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Tough truths for advertising in 2015.

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Ah! There you are. I trust the festivities were kind to you? But now, here's 2015 in all its fresh-faced glory. Swollen with potential and pitfalls, what will this new year bring? Frankly, I have no idea - but I do know there are a few troublesome boils the advertising business needs to lance before we go much further. Here are those pustules:

Social Media - Not The New Paradigm After All.

It all looked so exciting, didn't it? A fabulous new medium through which to engage the consumer with stupendous campaigns - and free to access, too! Yes, forget all that fusty old stuff, social media is the future. Or not. As usual, the truth is a bit more prosaic. Of course yer Twitter and yer Facebook have a part to play in any successful campaign, but broadcast and print remain very much in the mix and are likely to remain so. So, time to take a deep breath and calm down, social media hasn't turned the world upside-down after all.

Treating The Audience Like Children - Let's Stop That.

Television is the principal offender here. I'm not entirely sure how or why this has happened, but copywriters have taken it upon themselves to produce scripts which address fully grown adults as toddlers in a nursery. Just observe Halifax and their appalling 'well done you' campaign, patting the public on the head for doing their jobs well. Or Activia and Gok Wan talking about 'happy tummies'. We're infantilising and being infantalised;  unhealthy, unhelpful and should cease without delay.   

"You aren't even in the game without your own anthropomorphic mascot."

YouTube ads - Too Long.

Broadcast ads which the viewer can skip after five seconds - who'd buy them? Well, in the crazy old 21st century, just about every advertiser on earth. Any YouTube clip of interest is now preceded by an advertising spot, which indeed, can be swerved after the opening seconds. Naturally, that's exactly what most users do, thereby ensuring most of the message is lost. The obvious solution for the advertiser is to make the ad just five seconds long - but nobody seems to have twigged. A five second ad is a creative challenge, sure - but that's the only way to derive maximum value from YouTube. Time we returned to the 'blipvert', methinks.   

Cuddly Creatures Have Peaked.

2015 and those meerkats are still going strong. Good. I still believe the Compare The Market/Meerkat saga is one of the most entertaining and compelling campaigns in recent years. The trouble is, once it had taken off, every advertiser in the UK wanted their own. From Monty The Penguin to Neil The Sofa Sloth, in 2014 you weren't even in the game without your own anthropomorphic mascot. All good fun, but we've seen them all now. How about we leave the meerkats to it and encourage clients to look at more original concepts?

Posters Don't Win Elections.

It is highly amusing to see political parties discussing their pre-election advertising spend in terms of poster sites. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that our lords and masters are stuck in a 1980s creative ghetto, maybe the famous 'Labour Isn't Working' poster still burns so strongly in the memory, they can't see past it. Either way, it's 48 and 96 sheets all the way till early May. Doesn't say much for their thinking in other, more important, areas does it?

Happy New Year.   

Magnus Shaw is a blogger and copywriter.

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