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Is Advertising Dead x Nils Leonard

Is advertising dead?

Is it dead?

Or is what you loved about it dead?

Is that the same thing?

I can tell you that three-quarters of brands could disappear from shelves and no one would care, I could tell you that we have reached peak stuff, I could tell you that people are paying actual money to avoid what we spend our lives making.

If you wanted to check the vitals the clue would be in a button that the world has in order to bypass our entire industry.

The clue would be in this quote from our most prominent artist Banksy.

“People are taking the piss out of you every day. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.”

The real clue is in the endless search for talent, the dangerous ones, the game changers. Where have they gone?

The question isn’t whether advertising is dead, the question is who killed it?

Well, it’s easy to blame the people with the button.

But soldiers don’t actually start wars, leaders do.

If you were looking for the murderer you need look no further than this industry. We killed advertising.

We killed it when we invented the word client services.

We killed with when we prioritized selling time, cost and speed over our most precious gift.

We killed it when we stopped asking why clients had really come to see us.

The word creativity has become weak. Like the word kindness. Or hope. A word unattached to money. A word clients roll their eyes at. An indulgence.

Time, logistics, consistency, data, synergy, integration, 360 thinking, deliverables, content, social assets, trend, machine learning, insight and collaboration are all for sale here.

Don’t be angry if your client doesn’t come to you for your creativity. You don’t sell it.

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