The Tao of Advertising-Still evolving...

Every industry is defined and led by some core principles and dogmas.For example, Within the Tech industry we have the Metcalfe's law and Moore's Law etc.

Similarly there are laws in Geology, Medicine, Engineering etc.

One often wonders if the same was true about the Advertising & Communications business too.....Off lately, I have been looking at some of the talked about ads in the last decade or so. Ads that got the agencies that created them , talked about and also the product categories/brands they stood for.

The emergence of digital and viral platforms and social media etc have made this exercise quite interesting.




From a traditional perspective, there are some fundamental pricniples by which advertising lives by. At least till now.

But if one were to have a look at the communication that really got talked about in the last decade or so, ads that really got people chattering about, one would surmise that the old paradigm of Messages, Propositions, Benefits and "what is the pay off" is crumbling if not dead.
If one were to ask the general consumer on the street, some of the most iconic campaigns of the last few years have been those that have made a mark beyond their immediate target audience, have sparked a buzz, a conversation and has touched or booted a cultural moment.

Some Advertising Planners that I have been speaking to are still conditioned by the Classical school of Benefit, Pay off and USP led communication.

They also don't classify these successful ads of recent times as "real advertising"

But the fact remains that the end consumer - the entity for whom this kind of advertising was aimed at has lapped it up.
What explains this dichotomy? Is there a real difference between the way Agency Insiders (specifically Advertising Planners) and consumers measure and consume advertising?
I guess it is true. Looking at things in too much of a structured way can distort perspectives. I am sure that consumers don't look up at products and their messages the way we do. Their is no sitting and no post hoc rationalizations. Most of the advertising consumer is at the level of intuition and sub-liminal processing.

Should it surprise us? Not really. Works of Antonio Damasio and Robert Heath have been available off-the-shelf for quite some time now.

It is no coincidence that in recent times some of the bestseller ideas are coming from the fields of cognitive and neuro sciences, product decision making and Behavioural Economics.

Infact, one of the most talked about works, Malcolm Gladwell's Blink- posits exactly this- the importace and precedence of intuition over logical decision making.

In this context works of two agencies that have really come in to their own in the last decade or so can be the signifiers of a new paradigm that is emerging- a paradigm that puts much emphasis on entertainment, engagement and simple, joyous and indulgent kind of advertising.
No overt thrusts on USPs and Benefits, no flogging around "why is the product better for you" and "you really need it"
Yes, you might have guessed what I am talking about- Works by Crispin, Porter and Bogusky and Fallon.

I still remember how around 2006 and 2007 people in the advertising business were anxiously questioning how Sony Walkman and Cadbury's Guerrilla had the product Branding coming only for a couple of seconds- that too towards the end!

To a lot of Classicists, it was tantamount to sacrilege. And of all the things the client was Sony. Some of us who have worked on Sony, will vouch how the client is in absolute love with its products and telling the client that the product branding will constitute only a minuscule part of the final communication is akin to hara kiri!!!!












Crispin is another agency whose work and credo is admirable.The knack of taking a Brand, projecting it in popular conversations most provocatively and making these conversations culture defining is something that they have consistently done.

And this credo is now spreading.

As Peter Field in the April 2008 issue of Admap writes that a cursory analysis of the most effective advertising concludes that the creation of Buzz has a dis proportionate impact in generating super optimal ROI for the campaign and making the Brand in question loved by the target group.

Mos of the present UK advertising has this viral/buzz component built into it almost by default.

Adage wrote about this as well. You can read more about this here.

http://adage.com/globalnews/article?article_id=138478

Some of the contemporary ads this year that have a substantial buzz component in built are -







Some other examples are-