Woolley Ideas: When Perfect is the Enemy of Progress

The latest controversy over the AI-generated Coca-Cola Christmas television commercial is another example of the advertising industry clinging to a belief of being perfect in a world that is anything but.

According to the industry, the execution is creepy. However, according to the people at System1, consumers see nothing weird about it. In fact, they love it, just as they loved the originals. Some industry critics have been quick to point out numerous signs that this execution lacks humanity in the storytelling.

There was a time when advertising, and particularly production, were crafts. They were lovingly lingered over, finessed, and nurtured to deliver incremental improvement toward perfection. Many industry commentators believe that the quality and obvious expense of advertising signal to consumers the brand's confidence in the premium quality it delivers.

This may be true when broadcast across the big screen of the lounge room, cinema, or enormous out-of-home digital billboard. But so much of what passes for the product of the advertising agency is now consumed on the much smaller screen of the laptop, tablet, and even the tiny screen of the smartphone.

It is not just the physical dimensions of advertising that make me question this relentless pursuit of perfection, but also its durability. While consumer insight-driven ideas can last, advertising executions are increasingly becoming consumables. Once, we joked that today’s newspaper would be tomorrow’s chip wrappers. Today’s social media execution is simply an iteration of an exercise in multivariant testing to see which creative combination will drive more clicks or leads to the website.

The speed of the algorithm and the media news cycle often means you have only hours to capture attention before the next beat or news cycle begins.

The impact of this can be seen in the exploding and bloated agency scopes of work, which have increased more than tenfold over the past two decades. In contrast, agency fees, creative resources, and production costs have, at best, remained stagnant and, at worst, gone backwards.

The days of the big brand ad that would run across the media for a year or more have been reduced to an initial blast on broadcast television and then guest appearances on various social media platforms before settling into retirement on YouTube, only to be seen on agency and production reels during a pitch.

Advertising no longer sits between the content people are interested in; it is in the content they are interested in. It must now compete more than ever for the audience’s attention because it is simply a swipe away from the next piece of content.

While thinking, strategy, and creative ideas can still be longer-term in their best iterations, we have entered an era of fast execution, as the rag trade embraced fast fashion. The evidence is in the rise of the influencer and the creator and the explosion of user-generated content (UGC).

In the same way that the advertising industry criticises the AI-created Coca-Cola Christmas ad, it belittles the ‘quality’ of the content created by influencers and creators, making UGC feel like a massive insult. Yet, this is precisely the content their beautifully crafted and meticulously curated advertising competes and is regularly found wanting.

But the audience has changed. Yes, no one is interested in advertising, but everyone engages in what interests them. Social media provides them with an interesting diet that is new, different, and exciting. But more importantly, it puts them in control. Influencers and content creators build followers and communities by learning what interests them and what does not. This means making content that is engaging and making it fast and fresh.

Sure, there is time to tweak it, but not the time it takes to finesse and nurture the idea to an industry-award standard. Besides, if it doesn’t attract the engagement and attention you need, another one is coming right along behind it.

But what does this mean for the advertising industry? There is always a desperate need for an idea that interests the audience. But increasingly, you need to find ways to execute this in a way that is fast, cheap and good. And before you tell me I can only have any two of these, please explain how all that other online content gets made.