Switch on the television, flip through our multi-coloured newspapers, or tune into any radio station. Chances are that you?d be swamped by some really sad advertising.
Advertising that?s filled end to end with benefits, advantages, features, product spiel, and everything else that does everything else but entice purchase.
This isn?t something that only small and unknown agencies or blinkered lala clients are spewing out. Many of these come out of the august offices of big agencies and even bigger multinational clients.
Again, this isn?t as though we weren?t doing this earlier, just that the times are such and as long as the product or service is visible in the media, everyone seems to be happy.
Who cares if the advertising is way off in terms of the brand tone, and brand character. As long as the trade is appreciative of the money that the client is spending, no one wants to crib.
May everything else be ignored and abandoned at the hallowed steps of media visibility. I mean look at the advertising that we passionately cobble together and almost manufacture.
There was a time when advertising was an art, when one could travel a thermal and free fall through a wide blue openness. Just that today, we reserve the very best of our craft to merely win at award shows.
These days, every brand within similar categories speaks the same idiom, talks the same hyperbole, and just about delivers every benefit and every feature. Gone are the days when we had physical differences, or even clearly defined mental advantages.
While reason and logic tell me that with technology and quality gaining parity, and with every benchmark jostling with each other on the same peak, the only difference we can create is the pull of creative.
If everyone is wearing black, then your brand ought to be wearing a white shirt. And if everyone is speaking Mandarin, you better find another language.
This obviously is commonsense, and the first directive in 96 point bold in the great guide to greater advertising. But evidently, some people haven?t opened the book just yet.
Why make advertising that?s like product brochures? Or like leaflets that radiantly guarantee that you could even chew the chewing gum that you buy?
People aren?t going to scream out of their homes like banshees and run to the nearest dealer only if your fifth advantage is also mentioned in the ad, and that that too in a sans serif font, extra bold, and in all caps.
Who has the time to notice? Who has the patience to listen to inane product benefits? Who has the inclination to remember?
Advertising is no longer seen as information. People don?t see it that way. It has evolved to great stories, gripping execution, and of course, fabulous ideas, with the product coming in at the 29th second.
Recession or otherwise, clients ought to see the new role of advertising as likeable snippets that will anchor the brand inside people?s heads. Not as screeching lists of 15 generic features and a single slightly better advantage.
Marketing wizards should engage in marketing wizardry. Not spend their time fooling around with size of the font, or something equally mundane when it comes to films.
You got to let go. Much like chess is the art of sacrifice. Know what to keep, know what to give up. Thirty seconds or 100 cc are little spaces.
The less you cram into them, the better your ad will look, and the smarter you will come through.
Your ad is your public admission of your company?s or brand?s mindset, and offering. The shabbier, the noisier, and the more nebulous your ad is, the sadder will be the accrued equity for what you have on offer.
Just put yourself in your audience?s shoes. They are not sitting there waiting for your product or service. They have a hundred million things to do in life, and in the flash of a moment they open up to you, would you rather beautifully entertain them, or rage into them with a sledge hammer?
Once in a while when your life is at stake, and you have to tell the world that buying your product won?t give them swine flu, please go ahead and employ a bulldozer. Otherwise, take it easy. Be gentle. Be subtle.
Audiences and consumers aren?t strange animals that live in distant villages and run friskily on mountain ledges.
There are genuine people out there. Possibly less argumentative and more rational. People who get it. They are like us. And they are us.
We are target audiences for most of the products and services out there. And I doubt if we get turned on by 90% of what we see.
So then why do we do this? Why do we let our advertising choke sensibility? Why do we play taxidermists and shove in everything we can find? Or why don?t we commit ourselves to a single direction, a single sharply defined reason why some would need our product or service?
Why do we stand on multiple steps? Aren?t we precariously perched? We have only two feet for heaven?s sake.
Of course there are exceptions. Like not all eggs end up rotten. Some hatch. And some become swans.
The problem I think is pretty simple. In these times when advertising itself has been structured down into a business that has to toe the bottom-line to keep distant coffers jangling, it has mutated from being offices of freedom to offices of spineless thinking.
Creativity or lateral thinking is no longer overtly encouraged or fired up by clients who stand to gain from the innate strength of agencies.
Rather, clients have put the agencies on a leash, and converted free-thinking men and women into organizations of fear.
At the end of the day, agencies are also run by mortal humans who need their monthly cheques. The legendary fights, the fabled gumption and courage, and the incredible potency of risk taking, have long dwindled into toothless whimpers under the duress of imminent pitches.
Look at it this way. The finest advertising comes from clients and agencies who work together to drive wedges and create chasms in markets. Not trying to trip each other, setting booby traps for each other, and outwitting each other for new highs in safe and mediocre advertising.
And all that is possible only if the enterprise to think without fear is blatantly fuelled. No slave ever freed his master. No flame ever flickered without oxygen.
The author is National Creative Director (South West Asia), Cheil Worldwide