Are creatives now glorified PR people?
There used to be an accepted hierarchy for advertising creatives. If you were in an above the line agency it was Cinema, TV, Posters, Print, Radio. Then below it went, DM, Point of Sale, Field Marketing, Telemarketing and then if you really, really, couldn’t make it, PR. This of course was before ‘digital’. My father was unimpressed when I ditched TV for digital in 1999 but he would have disowned me if I had gone into PR. Where digital sits on the pecking order now is of course another interesting topic. But for now, let’s look at the Adage / Creativity Top 10 for 2010.
OLD SPICE: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like/Responses
PEPSI: Refresh Project
ARCADE FIRE: Wilderness Downtown
DOMINO’S: Pizza Turnaround
MITSUBISHI: Virtual Test Drive
DARE LABS: Remote Palette
NIKE: Write the Future
JAY-Z/BING: Decoded
WWF: Space Chimp
CONAN O’BRIEN: Comeback Campaign
These campaigns are essentially the campaigns that were talked about the most. Has this become the creative currency? We know that Crispin’s creative brief is always ‘what’s the press release?’ but is this a fundamental shift from craft (writing and art direction) to PR?
Now don’t get me wrong there is a great deal of craft in these campaigns. Old Spice would never have worked if the original 30 second spot had not been a sublime piece of writing and direction. But would the spot have topped the list if it wasn’t for the follow up PR piece? And don’t think that the YouTube responses wasn’t a PR campaign. Picking out industry writers and social media bloggers for tailored communications - pure PR.
The WWF Chimp, Pepsi Project, Jay Z, Domino’s, Conan pieces are all big PR campaigns. Every Nike spot is of course a PR event in itself but the film was the centre piece for this. That to me is a shift. If you asked a ‘proper’ creative to do a PR campaign a few years ago they have told you to fuck off - but been slightly more rude about it.
Is this a good shift? Time will tell. The first proper award show I went to was D&AD in 1997. The Fox sports NHL ads won gold. Now, this was at a UK based awards show. There was something kind of cool about seeing foreign spots you hadn’t seen before. There was some mystique, some glamor. Who knew if they had ever run before, I didn’t care, they were funny and they were new. With all the hooha about fake ads which will no doubt continue ad nauseum now that Tony Grainger is running Cannes there is something to be said for the work that everyone knows the most winning awards.
The flip side to this is of course you get spots like Evian babies winning awards, which is clearly a crime against creativity. And everyone starts chasing hits and likes. Hits and Likes become the creative barometer.
So we find ourselves at a crossroads. Some people will say, just do good work and the hits will follow. I can’t poke any holes in that logic so that’s what I’ll be focusing on in 2011 but it’s an interesting time for creatives. Anyone who needs some light shed on the subject could do a lot worse than read ‘The Idea Writers’ from Creativity’s editor Teressa Iezzi.
I only got a copy on Monday but even a cursory glance shows that it’s a very thorough and detailed analysis of modern advertising creativity. Where some ‘business’ books have a basic premise that could be explained in a sentence - Blink: I get it, trust your gut instinct, Outliers: I get it, practice makes perfect. (To be fair to Malcolm Gladwell I haven’t read The Tipping Point. People say that’s pretty good but I’m too embarrassed to start reading it now. Perhaps one for the Kindle?) - ‘The Idea Writers’ is chocked full of interviews, case studies and real opinion.
I have no idea if Teressa covers this idea of a piece of creativity being deemed successful based on popularity but it’s definitely something I’ll be thinking about over the coming months.
