The 5 Hottest Takes From Advertising Week APAC 2023

Advertising is causing the climate crisis … kind of

The first debate of the conference dealt with this exact proposition. With our house on fire, and over 70% of people in the advertising industry concerned about their impact on climate change, it’s hard to shy away from the reality that ads drive consumerism.

Interestingly, both sides of the debate contended this point, though the jury remains out on whether the climate crisis can be put down solely to the advertising industry. What’s clear, though, is that our $1 trillion industry holds significant power and responsibility in how we respond to the crisis.

Tear up the timesheets

Value-based billing versus hourly billing has been a hot topic of late, and at LBB’s day-two panel, ‘How Do We Put a Value on Creativity?’ this debate was re-energised. Supermassive co-founder Laura Aldington revealed that Supermassive doesn’t use timesheets.

Whether the move proves ultimately successful or not, time will tell – Supermassive is only a few months old. But with many across the industry starting to feel the same way, it seems only a matter of time before the industry reaches a tipping point on this issue.

… and the pitches, too

Staying with the LBB panel, ‘How Do We Put a Value on Creativity?’, the question that repeatedly arose was: in what other industry does a company give away their intellectual property for free?

In advertising, the practice of pitching for new business remains controversial. Agencies are staffed to serve existing clients, which means the work that goes into a pitch is essentially occurring outside of billable hours. Furthermore, there is nothing to stop a brand from using elements of an unsuccessful pitch in its final campaign.

This begged many in attendance to the question – what if we all agreed not to pitch? What could our industry look like, and how could advertisers take back their power? 

Content has never been more important

The two words on everyone’s lips in 2023 must surely be: media fragmentation.

Obviously, content has always been important in media and in advertising. But are we now in a content golden age? Maybe. With the emergence of new subcultures at the same time as global connectivity and evolving social media platforms, people are more fragmented than they have ever been.

For this reason, the types and volume of content being produced are more important than ever when it comes to reaching audiences.

AI will be the cause of human mistrust in advertising

That is if you don’t take into account the existing palpable mistrust in advertising that has existed for some time.

As generative AI becomes more and more difficult to discern from real content, a slew of predictions across industries – ranging from the utopian to the doomsayers – have surged to the front of our collective consciousness. But a more nuts-and-bolts prediction, that AI is yet another step in social mistrust for industry, is all the more eerie given how little must happen for it to come true.

As industries around the world, including advertising, lean more and more heavily into AI technologies, it is the contention of some that our pursuit of consumer relationships may be the exact thing that isolates us from our audiences.