Here at Woven we love advertising. A slightly odd thing to say, perhaps, but we’re not alone. William Bernbach, a giant of American advertising in the 1960s and 70s, said of his profession: ‘Advertising is fundamentally persuasion, and persuasion happens to be not a science but an art.’ And who doesn’t want to be an artist?
The question of whether advertising is an artform is best left to the academics, but there is no doubt about either its effectiveness or cultural relevance. Fond memories of childhood TV ads abound: ‘For mash, get Smash’; ‘Follow the bear’; ‘It does exactly what it says on the tin’; those bizarre and strangely menacing Kinder Surprise ads - Ebo Shakey! Chocadooby!
Great advertising is the product of blood, sweat and tears. It is distilled, triple-strength, cold-filtered, turbocharged. It’s a neutron star: super-dense and throbbing with potential. Done right, it packs more creativity and intelligence into a few fleeting moments than is found in entire TV series.
Now, that sounds like an artform to us.
A PROLIFERATION OF CHANNELS
Today, advertisers can deliver messages to ever-smaller, highly targeted sub-groups and audience segments with surgical precision - driven by real-time audience behaviour and insights.
Planning modern advertising feels more like deploying high-tech, laser-guided messaging missiles compared to the indiscriminate, wasteful carpet-bombing approach of old. As a result, the potential for collateral damage (to your marketing budget) is similarly reduced.