So advertising is dead.  Everyone says so.  In its place, we’ll use banner ads, email marketing, product placement, that kind of thing.  The 30 second spot?  Oh, that’s dead as John Cleese’s parrot. 

Right?  Well maybe.  Me, I think the argument is deeply mistaken.  I believe that nothing manufactures brand meanings like a 30 second spot. 

But I am beginning to think that I am the only one who takes this position.  From the agency world itself, we hear not a peep.  Well, there was Lovemarks, from the head of Saatchi and Saatchi, but this was a book so bad that it almost made me wish that talk of the death of advertising were true. 

Otherwise, all is quiet.

Could it be that the ad world suffers a state of paralysis?  Is it mesmerized by the new marketing and now helpless in its path.  Will MadAve go quietly?

This doesn’t seem very plausible on its face. The ad biz is nothing if not "snappy with the come-backs."  This profession is well stocked with conceptual and expressive gifts.  It is occupied by people who can perform a 180 degree course correction, reinventing the entire logic of the pitch, in the 5 seconds it takes them to register "the client is not happy."  Capitalism has a secret company of improv players, and one day many of these subversives will prove to have been on the payroll of Madison Avenue.

No, I think the problem goes deeper than this, straight into the heart of the industry and the most adaptive of its adaptive strategies.   The first ethnographic work I did in Detroit was for an advertising agency.  An  agency guy saw what we were doing as particularly "new wave" and he regaled me with stories about the old days

In the 1950s, apparently, the agency had a favorite technique for managing the client.  It would go out and hire someone who was quite a lot like the client.  Actually, they sought a match so close, the effect was sometimes chilling.  The agency guy would just happen to like the same movies, the same sports teams, the same Vegas hangouts as the client.  He would kind of look like the client, talk like the client, and dress like the client.  In fact, in some cases, it was difficult to tell the difference between tweedle dum and tweedle dee, all the better to persuade Pontiac (or some other GM account) to sign those breath taking cheques and leave the agency alone. 

Call it a doppelganger strategy.  The 50s version was the most exaggerated form.  But I believe this strategy is with us still.  I believe the advertising world long ago committed itself to having no idea of what is was and what it did.  Surely, this was the smart thing to do.  I mean, if an agency insisted it used the Aaker model of advertising, well, what would happen if a client appeared who was particularly anti-aaker (I mean, of course, Aanti-Aaker)?  Surely, specificity was a bad idea.  The industry decided that on balance a clear idea of advertising would always cost an agency more than it gained it.  Oh, I don’t mean to say that there weren’t tendencies in the ad world.  Leo Burnett was always going to be seen as more "x" and J. Walter Thompson more "y," but, on balance, the industry conspired to create a code of silence on precisely what it was and what it did.  This was the smart, the adaptive, thing to do. 

This sort of thing costs you, I believe, in the long term.  Being all things to all people creates a certain imprecision of self definition.  After awhile, it’s hard to know who you are.  In the day to day, this doesn’t matter very much.  The prevailing notion seems to be, "What does it matter what they call us, as long as we just get paid?"  Everyone harbors the idea that one of these days, if we wanted to do, we could just sit down and sort this out. 

But neglected ideas have a way of disappearing.  Some, the head strong ones, will away in the night.  Others, heart strong, wither and die, proving not so heart strong at all.  And I think that’s where we find the industry.  Now that there is a crisis upon us, now that there is a paradigm shift under way, now that the industry is facing the disintermediation that has destroyed once mighty industries and brands, it proves to be too late.  The cupboard is bare. 

Sir Martin Sorrell once made the sly remark that the "interactive marketing is more measurable than traditional advertising–so its more pleasurable for the decision makers."  And I think this means we are entering really perilous waters.  We know, or I think we know, that much of the best work by the agency world would never have happened if advertising had always occupied a measurable world.  Sure as shooting, the client would have measured the wrong things, leapt to the wrong conclusions, and otherwise mangled the creative opportunity without shame or apology.  (The creative director with whom I worked in Detroit told me, "If I let the client get away with it, every single ad would be about engine specs and turning ratios!")

It’s as if the advertising world has been too fluid, too adaptive, too flexible and now that it is called upon to give an account of itself, it dithers.  "Don’t tell me. I know this one.  Umm.  Oh, damn."  As long as the client had no options, we could pull a "St. Augustine" on them: "do not seek to understand that you may believe but believe than you may understand" aka "just give us the money, and we’ll look after it."  But now that there is competition, there’s trouble.

There is a darker possibility here.  It may be that the advertising world wasn’t merely withholding clear and coherent ideas of what it was.  It may be that it never had these ideas in the first place or long ago ceased to believe in them.  Perhaps there was a creeping dread that there was no value here, that the whole thing was just a lark, a way to pry money out of clients, amusing one another, attending those endless award ceremonies, and dining often and richly on someone else’s account.  Some may have believed secretly that the cupboard was always thus.

I hope I’m wrong.  Perhaps Sir Martin Sorrell has a blistering manuscript in his desk drawer that will throw off the cloak of the shapeshifter, renounce the ways of the doppelganger, and make the case.   Maybe the ad biz isn’t dead after all.  Yeah, that’s it.  Maybe, as Mr. Praline would say, it’s just stunned. 

