The desirability to think different in advertizing

This article will not be long. In many ways the point is made by the title. It is naturally about the folly of formulas, the refusal of rules and the shame of the same. It has of course to do with the desirability to. “think different,” the requirement to “break the rules” and the desirability of disruption.

Advertizing is not just something that every organization should have or every organization should do. As a blueprint for creative thinking, “The Outlaw” is a mentality and a belief system that should permeate our industry and inspire everyone in it, if we are to continue to be valuable and valued.

Information technology, the fragmentation of media, the globalization of the market economy, the liberalization of markets, and the shift of Western consumerism towards experience – and desire-based drivers and away from needs-based drivers, all add to the ascend in importance of “intangibles” and the dominance of creativity, coupled of course with the ability to apply it as a primary asset of businesses and organizations today.

When I worked in the States in the eighties, I was struck by the open acknowledgement, even by some practitioners, that there were 2 types of advertizing. Creative advertizing and “advertizing that sells,” whereas in Britain the creative imperative was widely accepted at the time.

I think that since than things have changed for the better in the States, but in these recent straitened times in all of our markets, in which some organization clearly still see creativity as a luxury, the reality is that more than ever The Outlaw mentality is not an alternative – it is a mandate.

In fact arguably, there is no other industry in which creativity in its broadest sense (which would encompass innovation and even boldness) is such an absolute prerequisite as it is in advertizing.

In many other industries which use innovation, creative skills and creativity are only a part of the product mix. The film business, while producing highly creative and innovative new films, is also openly enslaved by formula.

Similarly, the music business churns out endless “best off” and compilations alongside the genuinely new bands and albums. Architects, software developers, game designers – have a leading edge and a bleeding edge, nevertheless all also have genuine “markets” for the familiar and the tried and trusted.

In other aspects of culture, I possibly will appreciate and thrive on the new and the different (or I possibly will not), nevertheless I will definitely at least some of a the time be comforted, reassured and entertained by the familiar, in fact often by the identical. This self evidently can’t be said of advertizing at least in principle. I believe it’s less about “in principle” and more about “in theory.”

People consume games, music, film, etc. in an open and active marketplace. They exchange money for them and exert choices and preferences for them. They do not “consume” advertizing in the same way – although it exists in the same cultural space – and of course we use this term (to consume) to describe what people do with advertizing.

This, while being the bleeding obvious, is at the heart of the creative imperative for advertizing and is often disregarded. Like other aspects of culture, advertizing of course operates in the public sphere, but unlike other aspects of culture it is compelled to intrude and will only effectively be “consumed” if it succeeds in doing so in some way. It makes sense then that the sine qua non of any advertizing is to get noticed.

In purely neurological terms, the brain notices what’s different and relegates or files away the familiar. Suddenly, “resist the usual” becomes less of a folksy slogan than an astonishingly compelling summary of pattern Recognition and Signal Detection Theory, and at least 2 decisive and well known scientific fields are clearly seen to support The Outlaw mentality for advertizing.

One of the most gleeful and persistent predictions of the last 10 years has been that of the death of mass media and of advertizing. In fact in the firmament of advertizing services as a whole, advertizing is now pretty much the business that dares not speak its name.

There would be no such thing as mass media, as broadcast and little occasion for shared media experiences as people endlessly “interacted” with programming or entertainment in real time. Certainly they would not be passive consumer or even receivers of advertizing, as they would naturally want to edit that out. Their world would be entirely on-demand and customized. And boring, and isolated, and predictable, and of course as it turns out, deeply unlikely. This vision of the future consistently disregarded the social nature of being human and the herd or tribal instinct of the individual human being.

It also wholly took too lightly the hedonics of the physical browsing and shopping experience and took too lightly the ability of conventional retailers to innovate towards this. It dismissed the whole foundation of the entertainment industry, i.e. that the vast majority of entertainment is lean back not lean forward, because people like it that way.

It disregarded one of the driving features of the market economy as defined by Adam Smith, that one of the primary functions of wealth is the display of wealth, and that so we have got to have a shared understanding of what the signifiers of wealth are, i.e. brands and brand values and images.

And it also overlooked why brands evolved in the first place – to make choice more simple in an oversupplied, overcooked world. Five years later, the bubble burst and while many of the frantically predicted effects of the internet are now happening more slowly but for real, they are largely creating shifts in the balance and mix of people’s behaviour rather than changing it completely.

While mass market ratings have declined as a percentage of the whole, TV advertizing both in the UK and in the US is more in demand and sold for more of a premium than ever. There are still many shared media experiences and we still have water cooler (or pub or chat room) conversations about ads and programs because of course they are part of our shared culture.

The power of good television advertizing, in particular to work broadly over a population and quickly in time, is still dramatically demonstrated everyday by tracking study results.

There are, however, also wonderful new opportunities in other media and in using media and the mix of media differently that are now available which, when The Outlaw mentality is functional, give us even more chances to innovate, add value and have fun doing it. Creativity and The Outlaw mentality are still integral for the science of advertizing to work as moat of it still works on the push model and much of it always will.

Creativity is even more essential than ever now though as complexity increases as networks of connections, influences and channels multiply, as people’s experience dissects their image of things in more and more ways at more and more points.

Being creative in how you communicate is a much, much more weighty responsibility when “everything communicates.” People’s experience of thing in general and brads in particular is highly impressionistic rather than very much opinionated.

It is also constantly changing and evolving relative to other brands in contexts which we can’t know or control. Jeremy Bellmore uses the lovely image of a bird building a nest from twigs and found objects to describe this. A similar argument runs through the work of Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell, which, in this interconnected world, the most integral and dominant communication about a brand is that between customers and other customers, rather than that which happens between a brand and its customers.

Communication and specifically advertizing has never simply been about the paint job at the end of the production line, but these days that way of the production line, but these days that way of thinking, that way of using creativity is positively dangerous.

In fact, there is one law that I assume might probably be worth codifying at this point and that’s the “Law of Unintended Consequences.” It is no longer possible to simply measure the effects to our intended messages on our intended target, and trade off “conversion” against” wastage.”

We need to understand that any action will have an impact on all recipients and that the negative impact might probably be as powerful an influence on the many as the positive is on the few. Why is it still OK for the direct marketing industry to response that a 3% response rate is a good thing if it can be proved to be cost effective? When about the 97% you bored, insulted, misunderstood, inconvenienced or angered in order to achieve it?

A similar argument might be made about advertizing which seeks to shock or pander, or indeed advertizing which clearly creates a promise which bears no relations to people’s actual experience of the brand.

So the challenges for advertizing are far more complex now and so the requirement to harness creativity throughout the process is clearly there. Our industry recognizes creativity better than most because it has been an imperative
for us for so long. We know how to manage, use, foster and reward creativity.

We accommodate The Outlaw mentality, whereas many client cultures would find it unfamiliar and the organism would tend to expel it. The way of thinking that might be termed The Outlaw mentality, so prized in our culture, should then be even more valued by our clients.

And yet there is a sense in which we are our own worst adversary in this industry; by seeking to become more like them by being seen to be more driven by rationality and accountability when in fact we should be helping them to be more like us. The two are not incompatible at all. They are just different parts of the whole. As Bob Dylan once said, “Only an honest man can live outside the law.”