Well, the worst happened. We are now officially living an era in communications in which to communicate has been forgotten and it's all about the cool for coolness sake.
I'm no expert, and I don't want to sound arrogant here, but the supposed best creatives of the world, those who make up the Grand Jury at Cannes, have decided (for all of us) that the Cadbury Gorilla from Fallon London is the best piece of communication made for film this year. The best. Along with Halo 3. There was a tie. But still, the best. Wow. Let me recap here, it's 60 seconds of a Gorilla playing the drums (I think I'm quoting myself from a previous post) to a Phil Collins song (the sarcastically best detail of the ad), and then the tag line says "a glass and a half full of joy". So there's no connection to the product, they are saying nothing. It doesn't communicate anything! And when we've come to a place when we don't do the one thing we are supposed to do in an ad, we are really fucked as an industry. You can be boring as hell, but you always have to communicate something. The best ads are those that communicate, and are fun, entertaining, relevant, memorable and innovative. But the first requirement is to communicate something.
This ad could have been a dancing bear and it wouldn't have mattered. It could have been for Sprite, and still the same. The same happened to a lot of this years print winners, awards are being given out to whatever is cool, no matter what the concept is. Hell, it doesn't matter if it even has a concept. There's clearly a big crisis in advertising these days. And the funniest thing of all is that the only ones not aware of it are those involved in advertising. While we are all padding ourselves in the back with our awards (which by the way no one cares about, not the client, not people), there's a world changing out there by the minute. And I hate to sound so old school in here, but this is about talking to people, not creatives, not advertisers. Communicate messages to people to make brands famous. That's it. Everything else comes extra. Awards are cool, they're actually awesome, and everybody loves them, plus, like it or not, they might be the only way to measure creativity. I agree to all that, but awards should be part of the process and not the end of it. I hate to hear "this agency is client driven... Oh, these guys are really creative driven... Such and such agency is strategy driven..." Bullshit. Who is consumer driven? I hate that word, let's say, people driven? Who cares about not what the client says, not what award shows say, but what people really like and want. And it's not about giving them the power or doing entirely what they say, we're supposed to be the experts here, but it's about stopping to patronize them and begin an engaging communication process.
These will illustrate my point better.
The saddest thing of all is to see so many agencies doing ghost ads to win awards. And the worst thing is that there's people who think that this is fair and OK. I just had a recent discussion about this with a co-worker and they said that it was the only way of getting around the client, and the only way of doing good creative work. If this is the way the future generations of the business think we're in deep shit. It's an ethical thing, but the problem is that no one seems to think they are wrong when producing them, but everyone thinks they're wrong when inquired about their ethical nature. Sad thing is, big agencies, small agencies, good and bad and even the best do ghost ads. There's a handful of agencies that believe that the nature of this business is to communicate to people, and if a piece is not created for that purpose then there's no reason for it to live. Even if the client is stupid and the idea was the best one ever, they won't do it. Everyone deals with bad clients, everyone has to get around them. So the problem is that when in an award show a ghost ad wins, an ad that didn't have to go through every filter of the process, it's leaving out other ads that had to, and those have more merit. Ghost ads are the easy way out. If every agency did them, then we'd all have tons of awards. But that's not the point, is it?
The bottom line is we have to wake up as an industry. It's not that there is a creative crisis these days, it's that we're blind. There's more tools towards creativity now more than ever, more ways to communicate, and I really have to say that most of the web and interactive work awarded these days is really good, awesome in some cases. We only have to open our eyes and stop being so arrogant and self indulgent. We have to stop talking to ourselves and start connecting with people. Stop thinking that a complicated print ad is cool and arty because "you have to really work it to get it". This is not art. Disappointing to many but it's the truth. This is communication, and when art may be included into it, great. But communicating is more important. Let's see how long it takes us to wake up as an industry because we've been asleep for a while.
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