It’s that time of the year again, when the world’s advertising industry flocks to Cannes to bask in the sunshine that the French Riviera offers as well as in the limelight of international awards for creativity. And as I had written last year, this year too Cannes seems to revolve around AI and more AI, from what I see of conversations on CNBC and on LinkedIn. I think this excessive focus on technology is symptomatic of the larger problem that confronts the entire advertising industry more generally.
That technology had disrupted the advertising and marketing industries was known to us a couple of decades ago. But the extent of disruption and the damage wreaked by it on brands and brand communications is still unfolding, it appears. We have allowed ourselves to be completely blindsided by the tech phenomenon without seriously considering what it is doing to advertising and other communication disciplines that help to sell and build our clients’ brands. The warning signs have been flashing for two decades and yet nobody in the advertising industry or indeed in marketing is questioning what is going on and how all this technology is impacting the world of communications and marketing.
I have been writing on my blog about what I think is the problem with digital media and communications and the direction that it can instead take, so that it also helps build brands besides acting like a sales funnel. But this is not even a fraction of the despair and displeasure I feel when I see the kind of advertising that makes its way to our TV screens and newspapers as well as digital media. Considering I have been out of active work in the industry since unprofessional circus-like organisations wrecked my career decades ago – though they still have the temerity to interfere with my work, life, family and friends on a daily basis – I wonder what it would be like to be back working in an advertising agency once again. I also often wonder what kind of marketing teams at the clients’ offices initiate and approve such work, even if some young enthusiastic advertising agency team came up with the idea.
Then again, I am not surprised. Having been a writer myself for decades in the advertising industry in India – through which I also got a chance to hone my strategy skills – I know only too well that one of the problems with the advertising industry is that we follow marketing, which resides in client organisations’ offices. Very few advertising agency leaders have what it takes to speak to heads of companies as equals and inspire enough confidence to get them to listen to them. This is where, of course, we lose out to management consultancies who have an audience with company CEOs whenever they wish.
And my observations of marketing folks are not very much better, in that they are completely swept up in the digital wave. In fact, they are responsible for bifurcating the world of communications into brand and digital. Though to their credit, they are at least able to see that the two are separate and divorced from each other. Yet, the compulsions of having to sell and meet targets in the short term is so overwhelming and well-answered by digital that marketing folks couldn’t care less about anything else. Not even brands. Advertising agencies have been happy to follow marketing folks and clients wherever they lead.
In this context, I must mention a snazzy new term I came across recently on LinkedIn: fractional CMOs. They do exactly what the term says; acting as freelance marketing officers, they advise and help client organisations with their marketing efforts. I am assuming from their freelancing role, that they can’t possibly decide marketing plans or budgets, only advise and guide. If any of this is true, they are filling the need for management consultants on the cheap. I am not sure this is the same as retired advertising and marketing bosses becoming consultants, which has certainly been around in India a long time. Either way, this is another business opportunity advertising agencies are missing out on.
What next? Fractional CEOs? I know some folks in the industry who would justify being called this, based on their contribution to work and their leadership. Owner/entrepreneur types who must be taking home hefty pay packages but pay their employees poorly.
Then, there are “outsiders” and these constitute the largest group of all kinds of businesses who are neither from advertising nor from marketing. But they are busy providing a host of services that are ancillary to the advertising and marketing industry. PR firms, event management companies, celebrity and talent management companies, digital marketing companies, content creation companies and finally, the big management consultancies. All of them want a piece of the action and all of them think they have the solution. It’s another matter that many of them are led by people who are not from advertising or marketing and know precious little about the business and how it operates. Yet, they have ambitions as inflated as their egos as well as greed for money and power, but scarcely any of the knowledge, skill sets and competencies as well as the experience it takes to guide and lead a brand-development effort in these complex times.
Things have gotten so weird and ridiculous in the advertising and marketing industry that I am most surprised that the advertising industry bodies in India as well as marketing and management associations haven’t cared to deal with any of these burning issues facing the industries. It is nothing short of an existential crisis, in my opinion.
