Have you looked at this year’s CA Advertising Annual? Did you see any print ads or commercials that made you, “Holy shit, that’s cool’? Clearly, whatever innovation the advertising industry is doing is concentrated in new media technologies and tactics. So are the fundamentals worth teaching and practicing anymore?
Why should we care about the future of print? Well, only for this reason: We have the power to ruin, or save, the quality of advertising on any medium. And we ought to be looking at any tactic as a chance to do something unusual or extraordinary.
If agencies can’t, or won’t, do the basics right, there’s little hope they can pull off something more sophisticated. Same goes for individual creatives.
Unfortunately, it’s increasingly hard to pick up the average magazine and get inspired. And the traditional advertising sections of awards annuals like CA are shrinking. Learning to do a simple print ads or radio commercial is tougher when you’re surrounded by so many bad examples.
It’s the subject of my new column on Talent Zoo, which will be on the home page tomorrow.
And of course, if you’d like to rest the best of 10 years’ worth of columns, you can do so for 3 cents a column on your Kindle or iPad.
