Frank Zappa is considered one of the most innovative rock musicians ever.
I just saw an old video of him talking about the music industry.
He said people always ask him why music was better back in the sixties and seventies.
He said: I’ll tell you why.
What we had then was fat old guys with cigars who didn’t know anything about music and didn’t care.
We came to them with a new sound they said:
“I don’t like it but I hate this shit anyway, maybe the kids will like it.
Try it, if it sells we’ll go with it, if it doesn’t, we’ll can it.”
So what happened was lots of experimental stuff got made, lots of new stuff, sounds you never heard before.
But then they began hiring young guys who liked the music and thought they knew all about it.
If we came up with something new, these young guys would say “I don’t like it, and I know a lot about music.
We’re not putting that record out. Go and do something I like.”
And that’s what’s ruined the music industry.
You’ve got people who think they know, people who think they’re experts.
So they kill everything that doesn’t conform to their opinion.
That’s why everything sounds the same, because these young guys are everywhere now.
That surprised me.
I thought he could have been talking about advertising.
What we used to have for a client was a marketing director in charge of pricing, and distribution, and a lot more.
Advertising was just a small part of their job.
The client used to say: “I don’t like it but I’m not the target market. You’re being paid to be the experts so if you think it’s right do it, but it better work or else.”
So a lot of interesting work ran.
But, like everything else, it’s has been taken over by experts.
Now we have young clients with marketing degrees who’ve read all the books and passed all the exams.
So nothing that doesn’t fit in with what they’ve learned can slip through.
They come along on shoots, attend recordings, even edits.
They’ve got an opinion about every frame.
So you now have an advertising industry whose sole job is to please the client.
Not to do anything new and surprising.
Because these marketing and advertising experts see it as their job to stop anything like that slipping through.
They’ve all learned the identical things on their marketing courses.
And they think marketing is the same wherever you do it.
Whether it’s a car, a perfume, a washing powder, or a beer.
So all advertising ends up looking like all other advertising.
Just the way all music sounds like all other music.
In advertising just like music, we’ve trained a generation of experts in making everything bland.
Very true. I got kicked out of three schools in a row and I’ve always thought it helped my career instead of hindering it. My first job was as a journalist, which taught me nothing about advertising but a lot about the value of research. I think if we all assumed a lot less about what we know, we’d be open to learning a lot more.
James: “The ignorant are arrogant and cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt” – Bertrand Russell
Can definitely relate to this, I work for a publishing/agency hybrid media company as an account director within the pharma sector.
We’re now finding that big pharmaceutical companies are producing more and more of their own content and creating non-branded websites to peddle this content on along with their own events and printed supplements.
For example, a client recently asked us to run an event and assumed that they produce the events content programme as they know content better than us.
I’m now having to remind clients on a daily basis that they’re in the drug manufacturing business where as we’re in the content game!
Alas, I can only see this trend growing.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s like music to my ear. It’s a beautiful and rare thing to hear a client say ‘I don’t know you tell me, you’re the expert’.
I wouldn’t tell a mechanic how to do his job, why should we be told how to do ours?
Wow. I couldn’t agree more, Mr Trott.
It’s so true it hurts. The question is, is it too late to change?
What can we do about it?
I still don’t understand why a large proportion (with a few exceptions) of people working in Marketing aims to be part of an invisible crowd, doing their best to not to trust their “partners” (bah, providers), wasting and throwing to a super expensive bin hours of effort, talent and passion.
But silly me, at those marketing courses someone already realized that effort, talent and passion is something that you can’t just teach through books and exams.
Either you have it or not…
Personally, I’m not sure I totally agree. This article blames fresh marketing graduates for an issue that stems, in my opinion, from senior management. There is an astounding level of pressure on clients at whatever level to create communications that have a direct effect on business goals. Every dollar of marketing spend is now scrutinised and forecast within an inch of its life to make sure that the campaign or project will deliver, hence the major shift of spend into digital where accountability is high.
With this level of scrutiny, I’m not surprised clients are reverting towards tried and tested campaigns with proven results. With everyone borrowing elements from best in class examples, it’s no wonder each and every campaign is the same. So, until senior management are ready to take risks and instill that into their marketeers, get ready to make the next iteration of the same ten ads in circulation today.
Accountability in digital isn’t high, it’s false.
Even when it’s accurate, it’s unhelpful. All it’s doing is creating information bias. You think you know something when you don’t.
What exactly does it mean when one ad has X impressions/clickthroughs/conversions and one has X+1? Or X+20? Or X-20? That one is better than the others? Okay – by how much? And why? What element or elements of the ‘better’ ad have made it better? By what margin? When do we declare that margin to be significant enough?