Let me highlight just a few of the bizarre ways in which advertising and marketing are being upended.
Brands are no longer understood as the relationship between a product or company and its consumers. They are deliberately and mischievously understood only in the “personal” brand sense, ie, celebrity or social media influencer, and this is almost always linked to the person’s physical appearance most of all. This concept has been propagated deliberately in recent years by unprofessional PR agencies and some advertising agencies to pander to unprofessional elements in the industry who are sexist and objectify women.
These people will have you believe that advertising is not the business of building brands but of selling products. And the best way to achieve this is through perpetual discounts and sales, all the time and through the year. I have been seeing this happen with so many well-known brands in India, including Titan, that I wonder if all their brand value hasn’t been eroded already.
Such circus organisations who have tried hijacking the entire industry – along with my life, work and career – also think that brand or advertising strategy is not for women. It involves numbers, you see, and therefore to be a strategist or a planner you need to be a mathematician or a statistician! It is not about consumer insights and about connecting product brands and companies with their consumers. Sure, there is research and data analysis involved – most of which is done by professional market research companies – but what’s more important to my mind is what data and what we are seeking to find about consumers. They take this same poor logic further and assert that marketing itself is not for women. And most of this mischief is connected with their turning women into men and vice-versa.
Such unprofessional circuses also think that advertising and brand communications is more about design, visual appeal and colours. Don’t even get me started on their stupidity with colour-coding; you may read a blog post that I wrote over a year ago, on this subject alone, if you wish.
There is also a view that advertising has to be broken down by medium; some people write print adverts, others do film, and so on. This level of atomization and specialization of creative work is absolute nonsense. In the years that my generation worked in the industry, we had no choice between types of advertising by medium; we had to work on all of it, period. In my case, I even got to work on other communication disciplines such as direct marketing, sitting in Ogilvy Advertising Delhi and interacted a lot with Ogilvy PR as well.
Another recent problem is of misleading adverts where we also have a Supreme Court ruling about advertisers having to self-certify that their adverts contain no misleading information, if newspaper reports are to be believed. With all respect to the SC, I don’t think this is any solution to the problem of misleading adverts. For decades, these had been dealt with at the ASCI (Advertising Standards Council of India) level which, as a self-regulatory body would advise pulling the advert and making amends. As a tougher measure we perhaps need stricter laws regarding misleading advertising, with penalties of an order high enough to ensure deterrence.
My reservation against this declaration or certification besides the obvious one of it increasing paperwork, red tape and bureaucracy is a more philosophical one. The industry and all of business operates on good faith and the principle that such errant cases are rare and are to be treated as exceptions. By mandating such a declaration, are we not treating such offences as if they were the norm, where the onus of declaring that an advert is factually correct is now on the advertiser and agency?
I would think that bringing back the key number (name of advertising agency creating the advert that appears in fine print in one corner of the print advert) would be a good idea, in terms of helping identify the agency behind the work. A similar identifier can be worked out for TV, video and digital adverts.
The advertising industry needs to give this more thought and prepare its formal and detailed response to the ruling and recommend a better course of action to deal with such offences.
Returning to the subject of the Cannes Awards, I am once again disappointed by the kind of work that is making news and winning awards. This, even if Ogilvy and WPP are some of the biggest winners, so far. I find that so much of the work that is being entered and winning isn’t even advertising. Most of it are activation and social media ideas, or marketing ideas. It isn’t advertising and it also isn’t Cannes. Cannes always awarded advertising for creative excellence and it was mainly on the basis of the creative idea. I always thought that the CeraVé work was awful from the start as a marketing idea and product right through to the communication for it. Then, I don’t see how Ogilvy’s work for Verizon which features Beyoncé, Can’t Be Broken, is advertising. It too is probably mischief from guessing that I had written an email to an old friend of mine in Paris, Dilip Subramanian, more than a decade ago that unprofessional idiots have wrecked my career and are trying their best to break me as a person, but they can’t break my spirit. And at the same time also mischief to make me someone else, like Sarada, my former colleague at Ogilvy Delhi, if not my younger sister, Bhavani Sundaram, or even my aged father!
