CORPORATE MEDICIS AND AN ADVERTISING RENAISSANCE

Wanted: clients who will cajole, provoke, nurture and bully agencies but will refuse to micro-manage or look over their shoulders.

After the long cultural slumber of the Middle Ages came the creative peak of the Renaissance. Florence was the epicenter of this humanist reawakening, becoming an incubator of polymath geniuses from Leonardo da Vinci to Michelangelo…. but it might never have found its full expression were it not for a dynasty called the Medici’s.

This powerful merchant family were the catalyst for an enormous amount of arts patronage, providing the kind of political and financial stability that enabled artists in every field from painting to literature to flourish.

This lead to a culture of possibility, virtuosity, flare and inventiveness-- inspiring society as a whole and binding it together. This was the ‘soft power’ of the day and the Medici’s wielded it with enormous skill-- using art and culture to signify their vast influence.

Artists were nurtured, courted, and pampered but the relationship could also be fraught, even dangerous in a time when religious infraction could carry a death sentence. They even set artists against each other in a way that Machiavelli would be proud of.

But there was a limit to their involvement and a basic respect for the artistic process. They were smart enough to see that art thrived—even expressed the divine-- when it was empowered. The results, from Michelangelo’s ‘David’ to Dante’s ‘Inferno’, speak for themselves.

THE ENERGY FIELD

I’d like to draw a tentative parallel between that time and UK advertising in the 90’s when the top agencies and the clients they served provided an energy field for the whole business that resulted in work that still astonishes.

The seeds of this fertile time were planted in the 70’s when agencies imported the uncompromising creative ethos of the New York advertising school to the UK, revitalizing the business and leading to work that was vital and effective.

This gave agencies latitude to turn away business that didn’t align with their high creative standards-- resulting in clients giving agencies radical leeway.

This lead to a virtuous cycle of continually improving work, the apogee of which was the mid to late-90’s when advertising was produced that – like a distant echo of Renaissance Florence-- blurred the boundaries between art and commerce to spectacular effect.  

Confidence was in the air leading to bold work that permeated out across all brands: everyone got better and everything went up a gear.

Everyone remembers the agencies and star creative teams of the time but arguably the most important members of the energy field were the clients—the corporate Medici’s—whose ultimate responsibility it was to pull the trigger on all that great work.

Like the 15th Century Medici’s they weren’t perfect but the best of the breed existed in a state of healthy symbiosis with their agencies— bringing their own insights, experience and agendas to the table but allowing those who served them the fundamental thing their name expressed: agency—meaning the power to act freely and do what they were paid to do: devise, create, execute and implement amazing advertising.

This was work that everyone in the business could be proud of: adverts that were sometimes better than the programs and articles they nestled within. Adverts that made the trip to the kettle less of a given because you might miss something great. Adverts that lifted, engaged, and entertained.

Which brings us to today.

THE HO HUM WORLD OF WHERE WE’RE AT

Advertising, whilst by no means a spent force, no longer has the power and vitality it once had and a whole eco-system of limitations has drifted into place that preclude exciting work. It is being compressed on all fronts and painted into a corner. Data is used to constrict the creative reach of brands rather than expand it. The ticking of boxes has inculcated a mindset that is fearful of expression. Everything is cross-checked and homogenized to the point where it hardly registers anymore.

If the 90’s were the Renaissance, today’s environment seems more like the Middle Ages. Advancing technology, rather than freeing people, has led to a neo-feudal environment where people feel lucky to have a job and a mind-set of acquiescence and subservience is the norm. Confidence has been undermined. Attempts at brilliance are seen as ‘trying too hard’ by those with a vested interest in keeping the bar low; the low bar means anyone can do it and a lot of work looks as though no one did.

The tension that once came from trying to break through now comes from trying to hang on—and it’s even worse for the freelancers who are desperately clinging onto the fringes of the business, existing in a precarious advertising version of the gig-economy.

Perhaps the root cause of these changes was the Great Financial Crisis. This is when clients choked off budgets leading to a mass culling of the top players—the ones who used to get the crowd on their feet—the ones who made the rest of the team play harder, more imaginatively and with more effect. The ones who resisted limitation and found ways to keep the business full of vitality and inspiration.

The yin-yang push-pull dynamic that created the energy field was diminished and the clients and agency number-crunchers have maintained a viselike grip over every aspect of the advertising process ever since.

This has led to work that is often worse that doing nothing at all and the business now seems to be more about the smoke and mirrors process of passing off lifeless offerings by wrapping them up in mission statements, ‘brand purpose’ and superfluous affectation.

This is why the data farms are working around the clock to make sense of the numbers with targeting being the name of the game—the subtext of which is: ‘you don’t have to be interesting if you are preaching to the converted’.

