When Did We Forget to Advertise from 20,000 Feet?

Are we in the ‘Pretty Making’ industry? This isn’t what I was told when I studied Creative Advertising at Lincoln many moons ago. 

I arrived thinking I was there to ‘make ads’. I thought that’s what creative agencies did. Fair enough. I hadn’t yet learned to question the sandbox I was playing in.

‘Not quite,’ Gyles, my lecturer told me. Creative Agencies were places where clients went to leverage creativity for business impact.

Sometimes, we create ads to change feelings. But sometimes, we make the product more convenient or more interesting to buy. You might make it harder to buy if you want to drive demand. You might make the purchase environment more luxurious if you want to elevate brand perceptions.  

You may even change the product. After all, a bigger hole on a toothpaste tube makes for a product that is used faster and replaced sooner.

In the ultimate sense, it’s about ideas that matter, creatively and culturally - something people care about, and might talk about. But it also needs to matter commercially. 

As you move through your career, it helps to position yourself less as an Ad Person and more as a business partner for your clients - someone who can make a business case for creativity. 

I.e. ‘Will this do something for the business, that matters?’

It took a while to sink in. But the lecturers started beating this into my brain on the first day of ad school. 

But do I see the same when I look at the industry? Nowhere near as often as I’d like. 

I see people fawning over the beautiful cleanliness of print ads for products approaching irrelevance. Products sitting in categories which have been in serious decline for quite some time.

I appreciate a simple, beautiful poster as much as the next Creative. But when the approach is:

‘The answer’s a poster, now what’s the question?’

That’s when I get off the bus. And if that’s the attitude of an agency, it loses the right to complain if its new biz pipeline is drying up.

If the problem is the product or category themselves- as opposed to perception- a poster won’t do much besides validating some egos on LinkedIn.

Sure, it’s easy to comment from my armchair. Perhaps the teams behind these posters know something I don't. 

However, here’s the thing: The industry as a whole needs to have a long, hard think about how it positions itself. ‘Pretty Making’ feels like it's in the firing line of AI, and those wielding it.

But what AI can’t do, (or at least can’t do yet,) is orchestrate. AI can’t walk into a room full of smart people, identify the one problem that actually matters, and rally everyone to solve it.

That’s the real value of creative agencies: Human Orchestration.

It’s about focusing on the one problem that, if solved, will have the biggest impact on the business. And then using creativity as a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. A beautifully precise, strategic tool.

Sure, pretty ads are pretty. But let’s look at the business, the competitor set, the category, and the customer. Let’s look at things from 20,000 feet.

Are pretty ads still relevant once we’ve done that? Or are we admiring the paintwork on a sinking ship?

Nice posters are nice. But if they're not solving the real problem, if they're having little commercial impact, it feels like day one at Lincoln - before Gyles and Co had broken my brain and then rebuilt it.

It feels like ground zero.