Confusion rules the land. Unfathomed forces hold our beloved business of advertising in a vice grip. Severely choked, creative juices gradually ebb away. Then sufficiently drained, the guillotine falls, again and again and another account is chopped. The toll is high and rising. All the while, the new rulers cheer. They, the new brides of the clients - new media and their enabling technologies, social networks and their content kings, activation and their relentless foot soldiers, ambient, search engines, interactive, online - they come in different shapes and sizes, gloating as the powerful confederation of bean counters, penny pinchers and half baked gatekeepers posing as brand custodians hold sway. Just like it was in the Dickensian world of the French Revolution, It is the worst of times.
To be honest, the revolution had been creeping up on us for a long time. The handwriting appeared on the wall long ago with the perfection of the Internet. While we remained obsessed with "Generation-X", a new humanoid specie was emerging. It looked like a man, walked like a man and spoke like a man. Surely then, it must be a man, except it did not think like a man. Today, with a little more insight, we call him "the Digital Native." His pattern of thinking is completely different from what we were familiar with. He inhabits the neo-civilization world of "The Matrix", venturing out of that world to bestow on us a rare visit only when he is hungry and needing to forage inside our refrigerator or kitchens for something to eat. He morphs back into his world through the binary tunnels of his iPod, iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Galaxy Tab and legion other digital devices of escapism, to reconnect with the denizens of that other world organized into countries and communities with such exotic names as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Mixit and hundreds of others.
Since this new creation became the darling of marketers and advertisers, what used to be a straightforward process is now a complicated act, in which Google and Yahoo! could very soon become the biggest media channels yet. These are pretty challenging times, a winter of despair with doomsday predictions of advertising's imminent death.
Make no mistake, this season of darkness is a global phenomenon. Everywhere across the world, the business of advertising is being challenged in ways never before imagined. At the 58th edition of the Cannes Lions, the world's biggest festival of creativity held in June 2011, there were 28,828 entries from 90 different countries. This figure represents a 19% increase from the 2010 festival with well over 5,000 pieces of work in the Press category alone and 4,632 Film and Film Craft entries. According to the Cannes Lions President, this is a positive reflection of the way the business of advertising is recovering from the effects of the global recession. However, this cannot be said to be real growth considering that the previous year witnessed a 19.4% dip in the number of entries.
Here in Nigeria, the LAIF Awards, advertising industry's most respected self-appraisal mechanism is a telling barometer of the depth of distress. This year's awards witnessed perhaps the smallest number of entries in recent years with some of the biggest agencies not even entering a single piece of work. In total, only just about 10 Gold Gongs were awarded across all categories while the STAR Heritage TV commercial from LINTAS was adjudged to merit the sole Grand Prix.
The voices of many agency principals aptly captured the despondency in the air. While some of them openly lamented the poor state of their businesses, others confessed that they simply didn't find anything worthy enough to be entered into the awards. Some did not even bother to show up at all! For Nigerian advertising, truly an epoch of incredulity.
Nevertheless, in spite of all the gloomy picture, the brutal honesty of many of the agency principals and leading practitioners present at the 2011 LAIF Awards was refreshing.
For once, virtually everyone put aside the bickering that sometimes attended these kinds of award shows resulting from discontent over some recognition and accolade given to a piece of work perceived, rightly or wrongly to be deserving or not. For once, there was consensus that there is need to do something drastic about the dwindling standard of creativity. For once, there was equivocation on the need to save the soul of our darling business.
Therein lies the beginnings of our spring of hope. Revolution ultimately begets evolution. As we brace up to face the cresting waves of the digital revolution, we must prepare to take advantage of the new opportunities that are even now being created. As the marketing communications landscape inexorably changes, our business models must evolve with it.
If there is one, irrefutable lesson to be learned therefrom, it is this: the advertising agency of the future will not be a linear organization peopled by single-skilled creative types and suits who rely on the ability to sweet-talk the client in the relentless pursuit of the bottom-line. Rather, the future belongs to an evolved Organization, built on multidisciplinary competencies and who fully understand the dynamics of consumer interactions and engagements with their client's brands.
We must pay heed to the timeless maxim: The more things change, the more they remain the same. Even as things are changing around us, the fundamentals remain the same. A lot of "creative" work involves turning the problem over in the mind and articulating the underlying marketing issue the advertising has to address. It also involves an understanding of the person who would respond to the ads. These things - the need to articulate the problem, the need to understand the customer - are never going to change.
We must learn too and imbibe the mindset that the best advertising is not advertising. Rather, the best advertising will be the ability to generate actionable consumer insights and to use them as the launchpad for useful and usable ideas that result in real customer engagements.
And no, we will not listen to the doomsayers. To plagiarize someone's expression, "Advertising is dead. Long Live Advertising!" Put in the immortal words of Charles Dickens: we have everything before us.
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