In last week’s Campaign, Amelia Torode and Tracey Follows wrote an article comparing the decline of Detroit with the fate that could befall adland unless it wakes up. It was an engaging and well-written piece.
But I have one niggle with the analogy and its application.
Which is that Detroit didn’t die because someone came up with a radically different and better way of making cars, or because the world went off cars in general; it died because someone else worked out how to make pretty well the same thing that bit better. And that bit better, over time, went on to make all the difference.
Manifestly, cars didn’t die. Their core ‘DNA’ barely changed.
It’s just that no-one asked Detroit to make them for them anymore.
So Detroit’s issue was, in essence, a quality problem. Better was demanded and Detroit couldn’t, or wouldn’t, deliver.
If ‘adland’ means the traditional (Western?) agency-based centres of advertising production, then the thing I personally most fear will kill it is a similar lack of quality. Someone else, somewhere else – whether that be agencies in other areas of the world, consumers (via crowd-sourcing, etc.) or client companies themselves – will just do it better.
Of course, the ‘it’ in question will evolve to reflect the technological and cultural decrees of the moment, as it always does – but the distinguishing factor, as it always is, will be how well ‘it’ is done, not the evolution itself.
The warning signs of this qualitative decline have been showing up for years in the awards shows, with the former ‘Detroits’ (in particular, London) progressively losing out to emerging global advertising sources such as Brazil, South Africa and beyond. (This probably also showed up in the automotive awards of the 70s and early 80s, but I’d be too young to know…)
So can we learn the real lesson from Detroit’s demise in time, and recommit to quality?
If everyone working in ‘adland’ pledged this day always to make strategic and creative quality their priority in every single element of their output, then its future will be secured – whatever the societal, political and technological twists and turns that will inevitably come our way.
If everyone working in ‘adland’ pledged this day always to make strategic and creative quality their priority in every single element of their output, then its future will be secured.
What a quaint notion.
February 28, 2011 @ 11:28 am