How marketers and creatives can fight for a better 2023

The holidays are upon us, which means clients are scrambling to spend any money left in this year’s budget before it vanishes when the ball drops on New Year’s Eve. This fiscal fiasco means that during the compressed month of December most agencies have been struggling to keep all the balls in the air while bowling pins and flaming torches were being thrown at their heads.

As the old song says, it’s the most wonderful time of the year.

Though the holidays occur perennially, and Christmas happens on the same day each year, our entire industry always seems to act as if surprised—like a collective bunch of college kids who slept through their alarms on the day of the final exam.

Time is never our friend. (Deep breaths.) But it might help to look back at what we learned in 2022 in hopes that next year we are a little bit wiser—and can perhaps manage to waste less time on stuff that doesn’t matter.

Advertising is getting worse, but we can make it better

Look at the Super Bowl ads from the last few years, then look at Super Bowl ads from 15 or even 20 years ago. Or travel backwards in your Tardis 30 or 40 years and you’ll see commercials that rival feature films in their plotting, editing and cinematography. Funny, unexpected stories more entertaining than the programming that surrounds them, not invasive but engaging, sometimes shocking and unapologetically entertaining.

What the hell happened? Now every car ad looks exactly the same, and even the ones that try to deviate from the norm visually still adopt the same earnest tone: a faux sophistication meant to connote luxury but which puts us to sleep as quickly as an NPR announcer on Valium. And that’s just one category, but somnambulant auto advertisers are symptomatic of the industry as a whole.

Clients have become risk-averse, agencies are averse to losing clients, and everyone is hiding behind testing and all the pseudoscience that’s good for covering asses but tragically ineffective at making creative braver, more original and irreverent.

This is ironic, considering the only universal thing about our transient culture and the accelerated pace of life in the digital age should be a general acknowledgment that our attention spans are so short that if your brand gets it wrong, no one will remember or care a month (or a week or a day) from now. So, swing for the fences and if you strike out, try again next time you step up to the plate, which will be almost immediately because brands need to stay fresh in a world moving this fast.

The rise of branded entertainment—short films, episodic video and real-world activations—is really just a return to the heyday of advertising. Entertain us to persuade us, because if I like your brand then I’m more likely to buy your product.

Do we really need copy testing to tell us that?

Procurement costs more than it saves

We’ve covered this before but it bears repeating and is inextricably tied to the first point. One of the reasons advertising has gotten worse creatively is that agency margins are as thin as a dime, so that brilliant but misanthropic copywriter is too expensive to keep on staff.

The mantra across the agency world has been: “Find me someone half the age and half the price to do the same job, because our comp-to-revenue ratio is too damn high.” Exit experience, enter disaster, when someone half the age of the client is put in charge of their business. Nobody wants the surgeon who’s only operated on one other patient before. (No wonder agency-client relationships lasted decades before the holding companies arrived and now last two to three years on average.)

Asking clients for permission on how to staff an account is putting them in the awkward position of having to decide how work gets done at the agency, when it could be that the most valuable players are working behind the scenes on their behalf versus fronting the business as account people. When procurement determines that a client should pay for, say, 30% of a mid-level art director, where is the incentive for an agency to keep experienced talent around, let alone borrow creatives or strategists from another account when a big brief hits the agency?

Developing creative ideas and pushing boundaries is a messy business that sits at the intersection of Hollywood and Wall Street. Embrace the chaos and stop counting beans. When you consider shortened agency tenure, the cost of new business pitches, and the risk of constantly changing campaigns as each new CMO replaces the one who got whacked, suddenly the real cost of the procurement squeeze on both clients and agencies becomes painfully apparent.

Talent turnover, endless pitching, staff burnout, industry volatility and a pervasive undercurrent of fear have erased the daring from an industry that’s meant to be fearless. There’s nothing jolly or merry about that, and short-term savings have masked the long-term consequences for too long.

This isn’t a science, so stop pretending it is

Put more ideas into the real world, not into the next online survey, and see what sticks. Data can lead to great insights, but never, ever at the expense of common sense, empathy and gut instincts. Validation and ideation go hand in hand, but they are not the same.

We need better resolutions

Experts say that two-thirds of us will abandon our New Year’s resolutions within a month, so let’s stop promising to eat fewer carbs (seriously, why?) and instead focus our energies on bringing creativity back to marketing.

A suggestion to clients: Start every meeting with a thank you, even when things go sideways. You’ve no idea how insane agency life has become now that teams are half the size they were a decade ago. Try paying your agency more—maybe an incentive bonus—just enough to build a loyal bench of talent, and see how good the work can become.

A suggestion to agencies: Leave the bullshit behind and stop trying to sell ideas that chase culture so hard that they leave the client’s business behind. This is art as commerce, and one without the other is just self-indulgent. Too many award shows celebrate stunts over storytelling.

Said another way, let’s bring the blessings of the season into the new year. A little more grace and generosity just might bring some much-needed joy back to marketing.