The following essay was first published on The Ad Contrarian and is reproduced here in its entirety by permission of the author, Bob Hoffman.
Why Is Advertising So Crappy?
Like most sensible people, here at The Ad Contrarian world headquarters we do our best to avoid advertising.
This keeps getting harder and harder.
Despite all the witless proclamations of new age marketing gurus about the death of advertising, advertising isn’t just growing, it’s metastasising. Every click of a mouse brings us at least three ads. TV watching is at its highest level ever. Every person wearing a hat or a t-shirt has become a walking billboard.
Things that used to be just helpful have now also become advertising carriers — ticket stubs, museum maps, dry cleaning bags, milk cartons…
You can’t swing a dead media planner without hitting an ad.
And while advertising has gotten bigger and bigger, it hasn’t gotten much better.
I’m not one of those old guys who thinks that there was a golden age of advertising (or music, or movies, or literature) in which everything was brilliant and that everything since then has been crap. I believe that most advertising (and most music, movies, and literature) have always been pretty lousy, and today’s lousy is no worse than any other era’s lousy.
The reason most advertising (and artistic endeavors) are lousy is not that people set out to create crap. It’s that creating something good is really, really hard. And there are very few people who can do it.
The idea that we are all creative and that if we just free ourselves from the stultifying shackles of society we can unleash a torrent of creativity is juvenile nonsense. Creativity is rare and precious. Many seek it. Few have it.
With all the amazing advances in technology and communication, you would think there might be some concomitant blossoming of creativity. But there hasn’t been. Not in advertising, not in music, not in art, not in literature, not in movies.
Maybe that’s why our industry has become obsessed with technology and media. There have been impressive, sometimes startling, leaps of innovation and inspiration in these areas.
But, sadly, the “content” is just as crappy as ever.
