Recently, a series of articles fiercely criticizing the declining model of agencies created by incriminating them has caught our attention. If the observation of the fragility of the model is often shared, an entire eco-system must be called into question. For what?
Because the pressure of time to market is such that it is difficult to bring together all the elements necessary to launch an offer and its associated creative advertising in the best conditions: in an ideal world, there should be time to orchestrate marketing objectives, communication objectives, consumer knowledge, legal and industrial constraints.
But the approach with which consumer perception is too often treated in the process is often done as follows: We pitch one/or agencies on a creative brief, and the dance of back and forth: creative track – test – creative track – test continues until the launch date.
What elements of the process can really cause problems?
First of all, these tested avenues are already largely at the execution stage (time to market required): there is often no time to really understand the category insights upstream, place them in their realistic context of use and thus define in advance a locked and clear offer positioning to develop the concept of its associated communications platform.
These execution leads are immediately subject to advertising standards. However, these advertising standards, often reassuring and considered essential by the top management of advertisers, can have a disadvantage: they risk smoothing out any desire for an 'out of the norm' experience in the literal sense of the term, and can indirectly contribute to damaging creativity. Indeed, any truly disruptive creation will go beyond the predetermined framework imposed by the analytical models that structure these standards.
The reality of the creativity deficit is therefore partly to be attributed to an entire process, to development and testing habits which have been in place for decades but which perhaps deserve to evolve.
A question arises:
Is it really good news to be within the norm (even at the top of it), that is to say to satisfy a fixed analytical framework which struggles to authorize disruption? Because a “disruptive” creation, for example, is necessarily out of the norm, it breaks the current codes of an entire category, and as it is this category which is the reference and benchmark, it is therefore often depreciated by pre-tests, because it is out of scope.
So, how can we be sure that these analytical models do not contribute to erasing or even censoring creative roughness, precisely those that are outside the norm? Is it really always bad news to be depreciated by such a standard? And this must be the sole Alpha and Omega of decisions which ultimately belong to the top management of the brands.
The problem is not simple and the answer is not Manichean.
This is a whole process that should be questioned and which would reassess the real latitude that each participant in the creative process can have: by better integrating the risk-taking inherent in any disruption and by allowing the time necessary for a disruptive platform to really establish itself.
The rest >> The advertising standard the paradox of Sonalto’s communication (2/2)