This week I heard a global advertising leader say they felt the advertising industry lacked purpose. I also heard an ex-Telegraph journalist say that it represented “everything that is most meretricious and shallow about British society” – and plenty of ruder things besides.
Advertisers have long only been kept from the top slots of most hated professions lists by traffic wardens and estate agents, but there seems to me to be a link between our own anxiety regarding our role and the growing frequency with which the industry’s output is accused of being a vacuous cultural parasite.
When I joined advertising, the weight of clients’ spend was on TV and many felt its output was better viewing than the programming that was offered around it. In fairness, there was a lot less on telly. But still, brands such as Carling, Tango and Nike had set out their stalls as entertainers. And they excelled at it, in entertainment channels.
Now I work in a wider field of marketing and technology, where the weight of spend is in channels where people don’t want to be entertained by brands. They want to be served, informed or just left to do their own thing. Yet we keep making ads, insisting on nosing in on people’s time, trying to make them laugh or repeatedly shouting about products and offers, irrespective of what they are looking for.
No wonder we seem a bit out of place and are losing our self-confidence in the process.
Also this week, I spotted a worrying statistic in RPA’s The Naked Truth report: that 56% of clients think that agencies are more interested in selling their work rather than solving our problems.
So here’s the thing: it’s time we pulled ourselves together and directed our attention to what people really want from our clients’ brands and businesses – using that to offer useful advice, assistance and inspiration to both parties rather than the same old hackneyed sell.
It’s time we stopped trying to be funny and made ourselves useful. Or else, there’s always estate agency.
Fern Miller is chief strategy and insight officer, international at DigitasLBi
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