The blame game

The biggest drawback among us creative types is that we never follow the brief. No matter how valid or perfect the brief may be, it is in our nature to instinctively refute it. At the end of the convoluted and painful creative process we may eventually be forced to recognise the validity of the original brief, but woe betide if we were to admit this upfront!

In that same spirit and out of loyalty to the creative fraternity, (and no selfish ego-issues of my own) I chose to wilfully ignore the brief for this article and its instructions to highlight the top five creative milestones to emerge in the past 15 years. There is a notion that advertising is merely a reflection of the times we live in, the zeitgeist if you may; so in keeping with our innate tendency to put the blame on everyone else, I will identify five culprits which have impacted our creative growth over the past decade and a half.

Culprit 1 – They who must not be named

And by this I don’t mean You-Know-Who, but all those faceless and well-known entities from A to Z who have brought us to this state. We have learned to cope with power outages, gas outages, government outages (and thanks to the school of confession pages on FB, outages of a more humiliating kind) and it is a credit to the creative profession that it has survived. Such adversity is supposed to make us stronger and while it did give Nando’s ample opportunities for entertaining commentary, very few other memorable milestones such as Hum Sab Umeed Say Hain and BNN came forth. Our mob mentality combined with our love of drama should have been easy to harness and channel into a flash mob mentality, but with the deteriorating state of affairs and the mob mentality spiralling out of control, necessity became the mother of activation as brands were forced to rethink their on-ground activities. Truly ground breaking and innovative activations became a rarity. Chaos is one word that can be used to describe the state of the outdoor media and the past decade has spawned such horrendous examples that should make creative and marketing people cringe. Bigger, brighter, brasher has resulted in the utter and wilful destruction of our public space throughout our major urban centres.

Culprit 2 – The media monsters

No doubt the media explosion made many people happy. However, this unfettered growth did not come with a corresponding growth in quality, not only in content but in advertising opportunities. Despite all the media possibilities and opportunities, few examples of branded content stand out and those that do can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The Lux Style Awards did create a benchmark of sorts, but other than music, of which there is plenty, branded content is almost non-existent. The media agencies have not created much in terms of innovative and engaging media content either, despite their global and local clout. Tried and tested formats, uninspiring content and a complete aversion to shaking up the status quo only points to the fact that the media agencies are still more interested in ratings and raking in the money than in making any effort to encourage quality.

Culprit 3 – The satellite dish

This has been single-handedly responsible for turning us into a generation of dissatisfied, greedy, impatient consumers. And that is a good thing! We have become dissatisfied with the status quo of the advertising industry. As viewers we have come to expect more from advertisers, the creative function and even the channels themselves. However, whether we have been able to deliver on the viewers’ demands is another thing altogether. Viewers are greedy for entertaining content, and not only in the programming, and the advertising has started to reflect this growing awareness of the public. As a nation we have a very low ‘public’ tolerance of humour, however funny we may be in private. Unfortunately this affects advertising in a negative way. Ufone brought a breath of fresh air and popularised humour in its advertising but few have been able to sustain it or keep it fresh. The ability of the Indian people to laugh at themselves is manifest not only in the story content, but also in the overall treatment, in the linguistic play of dialects and in the music. Unfortunately, our attempts in this direction usually turn out to be poor imitations. It is ironic that we do this successfully in dramatic content and have produced fantastic stuff as TV content, which suggests we obviously have the talent. It’s anybody’s guess who is to blame for the dearth of humour. The media explosion has exposed audiences to a new world of exciting possibilities and they are impatient to experience the same. If we don’t give it to them they will simply switch to another brand, another channel…

Culprit 4 – The telecoms

There was a time, not very long ago when an ‘offer’ would refer to a salary package in response to a job application, ‘bundle’ in Urdu would refer to something useless, ‘a song and a dance’ was… exactly that! The rise of the telecom giants heralded a new era for Pakistan’s ad industry. It brought us a new lingo that has become part of the vernacular, not to mention memorable song-and-dance routines, both literally and figuratively (in the form of complex ‘bundle offers’ which no one really understood)! It revived the notion of patriotism after many lukewarm attempts, and efforts by brands to outdo one another brought us epic mega budget campaigns, exotic locations, which no doubt brightened up our TV sets and made a lot of top tier TVC directors very happy indeed. However, the telecoms also brought us carpet bombing type campaigns which drove viewers nuts with repeat after repeat. And with a blinkered focus on SMS and voice rates, it also unfairly blinded everyone to the true power of the mobile phone.

Culprit 5 – The internet

From dial-up to DSL to cable, the internet has changed the way we live and will change the way we advertise in the future. The impact of the internet has only started to make itself felt in the past few years, but as was evident during the recent election period, the public is not going to keep quiet and passively accept what brands dish out to them. The media has started to feel the impact of how the public can shape and control what makes it to the TV screen; the Ali Gul Pir phenomenon and the Maya Khan scandal would not have made it to mainstream TV without the power of social media. The cell phone with its hugely unexplored potential puts tremendous power in the hands of the common man, no matter where he may be. Thanks to technologies such as Pring even the most basic phone can give access to people beyond the reach of the internet infrastructure. But it is up to ‘us’ to harness the possibilities.

It may be simplistic to apportion blame for all our creative shortcomings, but moving forward, advertisers, advertising people, researchers and strategists have to collectively understand not only the role technology and the media play in people’s lives, but also the immense possibilities at the disposal of people. Only then will they be able to truly engage an increasingly empowered public and exploit the impact their brands, products and services can have on people’s lives.

Adnan Syed is CEO, Green Man’s Ark. adnan.syed@thegma.com