I sometimes wonder if our industry hasn’t wandered off the reservation.
How else to explain the banality of thinking that informs much of what passes for advertising today?
It seems to me that we are obsessed with targeting.
By targeting, I mean our destructive preoccupation with analysis, tracking, habits, preferences, and trends.
Targeting is not the same as relevance.
Relevant work isn’t binary.
It can’t be computed.
It’s not predicated on what website we visited yesterday or might tomorrow.
And you can’t run an algorithm to create it (though I’m pretty sure many have tried).
Relevant advertising, let’s call it real advertising, is founded on the wants and desires of real people with real blood running through their veins.
It posits a well thought out argument persuasively.
Moreover, it does so with a fundamental understanding of the larger world outside it.
The target-them-and-they-will-buy approach has none of these virtues.
The data-driven content that clogs up our web pages and social feeds has little or no connection with real life. No grasp of what ordinary people are facing every day – bills, rent, health, love, marriage, work.
For real advertising, all this is backstory, the context within which a brand, product or service must be seen to exist if its to add value in some meaningful way.
Here are two examples, picked entirely at random, of what I’m talking about – both are nearly 50 years old.
What these pieces have is a degree of humanity.
They’re confident, but they don’t brag.
They are reasoned but not unreasonable.
And because of that, they resonate.
More than that, they stand out.
It’s not easy to create work like this – part of the craft is that it looks so simple, so logical – but, hey, that’s why we have creative departments. Or, at least, used to.
A degree of empathy can help frame a brand in the hearts and minds of its audience. Better yet, it can give it a direction and a sense of purpose – something everyone from the brand manager and agency creatives to the employees and customers, can get behind.
If social media marketing really is the future, we might want to invest it with a little old school nous and wisdom.
Time to bring real advertising in from out of the wilderness.
Blokewriter 
Great post. My fear is that the ability to produce such work – and to appreciate its value on the client side – is fast disappearing. If your entire career has been targeted content and algorithms (and that could be, what, 15 years? Long enough to join the industry as a raw graduate and rise to a senior position where you call the shots), you’re going to have trouble recognising work like this, let alone relating to it. But hey, everything is cyclical. Like vinyl and beards, great ads could be due a comeback. Let’s not stop trying.
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