Commentary

Be Nice to Your Creatives: Segment

Society’s making it tough on creatives. Creatives want some hard concepts to work with – solid beliefs and common experiences and talismans that can make an ad speak directly to many viewers at once.

In decades past, we had more of this. Things like barbershop socializing, monogamous dating, milk bottles and fast cars gave creatives concepts that were universally understood. These were the types of props with which a generation of wordsmiths and art directors staged their ideas and got their messages across.

Today, not many people have a place where they can drive a fast car fast. Milk bottles and barbershops have been replaced with travel coffee mugs and chat rooms. And even these aren’t the common conceptual currency that the others once were. To one person, an Internet chat room is a family experience, to another it’s where an obscure hobby is explored, it might be a sexual experience to another, and a classroom environment to still another.

The Contradiction

We live in a time where the different parts of our society are more different from one another, yet our experiences and the products we buy are more generic. The result is a reaction that scares creatives: each group perceives its common products and experiences completely differently.

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There are two ways to deal with this problem, and ad agencies are good at only one of them. One way to approach it is to create a highly stratified series of ad campaigns that deal with each constituency in a unique way. This takes the differences and exploits them, making the audience feel that much closer to the brand. The second way is to create one message that fudges the differences. Obviously, the ads we see on the net and on the networks mostly fall into the second category.

And this haunts creatives. It makes them bitter. They’d like to do ads with much more drama and relevance, but the client insists on doing one message for everyone.

We might blame the media people for this whole problem. Their desire to consolidate buying power into comprehensive schedules with critical mass and client clout is at least partially responsible. After all, who could possibly desire to create the flight schedule Gantt chart that shows seventeen different messages going out to completely different audience targets? It would have to be more than a masochist; it would have to be a masochist with the data visualization skills of Steven J. Hawking.

So, instead, we tell the creatives there’s going to be only one ad produced. It had better be a good one.

Modern Talismans

Today’s talismans are much more conceptual that yesterday’s. Instead of physical symbols of middle class America, we have concepts like humor and humility. Advertisements from past decades certainly had both of these, but today they take on the role of providing the points of commonality among the audiences.

Which is a tall order to fill, if you’re a creative sitting in front of a creative brief and a blank sheet of paper. Every day, thousands of them sit there – most stymied – thinking about just this issue. What is it that joins this massive audience together? How can I appeal to it? How can I make an ad that both stands out and makes sense to each of the different types of people?

Media people could show some sympathy. To a degree they fail to segment the audience for the creatives; the creatives have to artificially cobble together one audience with an inclusive message. The effectiveness of that message – often severely diluted – is a variable not often considered in the media halls. Sure, it might be cheaper to throw the wad into a few networks, but it’s likely not the most efficient campaign. At least the broadcast and print people have the excuse that their media can’t really measure effectiveness very well. But online buyers can’t hide behind the opacity of their medium. We need to show more kindness to our creative colleagues, providing more segmenting with smarter segments.

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