Is modern life bad for creativity?

Is technology creating conditions that are antithetical to great advertising? On Friday, The Times published an interview with Sir John Hegarty, in which the BBH co-founder warned that it was getting harder to produce the kind of fame-building brand campaigns that made the industry’s bones.

In the article, Hegarty seemed chiefly concerned with three side-effects of modern living. First, that shared cultural references are becoming endangered as people spend more time with their tailored feeds of online content and less time watching broadcast channels.

Second, that the plentiful supply of customer data compels marketers to focus on selling to customers, ignoring all the other people whose casual knowledge of a brand adds to its credibility and prestige.

And third, that remote working thwarts collaboration and the kinds of chance meetings that lead to new ideas and opportunities.

Obviously, Hegarty knows a thing or two about making great ads, and some of his points are tough to argue. People are spending more time watching clips on TikTok and YouTube, and brands do need broad awareness to grow. But do all his concerns add up to an environment that’s choking the life out of commercial creativity?

‘I think that commercial creativity ebbs and flows, and goes into different spaces,’ says Tom Roach, VP of brand strategy at London agency Jellyfish.

‘When people say there’s less creativity, I think what they’re saying is that a subset of advertising is less creative, and it’s probably true that TV advertising is less interesting than in its heyday. But I think what is happening in social channels and other platforms is as exciting as ever.’

It’s possible that the nature of fame has changed with the way we consume media, concedes Roach, but the variety of memes and clips being shared among younger people indicates to him that there are still ‘mechanisms for delivering cultural reference points’.

The biggest practical difference for the industry, says Roach, is that brands must now work a larger number of channels to replicate the effect that a TV ad had in the 80s and 90s.

‘There was a brilliant IPA Excellence Diploma essay last year [by Lysette Jones] about the concept of fragmented fame,’ says Roach. ‘You need to communicate to a number of different tribes for it to add up to something bigger. I don’t see any differences [compared with broadcast methods], except in the starting points.’

‘I also have a feeling that the ad industry exaggerated its impact on culture, anyway,’ adds Roach. ‘Every agency would talk about denting culture or creating culture, but I think we were more about reflecting it and borrowing from it.’

The abundance of data is no cause for alarm either, says Roach, provided the people who deal in it are not set apart from creatives and marketers, and they can all work together to develop a shared language. True, some brands have been led astray by the availability of targeting tools, but Roach is optimistic about their ability to change course, as Adidas, Airbnb, and Asos have done in recent years.

Roach is sanguine about remote working practices, too. ‘I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the ability to brief creative people and to have complicated conversations through screens,’ he says. ‘Maybe there are fewer brainstorming situations, but did we ever think those were so great? Really creative people never enjoyed them; I think they were just cargo cult creativity.’

But while Roach is broadly optimistic about the state of commercial creativity, he acknowledges that advertising ‘doesn’t have the glamour or importance as an industry that it used to have in the 80s and 90s’.

Technology hasn’t just fragmented fame and media, it’s atomised the ad industry, says Roach, which has sapped some of its cultural clout. And at the same time, agencies have had to cede ground to influencers and others who have benefited from the democratisation of commercial creativity that digital media has engendered.

And thanks to AI, it looks like the plates under the ad industry are about to shift again, but Roach is optimistic about that, too.

‘I think [Hegarty] has this point — although, I’m not sure if he makes it in the article — about the digital platforms having been built by technologists, and when you speak to them, you’re often surprised that they’re not really advertising people. I’ve got hope that we’re building the new [AI] tools and platforms with the fundamentals of marketing built into them.’

Campaign of the Week /

Ecuador’s Arroz Super Extra painted prize-winning pictures on 20 grains of its rice and then hid them in bags for customers to find, as part of a Willy Wonka-esque promotional competition.

Grey Ecuador, Quito, came up with the idea for the competition, which it promoted with TV ads showing people going to extraordinary lengths — like sticking their hand in a pot of boiling water — to retrieve the winning grains.

Sri Lankan micro artist Daya used vegetable paint to illustrate the grains of rice with images that corresponded to the prizes being given away, like laptops and cruise holidays.

Pipo Morano, CCO of Grey Ecuador, said about the campaign: ‘In our very virtual world, promotional campaigns are often boring and don’t rely on in-person experiences. We flipped the script.’ Read our full analysis here. Contagious.

Is you a good at writing person? /

Contagious needs a copywriter. Maybe you've been reading us for a while and already come to that conclusion. Think you could do the job?

We’re looking for someone to join our creative services team in London, to write about all the things that we do.

We want someone who can convey messages about our company and its services in a way that grabs people’s attention and stays with them long after they’ve forgotten their first kiss, or even how many kids they’ve got.

Most of all, we’re after a writer who can understand the Contagious brand and its tone of voice, and build on our distinctive assets. If that all sounds like you — or even if some of it does — then we’d love to hear from you. Find out more here. Ascential.