Turning advertising into an art

According to Al Ries, brands are built because people tell other people about products or services. Word of mouth. The power of word of mouth is the power that no amount of advertising money can buy- - the credibility of independent opinion. Everyone knows (although the ad industry doesn’t admit to it) that an ad is nothing but an attempt to sell, and therefore will not be very truthful about the negative, but very generous in describing the positive of the product or serviced, and therefore everyone takes ads in with a pinch of salt.

By Jayantha P. Sittampalam, Managing Director
Cameron Pale & Medina, Communications Group

(An independent opinion regarding the Chillies Ad Awards and a book review of Al Ries’ Fall of Advertising & Rise of PR)
After decades of complaining about how badly marketers had judged their work the advertising industry finally decided to organise an award programme to recognize creativity in advertising.

This initiative jointly organised by the 4As and the IAA was hailed as a singular success of the ad industry, which had been riddled with divisive politics back stabbing, and disunity as to make it the oft-cited example of what an industry should make every effort to avoid.

However, all that is in the past. The first Chillie Awards show held last year united the ad industry as nothing else had.

There was so much unity and festivity packed into the awards show that it took forever to end. For all that, it was grand and advertising was judged purely on creative criteria unlike the earlier SLIM awards, which paid heed to effectiveness or the impact the ad had in the market as an essential criterion.

So finally we have an advertising awards programme that judges advertising on its most telling feature- creativity. Or is creativity the most telling feature? This may sound like blasphemy to the faithful, but what really is the relevance of creativity in advertising?

Like curtains and crockery, an ad too has its practical use and aesthetic form. But if one was to judge crockery for its design and ignore its utility value, then one would have to expect plates truly beautiful but utterly useless -for anything other than as displays of art to be placed on walls and showcases.

Is the ad industry standing up as one to demand this fate for its product? By insisting on judging advertising purely for its creativity are we hastening the process of turning advertising in to art?

Al Ries believes it has already begun. If you remember Al Ries is the guru along with Jack Trout, who came up with the whole positioning idea in marketing over 35 years ago. The ad industry thrived on that idea, because it supported and legitimised the concept of occupying a place in the consumers’ mind. Positioning gave advertising creativity a reason to live, and now the same man says advertising is irrelevant, an art form? How could the same man now attempt to dig advertising’s grave?

Interestingly in his book The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, he details the reasoning behind his conviction that advertising is now an art form. `Before the printed book’, he says, `poetry was used to pass along stories from one generation to the next. It’s much easier to remember a story in rhyme than one in prose and retell it to others. …before photography, painting was used to communicate the likenesses of kings and queens, princes and princesses throughout the kingdom. Before the age of photography, artists invariably painted in a realistic style. He points out that when they lost their functional purpose they became art forms. The point he is making is that once advertising loses its function it too must become art.

In fact, ad agency creative people ( I am one of them) have rightly felt that effectiveness is difficult to judge from the ad alone, since so many other factors impact sales.

Such issues as the products’ availability, salesman’s training, pricing and packing will have to be either equal in all cases or there must be some equalising method to realistically judge effectiveness of ads. Unfortunately, there is no such method and therefore the effectiveness awards will always be a judgement of overall effectiveness and not that of advertising alone.

The book, a compelling read for anyone in marketing, spells out many ways in which advertising displays all the signs of having become an art form. Indeed, recent ads have increasingly become displays of creative talent. Popular fast moving consumer goods (FMCGs) advertised regularly attempt to make such ads interesting. Ad agencies now must find new and novel ways to interest and entertain consumers – with the same basic story of the brand. Voila! Advertising’s function has become the same as art – to interest and entertain, tell a story well.

This is however not true of all advertising. For instance in the medical field and for engineering industries, advertising communicates complicated professional information with simplicity and grace. Yet even in these cases, an ad cannot be held solely or partially responsible for sales, because, the purchase process has so many other aspects that have an impact on sales. Admittedly, then, sales cannot directly be linked to advertising. It does serve a purpose in reminding people of the existence of and satisfaction the product provides, but it has no connection to sales increases or higher profitability.

Al Ries goes further putting forward the view that advertising has only limited use and that PR is now the more powerful tool in the marketers hand. He presents case after case of how brands were built with no advertising at all. Not little regional brands, but international giants like Red Bull and Body Shop, Microsoft Starbucks Coffee, Amazon, Google and eBay. When you think about it he’s right. The first Microsoft ad I saw was after they’d gone public. I’ve never seen a TV or press ad for Google, eBay or Amazon, but I know much about them.

Al Ries’ point is that advertising can sustain a product message over the long term, to reaffirm the brands’ position and promise but advertising has very little power to make a successful launch of a brand, because it lacks credibility.

Making them creative is to make it even less believable because the condition of being creative inevitably demands that it be new and different. Considering that advertising already suffers from a credibility problem, making it new and different only makes it even less believable.

To win an award for making it even less believable is like winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine for having made Cancer spread even faster – a privilege that Cameron believes it can do without.

The answer is for ads not to attempt at creativity but at sustaining a position that already has credibility. Unfortunately, this does not give much room for creativity except in the method of presentation. You can’t change the story but you can make it interesting in the telling.

Ads that express what we already believe about the product, not some new and insanely innovative expression that the public must strain to find out invariably connects with the public. But they have no place at creative award ceremonies.

Al Ries expresses the opinion that the right place for creativity is in PR. It is at the time of launching a product that PR has the greatest impact and it’s news only if it’s new and different.

Al Ries cautions companies against launching new brands with advertising, and advocates the use of PR. There’s logic to his view, considering that PR goes in the news, and a new brand coming to life is news. Naturally, the public will be suspicious of a brand that is new, and gloriously satisfying (judging by the advertising), but one about which no one has heard, especially the media. Credibility belongs to the independence of the media, and for that reason the media wields a greater influence on the public’s perception of brands.

The sensible thing to do is to launch the product in the media, give people and the media time to form an opinion – a favourable one, hopefully, - and then launch the advertising capitalising on that favourable public opinion. Book marketers have been doing this for years, using the credibility of highly respected authors, experts and academics as well as newspaper reviewers to write of the book in magazines, book reviews, covers and even in the advertising. Oprah Winfrey, for instance, and her Book Club has exhibited the power to make an author an overnight success.

The book is an interesting and though provoking read which, if one is to judge by what happened the last time Al Ries had a revolutionary idea, would undoubtedly create the astute marketers to rethink their positions and advertising spends. On the same note and with the same intention Cameron is conducting a workshop seminar dealing with Al Ries’s idea of achieving market leadership through category-led marketing using its proprietary Inclusive Communication Approach next week.