Has creativity killed advertising?
It’s a bit early to compile a list of the most overused buzzwords of the decade, but when that time comes, “creative” is sure to rank highly. And it’s no secret that the term’s ubiquity is mostly due to its massive appropriation by the advertising industry.
Even though the “creative revolution” in advertising dates back as far as the 1960s, the trend we are witnessing now, whereby “creative” and “creativity” has come to supersede “advertising” in a variety of relevant contexts, is rather new.
In 2011, the legendary Cannes Lions, previously known as “the International Advertising Festival”, became “the International Festival of Creativity”. Significantly, this extension of the festival’s scope and brand was justified by the idea that ads prized by top industry experts as the most creative are also those that have the biggest effect on consumers.
This remarkable name change is just one sign of a much broader transformation the ad industry has been undergoing as part of the global move towards a comprehensive “creative economy” where ideas, not traditional physical resources define the game.
By emphasising the creative side of advertising, the ad industry has successfully surfed this trend and gained the (somewhat questionable) reputation of being the creative industry par excellence.
Ad festivals which give awards for creative excellence have played a key role in this process, as there are no other instruments as powerful in shaping and maintaining the industry’s overall image. So that now, on hearing “creative” used as a noun, one most often thinks “adperson”, although technically the concept could just as well apply to, say, architects or programmers.
However successful this positioning has been for the industry, the actual correlation between creativity (measured by number of awards won) and effectiveness is far from obvious.
Although previous research, including Donald Gunn’s landmark “Do Award-Winning Commercials Sell?” has mostly confirmed the happy marriage between the two, the more recent, post-recession data suggests that shrinking ad budgets and diminishing number of long-term campaigns have put creative effectiveness at threat.
While this threat has emerged from limitations imposed on creativity “from the outside”, for many years a much more insidious threat to creative effectiveness has persisted in the ad industry itself. Scam ads that are produced with the sole purpose of winning awards seem to embody the creative freedom of their authors, as the client has little to no say regarding their content.
This emancipatory promise of scam is of course pure illusion, as the baby — unrestrained creativity — gets thrown out with the supposed bathwater — the client’s demands. By targeting scam exclusively at festival juries, “creatives” actually come to deliver work that isn’t addressed to anyone outside the industry, which means it has no genuine audience and thus cannot be considered advertising at all.
The damage brought by the industry closing in on itself in this way is not limited to problems of reputation alone. The situation where “ad people award ad people’s irrelevant solutions for problems that often do not even exist”, to quote Amir Kassaei’s critical 2016 statement on the issue, inevitably makes the gap between award-targeted creativity and market effectiveness much bigger than any imaginable budget cut ever could.
Although anti-scam policies at prestigious festivals are becoming stricter, global awareness of the devastating effect that this bubble of self-indulgent creativity is having on the industry is still lacking. The audience and the client are not something that advertising can do without, as its sole business is to produce on the former an impact beneficial to the latter.
When simulacra get substituted for these two necessary parts of the equation, a tiny space for creativity may still be left, but it must be made clear that any resulting product will have hardly anything to do with advertising. Quite the contrary — in the long run, this effectiveness-blind creativity, regretfully still embraced by some agencies, is nothing short of suicidal for advertising as such.
