I Hate Ads!

You wake up in the morning and look outside the window... a model is smiling at you on a billboard with a cup of coffee. You’re enjoying a scenic long drive with your favorite music and before the beat drops, you hear a spot (and it’s not radio!) trying to sell you an insurance policy. You are watching a new Hollywood movie trailer on YouTube and right in the middle, there is an ad you can’t skip. Ugh! You pick up your phone to order food from a delivery app and BAM! Pre-rolls, un-skippable, pop-ups, animated banners gliding through mobile screens and invisible links as bait trying to make you click. And if you click on something by mistake or fill out a lead generation form, you’re doomed. Now they have your data, your date of birth, your mobile number, your address, etc. They begin to bombard you with spam text messages and emails. They are everywhere!

The point is, unlike the pre-digital era of advertising, clients now are more aware and data driven with dozens of new ideas to advertise their product with. It has become so cheap for them to advertise that sometimes consumers choose to pay to avoid these ads.

Earlier, ads used to hold a certain value due to the time and effort put into a single ad, and with the growing digital times, the number of ads has increased so vastly that it is safe to say that we have chosen quantity over quality. The same mind which would focus on one specific ad and detailing is now working on 10 separate ads along with unlimited social media posts. It is time we realized that it is not enough to make communication, but make communication which is effective and holds purpose.

We as advertisers, especially the younger lot, need to understand and grasp the fact of bringing ad concepts under an umbrella – a ‘big idea’. Now, many of you might ask why it is important to bring a single social media post under a big idea and increase the hassle. We need to understand, that by doing so we are not increasing but decreasing the hassle, because the communication is clear as we know what the main key message of our idea is. Our growing industry sometimes takes a few steps back when we fail to realize the basics from where we started and the foundation of being a creative.

Being a creative does not always require us to present an exceptional idea, but to understand how the functional benefits of a product or brand can be presented creatively to its audience. The language that is being used, the connection that is being created and the direction that is being taken, each step requires a different angle which the naked mind might not be able to see but you make it visible with your idea.

To wrap it up, my words to the young, upcoming advertisers who are the future of this country are that bring life to your concepts by putting them under a ‘big idea’ and letting them fly. To be able to think outside the box, you must first get out of the box yourself. It’s not a race or a war, but an internal realization of what you are capable of and unlocking the real potential of your creative abilities.

Asrar Alam is Head of Ideation, Starcrest Communications. asrar.alam005@gmail.com