Keith Reinhard, representing DDB, asks if advertisers are sacrificing creativity for the excitement of “new digital” enterprises. He presents a multi-award winning creative campaign for Walmart as an example of creativity that won awards without relying on digital.
Even with all the programmatic, digital, online, and other avenues that have changed, Keith says human nature hasn’t changed. People still want love, romance, family pride, as examples. Those emotional avenues, and finding new, creative ways to advertise with them, still work.
It used to be advertisers thought it best to bombard consumers with ads to be successful. Quoting a movie Keith shows, The Hucksters, “Why do we outsell them? Because we out-advertise them.” Using a commercial for Volkswagen given an award as “The Most Important Ad of the Last Century” is used by Keith to show how advertising theory changed, and advertisers started using stories and creativity instead of brand-bombardment.
Even with the shiny-new-object of digital advertising, the most successful brands still show 3 things: a promise, a point of view, and a brand personality. With those 3 points solidified, then the agency is to make a creative, over-arching narrative to align all 3 points in a story for a successful campaign.
Instead of being distracted with digital avenues, agencies should find more creative ways to tell the story across the variety of advertising channels available.