Beyond the absolute numbers, what effect is actually being measured? Is there a baseline? A control group? When is an ad ‘successful’? When it can be directly shown to have sold 10 units? How about 11? Or 9?
Forecasting and ‘reporting’ in digital is more or less like the Chinese and Japanese obsessively laying out their offices according to the principles of Feng Shui. Superstition. Something that you do because you’re too scared NOT to do it just in case it might actually work. I think Dave’s brought this up before in the past.
Fully 100% of the clients I’ve worked with have been unhappy about how their digital ads perform. The interesting thing is they think it works perfectly for everyone else, and if they can just ‘get it right’ it’ll be fine. Then they double down and the same thing happens again. It’s like dealing with medieval doctors who think that bloodletting is the bees knees when it’s slowly killing the patient.
Dave, have you ever seen this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9P2V0_p6vE
That’s parallel to my story with Art Historians. They’re supposed to deal with megavast art history and instead become “experts” and authorities in technique. A few specialists become pretty good. Best art and graphics teachers warn students they can never understand talent above their own. And Art Historians have no talent at all. In art schools, they are also known as “Artsy-Fartsys. Which is probably why they never consult artists for opinion. If they did, there would be far fewer forgeries hanging around.
I don’t disagree with the general sentiment here, re over-educated, inexperienced, risk-averse, pseudo-experts making creative decisions by the numbers; but I do want to point out that ‘a lot of interesting work’ that the target audience doesn’t remember – and ultimately, that doesn’t sell more product – is just as ineffective as a lot of dull, unadventurous work that doesn’t work. The difference between the 60s and 70s music scene and the advertising scene is that with music then, one big success would pay for 100 failures. Plus, great music that doesn’t succeed straightaway is still great music and has a shelf life. Interesting advertising work that fails commercially not only doesn’t last (except in the memory) but has a much bigger opportunity cost in terms of projected sales. Music is art, it’s self-expression; whereas advertising is about getting people to buy stuff – a point I think you’ve made before, Dave. As for ‘all music sounds like all other music’… Tired words from someone clearly not trying very hard to find the constant, unstoppable stream of exciting new music in dozens of different genres being released every day. Because musicians don’t rely on clients telling them what they can and can’t do. Advertising exists to sell product. But Music _is_ the product.
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Zappa also said something to the effect of ‘there are two big problems facing America today, and they both have three letters: One is LSD, a chemical which is capable of turning a hippie into a yuppie, one of the most dangerous chemicals known to mankind. And the other is MBA.
Where I live they stopped all advertising in every Metro station and most poster sites have been pulled down and I don’t miss any of it because 99% of it was crap. In fact, it’s an improvement. I was recently exposed to the interior of a Japanese railway carriage carrying so many banners and smiling faces, I couldn’t tell you who or what it was about in any language. To me that’s not advertising it’s splunge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdNCEL5JKF8
Dave,
Pretty disappointed in this analysis to be honest.
The ad industry is in deep water, some say a full-blown crisis. But it isn’t the fault of marketing degrees. The analogy misses the mark for a number of reasons:
True, the 1970’s delivered a period of genuinely experimental commercial music. But it also delivered massive hits for Benny Hill, The Wurzels, Telly Savalas, Clive Dunn and others, in the same way that Prince, Bjork, the Fugees, Public Enemy and others were commercially successful in the 1990’s, after the music industry had been ‘ruined.’ In 2016 there’s a dizzying mix of talent, originality and experimentation in music, it’s just emerging through a diverse set of channels that didn’t previously exist, so you need to look for it, as a poster said above.
What might be more worthwhile is to compare how both the music & advertising industries have been turned upside down – some might argue destroyed – by digital ‘disruption.’ The old certainties of major record companies were obliterated in a trauma of technological change, forcing a complete reappraisal of the process of creating music – meaning amazing opportunities for some, but the loss of livelihoods for others.
In a similar way, the advertising industry has been turned on its head by technology, and a fundamental shift in how we should approach marketing. This has lead to a similar collapse of old ad agency certainties, and the influx of an overwhelming number of digital natives, with as yet, little to no proof that this new generational thinking is any more effective that what it replaced.
The industry has lost sight of what its good at, budgets are shrinking, trust in what we do is through the floor, there is massive consolidation by a few holding companies, and if that wasn’t enough, the US Department of Justice is investigating us for billions of dollars of fraud. And none of this has anything to do with what clients are studying at college.
Now more than ever, advertising desperately needs the analysis, insight and knowledge of brains like yours. So please try to stay focussed on the real issues, not looking back with rose-tinted analogies that don’t help the debate at all.
Thanks.
Does anyone ever wonder why no one studying Marketing ever appears on University Challenge?
Not a criticism, just asking for a friend.