Stupid Ads For Stupid People
It occurred to me that I have several industry-based thought strands running through my head and I have blog - so perhaps I should marry the two (smart eh?). This is my first attempt to do just that.
There is little formula, just an idea and a subsequent ramble. I suppose I should create a new category too, perhaps I’ll call it ideas or thoughts or something even cleverer.
Regular readers please note there are no pictures, so you might want to skip to the post below.
Back in ‘the day’ when I worked at traditional ATL agencies, the creative department always used to bang on about how stupid the audience was. The ‘tell them enough and they’ll buy it’ model, as I referred to it, was something I never subscribed to. Aside from being fairly insulting, I thought it was just plain lazy – an idea needn’t be that clever if you’re continually exposing it to fuckwits, right?
Rubbish.
Fortunately, in the multi channel world that is ‘advertising’ today, this theory is gradually being proved wrong. And ironically, much to the detriment of the more traditional creative dept.
People will always respond to good outbound advertising messages, and you could argue that many have responded to the bad ones as well, I don’t disagree. And I don’t think consumers have suddenly got 50% smarter either.
What’s changed is the arrival of the interweb and the increased use of events and PR related activity in marketing - or ‘choice’ as some folk like to put it.
I think that previously, the lack of alternative channels created the illusion that consumers were dumb.
Multiple channels enable punters the opportunity to sort of ‘edit’ their message intake - it’s almost like an ad has to advertise itself in order to get the required response. The proliferation of channels and collapse of ‘appointment to view’ behaviours serve only to increase the ongoing attention challenge and I think, further dispel the ‘stupid’ illusion.
Which, of course, forces ‘ads’ and ‘advertisers’ to have be a lot smarter - and anyone that encourages advertisers to be smarter and more relevant can’t be all that dumb.
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as a regular readers, I do appriciate these posts without images