I was never a big fan of awards, though it is an important motivator for creative folks. That said, when I see work like this being created, getting approved, running if only once just to be able to enter the awards and finally winning it, I wonder what we are celebrating. Mediocrity, surely. Gone are the days when advertising that won at Cannes had a truly simple and brilliant idea, often didn’t even need understanding the language to cross borders, and communicated the consumer benefit with memorable impact. The fault is not just with advertising and marketing. The rot has spread to Cannes and other awards as well I suspect, what with their increasing the numbers and kinds of categories for entries in a bid to make more money. Cannes entries are terribly expensive, I would think.
As if all this weren’t bad enough, I saw a post from WARC – who I follow on LinkedIn – regarding a podcast they did with Mark Ritson who is a marketing professor in Melbourne if I am not mistaken and also writes regularly for Marketing Week, about a session that he was doing at Cannes this year titled Creativity is Not Enough. I listened to the podcast and I suggest readers listen to it as well. I am shocked to know that there are attempts now being made to change Cannes into marketing effectiveness awards or perhaps even business strategy awards! This seems to be what Mark Ritson is recommending to WARC, and for those who are not aware of this, Cannes Advertising Awards is now owned by the same people who have also acquired WARC, which used to belong to WPP. A company called Ascential about whom you must read the book, Frenemies, by Ken Auletta if you wish to know more. Which is why Mark Ritson thinks that Cannes has been celebrating creativity only for the past ten years, which ought to coincide with Ascential acquiring it. I think both Cannes and WARC have been diminished and ruined by folks at Ascential who obviously don’t understand anything about advertising or marketing or business strategy.
All these are signs of decay in the world of advertising and marketing that tell us that we have got to stop congratulating ourselves and focus on what is required of the industry. To create advertising and brand communication that helps build our clients’ brands and their businesses in the finest way possible. I think we also need to bring the industry focus back to the teams, their competence and skills as well as their remuneration, which of course links back to the advertising agencies’ remuneration structure about which I wrote a blog post not too long ago. In clients pressuring agencies to deliver more for less, agencies are losing out on hiring better talent and are going for youth over experience, knowledge and skills.
I am, of course, writing this entire piece from the India perspective, but I doubt the problems and challenges are any different the world over. It is time for the advertising and marketing industries to address these issues urgently. At the rate at which technology is progressing – which seems to be the only thing we are responding to – we might find it hard to catch up.
It is also time for the real, seasoned industry practitioners to please stand up, speak up and make yourself count through the right kind of concerted actions and interventions. And not allow outsiders, impostors, pretenders, wannabes and other craven unprofessional idiots to interfere or influence the industry, with their ignorance and their unscrupulous work ethic. The future of these industries and the careers of millions of youngsters depend on this. The future of businesses and brands depend on this.
Postscript: In the context of reviving the old system of key numbers for print adverts, I must mention this. While writing and scheduling this post, I remembered seeing an advert in the Times of India Goa edition as well as Economic Times Goa-Mumbai edition on the same day in June 2024, for Taj Hotels. It was a full page advert – more a poster than an advert – as you can see and it carried the key number of rediffusion.in
I suspect this is mischief after reading my blog post with my brand strategy and ideas for Taj Hotels, in which I mentioned the last brand campaign for Taj being done by Rediffusion, which used to be Rediffusion-DY&R in those days. I had read that they had parted ways with Dentsu, but that they are not part of the Young & Rubicam network either which in turn is part of the WPP Group, is news to me.
Rediff is not an advertising agency I have ever worked for, but it shows how long I have been out of the industry, I suppose! Anyway, the industry must guard itself against this kind of mischief with adverts and key numbers. In this case, the advert is stupid with some “moment” nonsense once again and is certainly not the Taj brand, and I think the same unprofessional PR agency idiot bosses are behind this.
Peripatetic Perch 