Here's just one example - it was invariably found in DM that widening the choice of channels through which people could place an order increased the volume of sales. And yet today it is common to hear the phrase "drive to web" as an acceptable purpose for a piece of communication. True, cost to serve is lower online, but let's not forget an offline sale is still a sale - and better than no sale at all.

And yet.....

That good old Claude Hopkins scientific rigour is perhaps more in evidence today than in Claude's day. It now takes place in entirely new specialisms such as online media buying, search-engine optimisation, affiliate programmes and so on. Claude Hopkins and James Webb Young would both have delighted in all this.
A reverence for craft-skills can sometimes be a brake on innovation, too. Many advertising people disdained the Internet in its early stages simply because they thought it ugly and typographically crude. A case, perhaps, of being unable to see the wood for the dead trees.
The arrival of new media has given many people a useful new insight into brands and advertising - allowing us all to understand our business at a more conceptual level. While this is not much use unless it's harnessed to some practical skills, it is healthy for people to discover that brands are not created exclusively as a by-product of amusing 30-second films.
In some parts of the industry, the established "scientific" model is so worthless that, to extend Steve's metaphor, the baby is actually less valuable than the bathwater. The traditional approach to developing and pre-testing brand advertising seems to me almost entirely the product of pseudo-science - and based on a misconception into that million-year-old human nature: the unsupportable idea that what people say has any bearing on what they do.
Lastly I am not sure that one traditional idea Steve espouses - that great communication is invariably the product of single-minded proposition - does not count as psudo-science too. As with astrology, the fact that a belief may be long-established does not mean it isn't bullshit. The USP and the belief in single-minded, overt propositions has agreat provenance, dating all the way back to one Rosser Reeves and his book Reality in Advertising. But for all its lineage (and, believe me, I have spent 20 years trying hard to believe it) I suspect it has no scientific basis at all. Indeed, if you were to follow this to its logical conclusion, entire disciplines (design for one) would have no role in brand-building. Patently insane.
Incidentally, this proposition-driven approach to advertising may have done damage to creative departments, spawning a generation who believe that their principal job is simply to hang a few baubles on a USP rather than to solve a business problem through an imaginative understanding of human nature. Planners have been complicit in this.

My advice is simple. As James Webb Young himself said, the best books about advertising aren't always about advertising. And today there is plenty being learned and written about the constants of human nature, it's just not being written by admen. Behavioral economics (try reading Nudge, by Thaler & Sunstein, or the blog Marginal Revolution) has taken over from Direct Marketing in discovering through experiment what people do and why they do it.

But, as a final irony, I would particularly recommend that people engaged in new media read the advertising classics. Because, ironically, the works of Hopkins, Gossage, Ogilvy, Young are perhaps more applicable to the digital age than to the intervening TV age. Why? Perhaps because these people grew up in a world dominated by press - where you had to earn attention as well as simply buying it. And where it was assumed that your audience was to a great degree self-selecting. It also taught how to communicate to people who were rationally and actively engaged in the buying process, rather than mere passers-by. Given these things, the titans of classic press advertising may have felt more at home online than during TV's interregnum.

The TV age, in a way, did not produce all that much inherited wisdom. Perhaps it simply isn't that kind of form. One hopes that the digital age will not only learn from past masters but also create a few of its own.

James "Web" Young, in other words.

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On Steve Harrison's article in today's Campaign...

Not all change is good in adapting to a digital era