Opposites attract
It seems to me that there are two equally important things happening in advertising at the moment that are more than a little contradictory.
On the one hand is the emerging popularity of what I call identitity rich advertising. In its current incarnation this appeared in the mid 90s with WCRS’s work for Orange and HHCL’s for the launch of the low cost airline Go. Interestingly the identity partners in both of these campaigns was Wolf Ollins.
At present this type of work finds its most ubiquitous expression in VCCP’s work for O2 and also in the Ipod campaign in which the principle focus of the communication is always the identity rather than a bigger thought about the brand. Indeed the potency of this approach seems to reside entirely in the aesthetic and the emotional, something that is slightly scary for someone schooled exclusively in a world of conceptual creativity – what we used to call an idea in the old days. Of course identity rich advertising need not be vaccuous and BBH’s campaign for Vodafone proves that this isn’t always the case – the power of now work is identity rich and intellectually satisfying.
If identity rich advertising is domniated by the aesthetic and emotional then Google’s adwords is presisely the opposite. Here is an advertising environment where not only are creativity and executional precision absent they are actively legislated against with every advertisement typographically and aesthetically identical. This is rational advertising at its most extreme where relevance is the key driver of communication success not creative standout or appeal.
Unfamliliar and challenging as these approaches may be they are by far the most dynamic developments in an industry searching for a new creative language. And in many ways the advertising world seems to be going back to the future, to the creative approaches present at the birth of the modern industry in the late nineteenth century – a big logo painted on the side of a house and text heavy press advertising, this time on search engines.
I’m wondering if these developments are not really contradictory. Or if indeed they pose much of an issue for defenders of the conceptual.
I tend to come at this with a freedom of speech argument. It seems to me that in an age of infinitely growing channels of communication–be they personal/impersonal, direct/scattergun, ATL/BTL brand identity/product specific (&tc), diversity is to be welcomed. All approaches, including the two chief ones you’ve outlined, potentially feed each other. And perhaps even ensure/allow for the possibility of combining all (the conceptual, identity-rich, and rational relevance) should the right mind appropriate in the right way. At the very least you could say these are useful exercises in testing effectiveness.
An holistic, embracing-of-all-approaches stance means that each of these forms of communication can find their place in the world (be it ultimately as part of a more conceptual movement, or perhaps perpetually as a complement to conceptual stuff.) Hence the freedom of speech idea (although I’m certainly not reading your thought as a suggestion of censorhip): however troubling these developments are to fans of the conceptual, they feed the world of communication as a whole, not least in terms of the ‘education’ both of audiences (as to the kind of experience they might have) and of those in the communications business (as to the kind of experience that people do/can have). In this way, as with the free market model, everyone is free to appropriate, discard, be inspired, or be warned by such movements.
Long live contradiction. And diversity. As long as there are enough good guys out there fighting for the good work.
maybe i am missing the point but isn’t there an equal role for identity based advertising as well as those that are more overt about a particular brand or product truth?
could it be that some choose to go down the identity route because they don’t have anything else to say?
or that it is the most powerful way of saying it? say apple – they are known for their esthetically pleasing hardware. the ipod got so much talk that you don’t really need to tell people what it does – people already talk about it. so maybe it was part of a bigger approach – get pr/stores to tell the details. just make the thing look damn cool, spend a lot of money on media so you’re everywhere and sooner or later people will experience both. you’ll hear about it. the ads make you want to check it out. or if you’ve bought one, the ads give you a positive post purchase dissonance. (ok so apple have a big budget…)
ps. which vodafone ad?
The vodafone campaign is the ‘power of now’ work – very strong identity rich outdoor.
Don’t get me wrong I am very positive about these new developments – its just hard to teach an old conceptual dog like me new aesthetic tricks