Advertising Is Not A Science. And It Never Will Be.
"Technical" Bros (and Sisters), have a nice read.
(I posted this letter as an afterthought in an article last year. It deserves its own article. Fuck, it deserves its own course in every college marketing department in the world.)
I’ve decided to now post two free articles a week. If you’d like to sell all five articles every week, please buy a subscription here; it’s about 75 cents a week.
In 1947, creative director Bill Bernbach wrote a letter to to the board of ad agency Grey New York. Two years later, Bernbach started his own agency, which started the advertising creative revolution that transformed the industry. And, as Bernbach predicted, Grey went on to become a hacky data-driven sweatshop (They’re better now)—much like your digital/tech agency, only bigger. You should read the letter.
Wait. What can you learn from a 76-year-old typewritten letter by a man who died in 1982, without ever using a computer, even once? READ THE LETTER, Tech Guru. It’s just one page.
Every day, now, the letter becomes more—not less—relevant.
First some brief background info for those not familiar with Bernbach or the work DDB did in the 1950s-1960s. The creative department he molded produced ad campaigns directly responsible for VW, Avis and American Airlines (among others) growing into the huge corporations they are today. Yes, they created great ads, the best ads in the world at the time. But the ads also sold magnificently.
Bernbach despised the “technicians” of advertising. If you’re the TL;DR type, just read this sentence, out loud, at your desk:
Advertising is not a science.
Read it again, out loud. Now, go to the nearest conference room white board and write it 100 times, in red ink. Then, take a photo of the board and mass email it to all your contacts. After that, go ahead and order your headstone and make it your epitaph. Don’t worry it’ll still be true 100 years from now.
Still refuse to read the letter? OK, I’ll pull out the tidbits that directly apply to you and your ilk.
“There are a lot great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. … They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.”
Do you get what he’s saying? Ads are not art, but creating good ads is.
“…look beneath the technique and what do you find? A sameness, a mental weariness, a mediocrity of ideas. … It [is] like worshipping a ritual instead of the God.”
Ritual worshipping — a perfect description of ad tech. And it’s becoming a perfect description of most of the “traditional” advertising being produced today. Habit, not an iota of originality.
“[The] danger is a preoccupation with technical skill or the mistaking of technical skill for creative ability. The danger lies in the temptation to buy routinised men who have a formula for advertising … that will not make us stand out in competition but rather make us look like all the others.”
Not all ad techies are as “routinised” as you. James Britton, managing director of StinkDigital (a digital/tech agency) got it: “If you notice the technology first, truth is, the idea probably isn’t good enough.”
Ain’t no “probably” about it: Content isn’t king, and data isn’t queen. The idea is king. And it isn’t married to any technology.
“Tech” is never an idea. It is, by definition, a technique. AI is a technique. Nothing else.
But you optimizing, programmatic geniuses, let me know when you create a bot that can create better ads than a good human creative. I’ll sit here holding my breath while waiting for the cows to come home.
Here’s the two DDB VW ads that launched the car in America. Creatives, you know these by heart. They’re posted for the Techies.
The 1959 ad that kicked off the American VW campaign. Detroit laughed and laughed. At the time, Americans wanted big fat luxury cars, post WWII-boom. It’s nearly impossible to wrap your head around how outlandish this visual was at the time.
This is how they were going to sell an ugly German car that Hitler himself had a large hand in creating? (He dubbed it “The Strength Of Joy Car”. Read a good backstory here.) Three years later, Detroit was panicking, not laughing. CW: Julian Koenig. AD: Helmut Krone. Read the copy.
1960 ad. VW dealers were unhappy about the small car shot in “Think Small”. DDB took care of that while still maintaining the brutally honest campaign tone, a tone unheard of in 1960 advertising—all advertising, not just car ads. Again, read the copy.
Just for the fuck of it, here’s a 1980 Rabbit ad. 20 years later, same tone, same voice. And the power of the unexpected visual (like the Think Small ad).
If “technicians” had been involved in the creative process, NONE of these ads would have been produced. Put that in your AI pipe and smoke it.