The "Who Cares?" Movement Deplores The Industry's Crappy Advertising
"Who Cares?" now numbers 400 disgruntled members who desperately want Madison Avenue to stop destroying itself. The 12 September 2024 conference in London brought together enthusiasts for change.
At the "Who Cares?" conference, held at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) House on September 12, 2024, the general consensus was that the industry was producing an overwhelming amount of crap rather than focusing on delivering creative work that truly adds value to brands.
Uncreative crap.
Digital crap.
Social crap.
Volumes and volumes of crap that generates no real value for brands.
The only beneficiaries of the crap are the C-Suite executives who enrich themselves from the fees paid to generate the crap…or the Marketing Departments who seek to look relevant by commissioning the crap in the first place.
Creatives are not benefitting from the crap. They work under sweat-shop conditions to crank out volumes of work, trying to keep up with client-generated, bloated Scopes of Work.
The low quality of industry work has an adverse impact on the industry’s recruiting efforts. Crispin Reed, who presented results from his survey of students, gave a gloomy but insightful view about the unattractiveness of the industry to students — the industry’s future potential recruits. What he heard was alarming:
“I need financial predictability — to make lots of money now for an uncertain future. The advertising industry does not offer me this possibility.”
“There is no skill in advertising.”
“The industry is like a band playing the same 4 notes – there are no original scores anymore.”
“People who work in advertising have a dubious moral character.”
“Advertising is an intrusion into my privacy — it’s all about profit.”
“Behind closed doors they’re using your data.”
“Why would I want to join an industry that bombards me with rubbish?”
David Weldon and Sir John Hegarty suggested that the industry return to a practice of doing less work but making it meaningful by increasing its creativity. They admitted, though, that public ownership of agencies made this problematic. “Public ownership requires never-ending growth, and the need for growth has diluted the creativity and effectiveness of our work.” Some participants at the conference hoped that a trend for private equity firms to buy agencies from holding companies might lead to greater (if temporary) private ownership, where agency transformations might take place behind closed doors rather than in the public eye.
Client-agency relationships have gone downhill, with agencies now positioned as insecure vendors who hang on to their relationships and fees by becoming “yes-men” — until they are fired and replaced with agencies who will do even more crap for even less money.
The Marketing Departments who direct these agencies have been defeated by media complexity.
Instead of creating focused Scopes of Work that have a high probability of being effective, they simply inflate Scopes of Work in the hope that they’ll get lucky and find something that works.
Is this an overly gloomy assessment of the industry? Hardly. But it would not take much to fix things:
Clients and agencies need to increase their understanding of “what works” in today’s complex media landscape. This needs to be a joint exercise, with agencies embraced as partners rather than abused as vendors.
Legacy brands, which used to grow, and do not grow today, and they need new marketing approaches. The reasons for the decline in legacy brand performance need to be understood.
More and better Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) is needed to separate the wheat from the chaff. Only 40% of clients use MMM today. Instead, they rely on intuitive approaches, referred to as “spray and pray” at the conference. “Spray and pray” is hardly an effective media strategy, but it is prevalent, and it generates many of the problems experienced today.
Scopes of Work need to be simplified. Excess complexity is undermining marketing efforts. Too much money is being spent on work that is ineffective, intrusive, and soul-destroying for the people who are tasked with creating it.
Agencies need to be paid for the work they do, and when the work proves its effectiveness, the rate of pay can and should increase.
This will take time, so both parties need to focus on developing long-term relationships. Agency C-Suite executives need to re-engage in current relationships rather than beating the bushes for new clients (to replace lost clients).
More and better creativity — coupled with strategy and technology — is the requirement, not more volume.
As with all things, C-Suite leadership is the required ingredient. Leaders are currently focusing on fixing symptoms rather than problems. They need to take a deep breath, reflect on the real problems of the industry, and redirect their own efforts.
“Who Cares?” is superbly led by Brian Jacobs and Nick Manning, and the movement intends on continuing its efforts to identify transformation needs and put pressure on industry leaders to do the right things.
The September conference in London was simply the first step on this long journey.
For those interested in joining the movement, visit “Who Cares?” at https://www.advertisingwhocares.org/.