Where's All The Originality?

The human condition is to survive. That is true of all human endeavours. How can we last longer? Flourish? Get by? How can we be better than that which came before?

This dates back to the earliest known human, so let’s call that 2.8 million years ago. How to hunt, keep warm, remain sheltered. How to make their brand the 'go to brand'? I imagine there was someone selling the hide of some poor beast, recently perished, and along came another person who thought "hang on, there’s something to this but what if I sell my wears a little nearer the Jones’s as they seem to be doing well?" And thus marketing began. That is really how it happened. 

Originality is difficult to achieve. With every passing year the creative industry changes. I look at my younger siblings aged 30, 26, 23, 21 and 16… these all represent a variety of target audiences. To see how they engage with commercial activity is to understand that adverts don’t have an impact on us as they once did. 

The information above isn’t groundbreaking news. It won’t make you put down your tools, remove your clothes and wade into the nearest water reserve declaring the rest of the week a holiday. What it's saying is that the evolving nature of our business is like no other. Tech and media, so often intertwined, are liquid subjects, where continuous movement is required. Static businesses become consumed by the increasingly intelligent and forward thinking ideas that develop in their shadow. 

So when we are approached by client A who have their own client, client B, wanting to emulate what competitor C is doing due to the unmitigated success of campaign D, we long for client A to say something like, "let’s do something entirely different", and not, "let’s do something i-fucking-dentical". Aside from the creative industry being both small and incestuous, your work will become ridiculed, your reputation tarnished. 

I am guilty of a fondness for the past. This isn’t a bad thing, and it isn’t related to how we work. I just happen to have a predilection toward reminiscence. When I look at the standard of commercial advertising, the above the line, big budget work, there is a yearning for the likes of Guinness 'Surfer', Levi’s (pick any from the '80s and early '90s), Nike 'Parklife', Honda 'The Cog' and Tango 'Slap'. But why? I know full well that those commercials were magnificent because of the time they were launched. They are very much of their time, and would almost certainly have less impact now than they did then. 

There are, without question, many good TV commercials but so much of the great creative is designated for online ‘branded content’. The list is astonishing; my personal favourite remains Under Armour’s Michael Phelps campaign, which really did feel original despite it having numerous images that we’d seen previously. It was indefinable in its quality.

We, as production companies, have a limited scope to what we can provide when it comes to originality. We want, desperately, to shoot something that beats the dreaded “Skip This Ad” but in order for us to do that, there simply must be the pedigree from clients A and B to allow us the opportunity to create something that has not just ‘survival' printed all over it but ‘big fucking shark - top of the food chain’ stamped all over it.

Dan Mallerman is Head of New Business at Kode