Something important has disappeared from the heart of our best people and from the heart of our best agencies. I’m not talking about the usual issues – creative focus, innovation, gender diversity and so on – but something more fundamental.
Quietly and almost imperceptibly, something special that drew me into advertising appears to have slipped away.
When I got into this industry, I joined a group of people who clearly valued creativity as the solution to business problems. We started with the problem. There were problem businesses and problem clients; hurdles; false summits; issues of inestimable complexity and drama. There were things that could be a bit risky – things that, frankly, only a decent creative agency could solve. We raced headlong at such issues. The bigger the issue, the greater the prize in solving it.
It wasn’t just us. Every decent agency from any given period confounded expectation, silenced critics and solved business problems. Take Ogilvy’s Backbone of Britain campaign for Ford Transit, HHCL’s campaign for Tango or our own OXO family work. My problem is simple: our industry doesn’t chase problems any more. It chases success. Existing, proven success.
Ask yourself when the last time was that you saw a basket case and thought: let’s turn that around? When did someone in your team come to you and ask to be put on the nastiest, most punishing bit of business?
To use a football analogy, agencies are too busy looking for the easy tap-ins than devoting ourselves to the beautiful game. We’re too scared to take the troubled business. Instead, our ideal solution is to take on the famous brands and continue their famous work.
Procurement is partly to blame. So are our paymasters. Our own pitching costs also mean we are consistently under pressure to look for a guaranteed return on our investment. While risk isn’t a friend when it comes to delivering healthy margin, goal-hanging isn’t good for our business either.
Advertising needs to find the courage to use creativity to improve and grow. We cannot and should not build our agency brands by using procurement-led initiatives to piggy-back off of another agency’s work. We should have the integrity and guts to take on problem businesses and transform them into successful brands. That’s where our value lies, and that’s the best advertisement for our respective agencies.
Joe Petyan is executive partner at J Walter Thompson
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