Frustration as a mechanism of survival for the advertising industry
Advertising
is an industry plagued by frustration. We always joke that account
directors are frustrated strategists while strategic planners are
frustrated creatives and creatives are frustrated artists. Basically,
everyone tries to do someone else’s job.
Such
frustration has gone even further in the last few years. After trying
to do one another’s jobs inside their industry, advertisers and
marketers are now exploring new businesses outside of it.
For instance, I’ve been attending the 63rd Cannes Festival of Creativity
for a few days now and this year it feels different. From fashion to
coding, from philanthropy to contemporary art, from music to filmmaking,
it seems like every advertising exec aspires to do anything but advertising.
Some
will see it as conceit or even hubris (“these marketers really think
they can do whatever they want”). Other will laugh at the irony of such a
situation: after all, advertising is all about creating need and
frustration… But there is more to this than whim or bloated egos. In
fact, in the advertising industry, frustration is no less than a survival mechanism.
Media,
advertising and marketing professionals now live under constant threats
such as the rise of digital monster-companies, atomization of
touchpoints and of course massive consumer distrust. They’re told all
day long that the “good ol’ times” of marketing are behind them and that
they will eventually lose their [meaningless] job if they don’t
transform it.
This
feeling of urgency is accentuated by the fact that these professionals
are deeply confident in their ability to build great and more concrete
things. The real beauty of the advertising industry is that they are few
businesses that young and open-minded, where so many different
characters, cultures and minds mingle. These are people with countless
know-hows, willing to use all of them. These are people with huge hopes
and ambitions. These are people who feel a dire need to join forces to
bring something else to the world — art, ideas, products, you name
it — and save themselves in the process. I won’t deny advertisers and
marketers are often infatuated with themselves but the truth is they are
the most beautifully frustrated crowd one can get. And Frustration is
precisely what will drive them to reinvent whole industries from inside
out.
Back
to Cannes Lions. Keynote sessions in the Palais des Festival are
punctuated by 15-minute breaks during which they blast music in
auditoriums. On Monday, you could hear all day a massively cheesy and uplifting song by the EDM act Alesso. The song is called “(We could be) Heroes”.
