THE BOOTLICKER DILEMMA

Why is so much crummy advertising and marketing going around? Why are millions and millions more spent on irrelevant, meaningless and unsustainable brand communications? Why does so little the ad biz creates and produces appeal to those it is actually supposed to reach?

Often enough, the process of developing ads and communications kicks off quite well. I have experienced companies giving true and honest evaluations of their brands and products problems and often enough, our creative briefs pose us with extremely desirable challenges. How often have I been asked, to make a brand more relevant for consumers, to improve a brand’s image or create brand-related contents people can talk about and the press wants to report on?

Basically, these tasks are easy. However, only under one condition! You need to turn to the target persons and groups and find out what they find relevant, how they would like to be approached or what benefits they believe a certain brand should give them with its products, its communications, its behaviour in general.

But, in the end, brands and products, communications and marketing aren’t made to suit the liking of the people out there (us!), but are made to comply with the perception the CEO’s, general managers and marketing directors have of the people out there.

You get people, who themselves last participated in real life and interacted with normal people at college or uni, telling their agencies what contents or activities will work with the “target group”, what they desire, what makes them click. And although agencies often know their clients are wrong, they don’t consult them for fear of losing the account.

The ad biz is – to a great extent – a boot licking trade.

I’ll give you an example: I know a brand that for some years now would like to be seen as urban, cool, stylish and relevant for opinion leaders, you name it, the way most global brands want to be seen. They would love to be consumed by 25-35 year old urbanistas. Yet, the brand’s CEO happens to love ballooning and horse-jumping, so a great share of all strategy and communication budgets goes into sponsoring these sports, regardless of the investments ineffectiveness, before the needs of the desired consumers are even researched! And the agents even dare voice a doubt.

How often have I sat with 50-year old CEO’s or marketing managers telling their agencies’ creatives that the concepts they have presented are crap and – in their deteriorated, life-detached view – what 22-year old urban slickers really need to spice up their lives. Sometimes our jobs are hilarious, sometimes it just gets sad…

Next I could be complaining about the market research that often undeservedly determines the contents of our creative briefs or co-decides which campaign proposals actually get executed in the end, despite manipulating both the research techniques and the results to suit the demands of their customers.

In the end, the ad biz is a farce. All it has in mind is retaining its existence, its wealth, its clients and its networks. The people out there, the so called consumers, are merely victims arbitrarily penetrated with the results coming from the process of ad agents sticking their heads up their clients arses.

This is the reason why there are so many unhealthy brands and billions of disillusioned, pissed off and increasingly immune consumers out in the market place.

And there’s the dilemma for you: according to the brief, we seek solutions and mean to be meaningful to the people out there. According to reality however, we are meaningless to those supposed to purchase and adore, because we adore the ones paying the cheques too much, without looking them in the eye and telling them how life really works…

And that their butt’s stink.

So, as long as advertising and communication is not made for the consumer, but for the brands executives, as long as the consumer is not involved in brand, product and communication development and as long as agents act like bootlickers, the whole ad biz is superfluous and basically doomed!

Yours

Brian B. Ashes