Do you still remember disruption? One of the last great prophetic buzzwords that our industry launches every so often with such enthusiasm. How we loved it. Disruption! The word sounded progressive, dangerous and sexy. It gave us the feeling that we had the power to change the rules of the game, to break conventions, to reinvent categories.
One of the largest advertising networks in the world, TBWA, even turned it into its philosophy – Jean-Marie Dru launched it a few years before the famous book The Innovator’s Dilemma, after which disruption became one of the most abused words in the business world. At last we, the advertisers, stood alongside the tech companies in the front row of a new world. We were going to “disrupt” banks, shops, taxi services, hotels, media … Somehow we were convinced that disruption applied to everyone else. Not to us.
Good enough
Artificial intelligence finally sobered us up. Today I sit at my computer and in a good hour I make a complex storyboard for which I once needed an illustrator, a few days and some budget. The result may not be as good as a top illustrator would make it. But it is good enough to present an idea to a client. And it is made in an hour. If I am honest: no matter how carefully I try to use artificial intelligence, I know that I have already taken someone’s job. And I don’t feel very good about it.
When colleagues and I talk about it, we comfort ourselves that artificial intelligence cannot yet come up with ideas as good as ours, make campaigns as good as ours, or understand people as well as we do. Maybe it really can’t. But what if that doesn’t matter at all? This is where the uncomfortable part of the disruption story begins. Artificial intelligence has also caused disruption on the other side, on the side of expectations.
“Disruption almost never arrives with a product that is better than everything before it on day one.”
It often arrives with something that is merely good enough. But faster, cheaper and more accessible. And if we look at the current state of society and the industry, “good enough” is perfectly acceptable, for clients and for consumers. For now. In my view this also shows at creative festivals, where craft, once the showcase category, has become a weak category of the competition.
Some twenty years ago I worked with an excellent director of radio commercials. Back then there were decent budgets for radio ads and professionals who specialised in the format. Then the commercial radio networks began offering clients everything in one package: media space, creative and production. My acquaintance was appalled. She listened to those ads and was angry that the quality was falling. She was right. And she lost her business. She was angry at a world that does not value quality. She held on for a long time, but when she ran out of work she finally changed profession.
Tracks and locomotives
As early as 1960, in his famous essay Marketing Myopia, Theodore Levitt wrote about the American railroads and their decline. Their mistake was that they thought they were in the railroad business, not more broadly in the business of transport, of moving people and goods. So the problem was not the tracks and the locomotives, but how these companies defined themselves.
So what are our tracks and locomotives? Ads? Ideas? Communication strategies? When I ask myself what business we advertising agencies are in, I have to admit I don’t have a clear answer. If our business is making ads – writing copy, design or production – we have a big problem, or we are already gone. And what if we say we are in the business of ideas? Is that enough? What does the client really buy from us? Strategy? A creative solution to a business challenge? Judgement? The ability to recognise, among a thousand options, the one that is right?
“I don’t know. And maybe “I don’t know” is a more useful answer today than it seems.”
I have always slightly envied people who knew as children what they would become. Doctors. Architects. Directors. Writers. I never really knew. Those of us who “wandered” felt a little lost next to them. And many of us found our place precisely in advertising. Partly because our business has always been fluid, elusive and unpredictable.
Lately I often think that perhaps this very quality is good for the times ahead. Because today none of us really knows what our industry will look like in five or ten years. And perhaps the advantage will go to those who never fell too much in love with their answer to the question of what they are.
For thirty years we told others about disruption. Now we will see whether we understood it ourselves.
Translated from Slovenian with the help of artificial intelligence.
