Seeking The New Advertising Idea

Laurence Green, chairman of Fallon London has a very important article in the latest issue of Campaign. About the need to look for a new kind of advertising idea. He thinks its time to move away from the traditional ‘campaignability’ concept to creating ideas that can be played with, shared, built, rebuilt, proselytised and picked apart as appropriate. There are a lot of nuggets in the article that come from some of UK’s top planners. People who seem to have found a way to negotiate the digital advertising space. Like Shaun McIlrath of Hurrell and Dawson’s puts it: “Yesterday’s commercial messages were highly polished pieces of corporate propaganda … as we lived in an era of deference, we gave them credence.” Mother’s Dylan William has another gem: “Most of the stuff that inhabits popular culture starts from audience response and works back to an idea. We in advertising tend to start with our message and work outward. We are spending too much time on what we want to say, rather than what people want to hear. Maybe we should flip the traditional planning process. There’s more from Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s Kevin Brown who proposes, “active selling propositions” are the new holy grail. “We’ve evolved from USP to ESP and now towards ASP … not just what a brand needs to ’say’, but how it should behave.” If there is just one article we will read this year, this should be in. Download in Word, for your convenience.