Why the Ad Industry Needs a Cold Shower

“The ALS Ice Bucket should win a Grand Prix at Cannes”. The quote of last week’s Spikes festival in Singapore? Well, Graham Fink’s proclamation during his ‘Baozi Baozi Baozi’ seminar was certainly up there as a moment of clarity, a rallying call for the advertising industry to regain its sense of purpose. After all most creative can only dream of the level of exposure and engagement raised by this deceptively silly trend. But even if it’s the sort of thing that the industry should do, the question remains: could it? 

Across many of the senior figures who spoke at Spikes, there seemed to be a prevailing feeling that somehow the industry might be losing its way a little.  Fearfulness, obsession over all the wrong trends, intimidation from the Google giants and the unstoppable acceleration of technological change – with such a cloud of confusion it’s no wonder that people are losing a little focus. 

So what’s the answer? For Ogilvy’s Fink, it’s all about nurturing creative bravery and learning from the greats. For AKQA’s Rei Inamoto, who questioned the industry’s ‘identity crisis’, the answer lies in ‘endurance’ and looking outside of the industry to learn about creating ideas that last. And for DDB’s Amir Kassaei, the guiding star is the concept of relevance. While shiny trinkets like ‘storytelling’, ‘content creation’ and ‘big data’ are distracting many, he argues that the very purpose of the industry is to keep clients ‘relevant’.

That’s not to say that there are not lots of exciting things going on in the industry right now – the quality of work in the shortlists at Spikes was high this year (and if you haven’t checked it out, I urge you to check out the winners on the Spikes Asia site while they’re still up). But did anything have the broad cultural impact of this summer’s ice bucket extravaganza? Of course bigger isn’t always better and some clients require something small but perfectly formed. But there’s undeniably something of the Saatchis’ ‘brutal simplicity of thought’ in the idea of upending a binful of ice water on your head and daring your mates to do the same.

As far as Fink is concerned it’s just the sort of idea that would get shut down by the layers of bureaucracy and research and committees that plague the contemporary ad industry. “I didn’t do it but I wish I had done it,” he confessed to me after his talk. “I think it’s great – it does the three things we should be doing. People are talking about it, it changed their behaviour and it started a trend, and that’s what I love about it. I forgot to mention it on stage, but if it was in a focus group, suppose they’d researched it, they would have said ‘people are dying here and you’re having fun, it’s taking the piss, you’re pouring water over people’s heads! All you’ve got to happen is for a kid to do it and get pneumonia and die!’ You can take any great idea and I could give you ten reasons it should have run.”

So, just putting it out there – if the industry is feeling a little foggy maybe the best thing to do is to bring back cold showers?