My POV on Advertising
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MY MANIFESTO My POV on planning and advertising.
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Transcript of My POV on Advertising
MY MANIFESTO
My POV on planning and advertising.
WHAT G8 MEANT FOR ME
Why is it useful to create your own “philosophy” and your own method?
Could be so idealistic that you’ll never get to use it.
At the end, it probably isn’t as good as that one done by 100 planners with 50 years of experience for a global network
that has all the money in the world.
But at least it gives you a purpose in life,
gives you a north.
It is like going to therapy: to understand yourself better and
understand the reason why you do what you do.
Writing down everything that you feel, think, complain about, your virtues, your view of the
world, your beliefs, your values and goals. Helps you see the future clearer.
And best of all, your philosophy, your methods, will evolve in time.
What you do has to be flexible enough in order to adapt to any change that time will bring.
This is what G8 gave me.
And I will show you the evolved version of what I presented 3 years ago as a student.
LET’S BEGIN FEELING OPTIMISTIC
99%OFTODAY’S
ADVERTISINGISSHIT
Source: Advertising for people who don’t like advertising
And for many reasons…
Our day to day, real work, IS SHIT and has become secondary because it doesn’t win lions.1
As Nacho Zuccarino said, the lion is our brief and we lack of moral when we want to win one.2
Source: Paraphrasing Nacho Zuccarino
All of the sudden, between January and June, we believe we are superheroes and we pretend that in months (and with one fucking
piece of work) we will solve problems that world leaders have been trying to solve for decades.
We forgot that our job is to SELL.
As plain as that.
…It was not going to be so easy to control the population by force. Too much freedom had been won… It was understood and express that you have to control them by control of beliefs and attitudes. Well, one of the best ways to control people in terms of attitudes is what the great political economist Thorstein Veblen called “fabricating consumers”.
Noam ChomskySource: Requiem for the American Dream
Walter Lippmann said: The public must be put in their place, so that the responsible men can make decisions without interference from the “bewildered herd”.
Noam Chomsky
Source: Requiem for the American Dream
El público es espectador, no participante.
Y esto fue tomado como el mantra de la publicidad.
Source: Requiem for the American Dream
Pero las cosas han cambiado:
“Dictatorships are never as strong as they think they are, and people are never as weak as they think they are”.
Dr. Gene Sharp How to Start a Revolution
Source: How to Start a Revolution
People is reclaiming their status as ‘people’.
People want to be called people, not consumers.
But we are still the same, we haven’t changed yet.
“Why do you put so much effort into trying to do good things for people, we need to manipulate
them. It doesn’t matter if we sell them crap, selling is the only thing we want. If we don’t sell I have to
say goodbye to my yearly bonus”.
My former boss at Nestlé and the reason why I quit
And something else…
“When I was a kid, my cartoons were constantly interrupted by advertising. I developed hatred towards
advertising, because they were interrupting my cartoons. If they would interrupt with awesome things, it would be
great, but they always interrupt you with shit”.
Geoffrey Hanson Chief Creative Officer at Happiness
For these and many more reasons: I HATE ADVERTISING
Every month and a half I ask myself if any of this actually works, if advertising actually works.
But at the end, I love what I do at work (thinking, understanding, researching, creating, for different
audiences) and I haven’t found yet a job outside advertising where I could do the same.
So the only thing I can do is to try to do something that would make me proud,
something that would really add value to people’s life.
Let’s go back to the big question: How do we transform this fucked up industry, an industry that produces shit, with no ethics, that
underestimates people and interrupts lives, into something that could, at least,
be a little valuable to them?
HOW?
We need a maxim.1
“Act so as to treat people always as ends in themselves, never as mere means”.
Immanuel Kant
This makes words like target and consumer to not make sense anymore.
Consumers are first and foremost people, not lifeless entities that
buy because they have to.
Moreover, calling them ‘target’ is just stupid, is the coldest word we can use to describe them.
In a market like the MENA region it is easy to judge people.
