Scrap yards full of ideas in your head
Something That Caught My Eye: What do creatives, clients, and financial controllers have in common? Their respective tunnel vision and their narrow focus on fees, writes industry veteran Walter Bosch.
Column What unites creatives, clients and controllers? Their respective operational blindness and a rigid focus on fees, writes industry doyen Walter Bosch.what strikes someone who no longer sees advertising as a perpetrator, but as a victim? First of all, that the proportion of junk has increased even further. The ex-advertiser who wrote this was almost stoned to death with ADC cubes when he put this proportion at 90 percent in the past. It didn't help that he also applied this estimate to his own work. Today, with more distance, he is perhaps a little more open-minded about how this high number of accidents and crimes comes about - nobody wants to do or have bad publicity. Nevertheless, most campaigns - like in a Greek tragedy - run unchecked towards their worst possible end. Who is to blame? Quite simply: the four "C's": customers, creatives, corporations and - the money.
I. Customers know what they want, but can't say it. This speechlessness is eloquently embellished by advertising chimeras that have just emerged from the Sawi. In this Babylonian confusion, every idea, no matter how small, is talked about until in the end it is not reason but time pressure that decides. The client is not really satisfied, the agency even very unhappy, but the campaign starts on the planned date. And the normative power of the factual allows everyone to gloss over everything afterwards.
II The creatives have their pride. Unfortunately, this is not satisfied by successful customers, but only by a guildmate tapping them on the black-robed shoulder in a black bar on a black night. Of course, this requires a campaign that only people who hang out in lounges, read Kurt Cobain's "Diaries" and like splatter films will understand.
III The corporations, these global advertising giants, all mumble the same mantra: "Creativity, creativity, creativity." But what they mean by this is simply creative financial engineering. In other words, buying volume and profit, inflating the stock market price, buying new volume and new profit with the anabolic steroids shares, because the acquired agencies collapse as soon as the international management takes over. Consequently, no creatives are placed at the head of these branches of global financial acrobatics, but rather the human species that is able to deliver endless series of figures to headquarters month after month, which are then "consolidated" by corporate controllers. We don't even have to imagine the advertising that produces such sociotopes, as we see it every day.
IV. And finally the money. Advertising is not quite
as highly complex as quantum physics, for example. But you have to think a bit before you come up with decent solutions. This mental work takes time and money, because people who can think are not cheap. But if the client is primarily interested in low prices, he shouldn't be surprised if his advertising flops. He may have saved a percentage of the fee, but there is a 90% probability that his communication will be a disaster. Which brings us back to the scrap quotient.
The only comforting thing I can think of in all this is: Yes, there is life after advertising!
> Walter Bosch was editor-in-chief of Blick, head of all editors-in-chief at Ringier Verlag and co-founder of the advertising agency Bosch & Butz, which he sold five years ago. Since then, he has worked as an entrepreneur and consultant in Zurich and the USA.
I. Customers know what they want, but can't say it. This speechlessness is eloquently embellished by advertising chimeras that have just emerged from the Sawi. In this Babylonian confusion, every idea, no matter how small, is talked about until in the end it is not reason but time pressure that decides. The client is not really satisfied, the agency even very unhappy, but the campaign starts on the planned date. And the normative power of the factual allows everyone to gloss over everything afterwards.
II The creatives have their pride. Unfortunately, this is not satisfied by successful customers, but only by a guildmate tapping them on the black-robed shoulder in a black bar on a black night. Of course, this requires a campaign that only people who hang out in lounges, read Kurt Cobain's "Diaries" and like splatter films will understand.
III The corporations, these global advertising giants, all mumble the same mantra: "Creativity, creativity, creativity." But what they mean by this is simply creative financial engineering. In other words, buying volume and profit, inflating the stock market price, buying new volume and new profit with the anabolic steroids shares, because the acquired agencies collapse as soon as the international management takes over. Consequently, no creatives are placed at the head of these branches of global financial acrobatics, but rather the human species that is able to deliver endless series of figures to headquarters month after month, which are then "consolidated" by corporate controllers. We don't even have to imagine the advertising that produces such sociotopes, as we see it every day.
IV. And finally the money. Advertising is not quite
as highly complex as quantum physics, for example. But you have to think a bit before you come up with decent solutions. This mental work takes time and money, because people who can think are not cheap. But if the client is primarily interested in low prices, he shouldn't be surprised if his advertising flops. He may have saved a percentage of the fee, but there is a 90% probability that his communication will be a disaster. Which brings us back to the scrap quotient.
The only comforting thing I can think of in all this is: Yes, there is life after advertising!
> Walter Bosch was editor-in-chief of Blick, head of all editors-in-chief at Ringier Verlag and co-founder of the advertising agency Bosch & Butz, which he sold five years ago. Since then, he has worked as an entrepreneur and consultant in Zurich and the USA.
