I watch TV and the adverts are abysmal. When I drive in my car the adverts on the radio are horrendous. While driving in that same car I see billboards on the side of the highway and, you guessed it, they are shocking. For the past two or so years I’ve been oblivious to this fact as it was the status quo. This all changed a few weeks ago with the release of the new Vodacom “We’ve been having it” Dictator set of adverts. For the first time in a while I was not on only impressed by an advertising campaign but I found myself wanting to watch it again and again so as to hear all the subtle quirks of the advert. Now I’m in a profession very vaguely related to advertising and it’s something that has always fascinated me.
The simple fact is that advertising is not only tough it’s horrible. You have to keep the audiences’ attention but you’ve got to keep your customer (the owner of the product) happy at the same time by not going overly risque. For many years we in South Africa had a very high level of advertising standards. In America due to competitive advertising you’d be hard pressed to find a Pepsi advert that didn’t have a tag line: “Coke sucks, drink Pepsi”. Now in South Africa with our smaller, poorer population and the fact that we aren’t allowed such blatant competitive marketing things were different. Companies were innovative and worked hard to get the best method of showing off products.
Companies such as Vodacom with their “Yebo Gogo” string of adverts and the Nandos adverts, which were always topical and skirted the border of good taste, appealed to customers as they were memorable, smart and more than a little cheeky. For some reason though, the standards of advertising have vastly atrophied. Those old campaigns were memorable. Now we only remember an advert for being bad.
Take a look at Vodacom, for the past few years their idea of a good ad campaign was “Mo the Meerkat” dancing around. I’m wondering though, is it the advertising agencies that are getting stupider or is it something more sinister like the general populations intellect deteriorating? Using my other example, Nandos, we have a company that used to often be sued for their quirky and risque adverts. Now we have them advertising through Vernon Koekemoer. Sure – he’s a cultural icon but there’s nothing smart about the Vern and certainly nothing that will raise any eyebrows. The scary thing is that these are the adverts that stick out to me because they are either the best of the worst (in the case of Nandos) or the worst of the worst (in the case of Vodacom). The problem is, mediocrity has crept into our advertising industry and nothing seems appealing anymore.
So what’s the problem? I can think of three issues facing our ad industry:
The first is a possible brain drain; quite simply people are going overseas and taking skills and experience with them. The second issue I can see is the consumer’s intellect being lowered and thus intellectual or humourous adverts are generally not understood by them. The final thought I have, and I’m beginning to wonder more and more about this, is whether due to the lower quality of cocaine available these days creative’s in advertising agencies around the country are having to rely on natural talent as opposed to chemical induced brilliance.
I’m assuming that it’s a case of the first two and joke about the third theory but since it’s been an advertising agency preserve for decades, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Either way: Someone save our dwindling advertising agencies!
Enjoy this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed.