For example, to think that women in Saudi are oppressed because they have to cover their faces or that men have a boring life because
alcohol is forbidden and they cannot go out with women outside their family.
They live a happy life and we are no one to judge them.
If you don’t love people, if you don’t respect cultural differences, if you don’t understand that those differences don’t make them less human,
you’ll never be able to understand them, thus you’ll never be able to communicate anything to them.
Recognizing your ‘consumers’, your ‘target’ as people means that you respect them and
you consider them as human beings.
Understand why a brand and a product exist2
Corporations have always tried to take advantage of people.
This because we’ve always seen brands and people as two separated worlds.
When actually they are very similar:
People BrandsPassionate
about something
Have dreamsand goals
Want tobe unique Belong to one
or more cultures
Need to bond
Have somethingto offer
Have an originand a story
Passionate about something
Have dreamsand goals
Want tobe unique Belong to one
or more cultures
Need to bond
Have somethingto offer
Have an originand a story
Three key shared elements are useful for our work:
Have goals in life (short, mid, long-term) Have guiding values Have ideals
Dissecting the relationship3
Both brands and people want something.
The best relationship we could build is a win/win relationship.
Thus, brands have to stop behaving as paternalistic entities.
As if their products were to save people from apocalypses.
TWO PIECES OF SHIT
Without your brand I’m a lame fucker?
Your brand will guide me to the light?
We have to stop insulting people!
The path we want to take4
We have to go from being paternalistic, to being Sidekicks.
Sidekick
A sidekick is a hero’s complement.
Helps the hero deal with the world’s problems in a better way, saving time and energy.
Is a right-hand man that knows everything about the hero.
It is not the protagonist. It gives the hero more relevance and notoriety.
Between them there’s an emotional relationship nurtured in time, based on trust.
Sidekick
Un sidekick es el complemento de una persona.
Ayuda a enfrentar el mundo de una mejor forma, ahorrándole esfuerzo y tiempo.
Es un hombre de confianza que conoce todo sobre la persona.
No es el protagonista. Le da mayor relevancia y notoriedad al protagonista.
Entre ambos, se ha forjado una relación emocional, basada en la confianza.
Sidekick
This means that the brand has to be always meaningful. Pursuing value in every action.
Advertising then is a vehicle that helps establish and nurture this relationship.
The ‘lines’ disappear and everything is around creating value, being useful, and
purpose oriented. To be a piece of culture and to help in culture growth.
If we are culture generators (not only a mirror of what is happening) we will then produce content that
people would actually enjoy and find useful.
BusinessObjective
Brand’sbeliefs
What people arelooking for
People’sbeliefs
VALUE BASED RELATIONSHIP
People
Brand
Understand
to find a gap and develop
that will be applied to
People
Brand
Channels
Subjectivity Moment Habits
A core value
the touchpoints that will be better able to deliver it.
Thus achieving strong relationships based on culture growth:
And non of these campaigns is taking advantage of people by ‘saving lives’.
Each campaign is based on what a brand beliefs in, which engages with an ideal that people have
and by that, achieves to generate culture.
What a planner has to do5
A planner is responsible for understanding and rethinking culture in five ways:
Brand’s culture Global and local culture
Category’s culture Current media landscape culture
Competitors contribution to culture
We as planners have to define how the brand could be useful and how the brand will
contribute in culture growth.
We as planners are culture makers
and brands culture wardens.
It’s not about advertising campaigns anymore, we should be talking about a major cultural shift
and evidences of this throughout brand activities destined to nurture our relationship with people.
A case I worked in that tries to achieve all that I preach.*
A brand that wanted to be more appealing for Millennials
A 6.8” phone (1.3” more than the iPhone Plus)
A business problem: People are not buying it
But… a bigger screen means
better movies, better reading, better gaming,
more battery life, etc…
A human problem
An observation: fashion is not evolving at the
same pace as technology.
A human solution that seeks to achieve culture growth:
Una solución humana que busca aportar a la cultura:
An idea: a fashion collection
and the beginning of a movement
MY MANIFESTO: How I understand planning and advertising.