As technology, data-wrangling and management have come to the forefront, creatives have been pushed to the background. The business has lost the confidence that comes from having these people pitch-side. Instead we feel the touch of a different animal with a different intent. There is less flair, less style, less real magic. It’s all about trying to hold onto ‘good’, at the expense of ‘great’, and in an industry that depends on standing out, this is the way of death.

So, gradually, rather than aspiring to engage, surprise, entertain and even shock, advertising seeks only to remind people of what they already know. Genuine cultural engagement has been replaced by the nod of approval and the ‘like’. It almost feels as though something is happening but it is an illusion. The energy field is suppressed and the lights have gone out.

So what is the point of this essay? Aren’t we simply living through great technological change? Aren’t we just bystanders watching cultural tectonic plates shifting?

No, we’re fiddling while Rome burns. Because the point is this: no one really cares about advertising anymore. It’s being slowly erased from the public consciousness. People pay money not to engage with it. It’s gradually becoming nothing more than a tax on poor people. And if we want the business we love to survive long-term we need to respond.

We need to get to a place where people want to watch advertising because it is worth watching. The advertising social contract should be restored: yes, this thing is breaking into my awareness but if it brings something extraordinary with it, if it makes me stop and stare and think: that’s cool or funny or it’s something I’ve never seen before, then good—bring it on. This is the real renaissance I’m talking about.

Some ideas to get the ball rolling:

BRING BACK DITCHES IN WHICH TO DIE

Have a vision. Take a stand. Defend your work with your dying breath. Put yourself on the line. Become the base layer of a new feedback loop of wonder and greatness and posterity will thank you for it.

GOING OUT ON A LIMB

Approving creative work shouldn’t feel like slipping into a warm bath of safe familiarity. It should feel like running a razor blade across an eyeball. It should feel like a life-threatening tightrope walk without a safety net. It should feel like running down a mountain in front of an avalanche. A part of you should die every time you approve an ad. Then be reborn when the ad runs. Because it will carry that energy into the arena. Because it matters. Because the audience judges it all and is more astute than ever. They're watching more content than ever. They choose more actively than ever. 

FOCUS GROUPS ARE EVIL

In the real world advertising is not consumed while sat around a table with other slightly disinterested people trying to think of something to say about the advertisement. So why use focus groups?  Instead, personally respond to the work…. if it provokes some sort of emotional response in you then it might have merit. If it makes you shit bricks, it might be great. And if it ignites your soul, it is great.

REVERSE THE BRAIN DRAIN

Slowly but surely all the creativity, love, faith, hope and glory is seeping out of the business and into other arenas that allow creative people to give their utmost, or at least not get pecked to death by the ducks of humiliation. This has to stop or the business will end up as a thumb print on a skyscraper.  

WHERE’S THE CHEESE?

This is what creative people get for putting themselves out there, for taking on extreme career risk, for sleepless nights worrying about the kerning in a headline— for basically devoting their entire psychic energy to their work.

This is what they get for tethering their art to advertising rather than becoming the next Kubrick or Damian Hirst. This is what they get for blowing minds. Cheese is money, awards, recognition, pampering and support.

It’s an office. With a door. The creative process should be one of absolute freedom where the team can say what they want without fear and they need a place they can do this. Every artist needs a studio.

It might also be a salve for the inevitable burnout in certain individuals that genuine, all-out creative strain induces. What is there for the Syd Barrett’s of the industry? Precious little.

SCREW THE ALGO

This is the hardest thing, but the most important thing to do-- because data and algorithms have dumbed-down the whole business and are in the process of taking away every last iota of what made it great. It’s turning us into panderers instead of entertainers, educators and challengers.

How to unpick the negative effects of data when it is woven into every aspect of the process? We do it by finding fresh canvasses, or recreating old ones. By seeking out avenues of collective experience where bold ideas can meet large audiences. By doing anything with the client’s budget that isn’t mediated by a bland, self-seeking, polarizing and numb machine.

Even if this is impossible then we need to at least acknowledge that the whole thing is a dead-end equation once everyone has the same data access. So the question goes back to the creative use of the data, or finding data that serves the creative process. However it is used it should be a starting pistol rather than a full stop.

Data was the theoretical new power, but weirdly it has become a toxic force. We were running on green renewable energy that kept the environment fresh and vital and we need to get back on it quick.

WANTED: THE NEW MEDICI’S

Of course this is all pissing in the wind without the most important element of a new renaissance: great clients. Clients with the guts to demand great work and even more guts to trust the agency to create it.

Clients who will cajole, provoke, nurture and bully agencies but will refuse to micro-manage or look over their shoulders. Clients who understand where the balance of power lies but are clever enough not to abuse it.

Clients who want to turn the energy field back on and bask in the glory of its beam. Clients who want to enable their protégés to carve immortality from a block of stone.