Advertising: does it engage?
Advertising, by and large, is afraid to engage. Consumers, on the other hand, are not.
Recently Head First was invited to contribute to a discussion regarding art in advertising. Among our observations was a statement that advertising rarely innovated and so rarely became art.
And I figure that if advertising doesn’t innovate then there must be a reason.
Consider the rise in ‘crowd sourcing‘. Ideas are emanating from people. Ordinary, non-industry people.
Consider also recent reports of big companies plagiarising ideas from sole traders and designers. These designers are acting on a small scale, pleasing a small number of people. They have no brand to protect, no image to damage. They are unencumbered by procedure or responsibility. Like artists and like ordinary crowd-sourced creatives, the people who create do so in the hope that others will respond to the creation in a positive manner. If they are creating funny videos then there is little or no concern for an audience. When the need to sell is removed from the process, creativity takes on a raw beauty that has great power.
We, as viewers commonly branded as consumers, see this power as honest in scope. As clever, as entertaining as we can be as professional creatives, can we ever hope to reach this level? Can we, in other words, set out to create with sales or even brand propagation as an afterthought?
With FMCG the answer might seem to be a resounding no. Even those peculiar products which don’t quite fit the FMCG model (games and books fall under this banner, at least to my mind), can’t afford to release marketing without some kind of sales message directing it somehow. Books, it has been observed, are having to step up their marketing activities and in doing so may be forced even further from simply presenting their author’s vision and letting it settle naturally into the hands of the reader.
The need to inform can override the desire to entertain. But it is the entertainment value of any good ad that does the engaging.
We are, I believe, entering a phase of advertising where this process, this collision even, are being blurred. Games which technically are adverts throw off their need to inform, or reduce it to a bare minimum. They seek to entertain by not letting the brand get in the way. Good, crowd-sourced ads seem to work because suddenly the agency creative isn’t having to steer a course through briefs and personalities in order that their idea get greenlit and as the more savvy brands cone to understand this we are seeing some engaging creative content being released through any and every means at our disposal.