References

Cleese, John et al.  n.d. The Dead Parrot Sketch. here.

McCracken, Grant.  2006. Lovemark.  This Blog Sits at… Februrary 24, 2006. here.

McCracken, Grant. 2005.  When Cars Could Fly: Raymond Loewy, John Kenneth Galbraith, and the 1954 Buick.  Culture and Consumption II: marketings, meanings and brand management.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 53-90.  (for one of the accomplishments of the advertising world in the 1950s)

Sorrell, Sir Martin.  Patricia Sellers Interviews…  The Hidden Persuader.  January 27, 2004. here.

When Peter Sealey, then VP of marketing at the Coca-Cola Company, decided he wanted Coke ads made by big-time Hollywood directors, someone had to tell him that you don’t tell Martin Scorsese to reshoot something because "I can’t see the label."  No, apparently, what you say is, "Thank you, Mr. Scorsece, that was great."

I thought of this during the Oscars when AMEX launched their ad by M. Night Shyamalan.   It’s set in a restaurant.  Shyamalan, playing himself with real cunning and some restraint, sits by himself at a table.  As the camera pans past him we hear a "the joke’s on you" laugh coming from someone who has just glimpsed the possibility the joke’s on them.  This emerging note of panic is a perfect prelude to what follows.

What follows is a mother and son who look alike, a baby carriage that comes to stop before almost motionless couple, and a man who scalds himself with a touch.

The camera finds a couple who doing that thing that couples sometimes do in restaurants: have a humdinger of an argument sotto voce.  It sounds as if the man is saying, furiously, "If I don’t understand a movie, I just stand up and walk out, I don’t care."  Ah.

Then the man begins to choke.  He looks to his wife for help.  She returns his gaze with truck stop malevolence, and then looks across the restaurant at Shyamalan with…complicity, compliance, dull acknowledgment?  We can’t tell. 

A waitress drops a couple of empty glasses from her tray.  People standing around tables suddenly disappear.  We understand that these people must have been ghosts because their departure goes unnoticed. 

A diner engaged in the most banal conversation plucks a fly out of the air with her tongue. 

Then the camera approaches a table with three guys in cowls.  One of them loses his hood as a waitress passes.  When he brings his hand up to replace the hood, we see that his forearm is tattooed with occult symbols. I have no clue what is intended here, but I came to think of these three as the monks of the apocalypse.  I happen to know that this is not the sort of clientele a restaurant normally encourages. 

Then a pretty, young waitress approaches:

"Mr. Shyamalan, I love your movies, I’ve seen every single one of them.  Like in the 6th Sense …"  A deluge ensues including the charming line, "the village, first of all, I love everyone’s shoes…"  Shyamalan ducks away from this witless chatter.  He doesn’t have to look at her.  This is not a conversation.  It’s a recitation…not quite as odd as the other things that have happened here, but something else that’s, well, essentially mysterious.   

Then we here Shyamalan’s voice over: "My life is about finding time to dream, that’s why my card is American Express."  And now we see Shyamalan entering the restaurant.  A flurry of questions arise:  Was this not Shyamalan we saw in the first place?  Was this ad our moment of prescience?  And with his line ringing in our ears, we wonder "is this restaurant a place he will find time to dream?  Are these visions the dreams he looks for, or invasions that keep him from dreaming?  Or is the real problem chatty waitresses?" 

Notice two things.  This ad is riddled with indeterminacy, and in the presence of this indeterminacy, I start making stuff up. 

Indeterminacy used to be a "no-fly" zone in popular culture.  I was actually there when Warren Beatty confronted Robert Altman about the opening moments of McCabe and Mrs. Miller.  Altman wanted all the voices at once.  Beatty wanted one voice at a time.  It was one of those "all voices at once" conversations, I can tell you.  Actually, there was quite a lot of shouting. 

So here we are almost 20 years after Sealey’s reign at the Coca-Cola Company, and things have changed most markedly.  Now American Express reaches out to a director, and the marketing team knows he will make an ad that’s hard to follow.  They give him, um, a blank check with the clear knowledge that he might even make fun of people who get angry when they can’t follow a movie or an ad. 

What happened?  We grew to love indeterminacy, meanings that withhold themselves, ideas that can’t be thought very easily, emotions threatened to damage the instrument of feeling.  Popular culture has moved on.  On Oscar night, for instance, Robert Altman gets a life time achievement award while Warren Beatty settles into a hard earned, well deserved obscurity. 

Marketing, thanks to this kind of work, is perhaps now catching up.  In the words of Diego Scotti, VP of global advertising at AmEx, New York,

Maybe you don’t need to be so loud and obvious to capture consumer attention.  When you go quieter, with longer takes, you break through more. 

They certainly have mine.  If we are sincere when we talk about cocreation, this, clearly, is one of our best methods.  When we unleash indeterminacy, consumers will rush in to make things up, including our messages and our brands.

References

Frook, John Evan.  "Always" Intact Amid Coke Shake.  Variety.  July 22, 1993. here.

Solman, Gregory.  2006.  GM tops at Oscars.  Adweek.  March 6, 2006. here.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to IF and PFSK for the head’s up here.