Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
Giving an inspiring lecture at Direct Media Academy (DMA), Tobias Wacker, Creative Director at hasan & partners, one of the most creative and most successful agencies in the Nordic region explained why the advertising sucks today and how to make it a real thing.
Tobias’ work has been included in final rounds and awarded with Epica, Eurobest, Cresta, Red Apple, Cannes Lions, ADC*E, Guldägget, iF Communication Design Award, Effie Awards, Golden Hammer, and national advertising awards in Finland, the Netherlands, and Germany. He was a member of many national and international jury panels – from White Square International in Minsk to New York Festivals. In 2015, Hasan & Partners was included among the top 15 creative agencies in the world.
Less than a month before the death of Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister, the legendary Motörhead frontman filmed a milk commercial for Valio, the Finnish dairy giant. Instead of airing the ad, the hasan & partners team change it and made a tribute. The agency created the first world’s first Complaints Booth where people could trade their worries for a cruise. Showing emotions can be difficult – especially if you’re a silent Finn. So it makes sense that Finland has become the first country with its own set of national emojis – again hasan &partners work that gained global attention.
Media Marketing: The audience at Direct Media Academy awarded you with big applause. You presented some great campaigns of your agency, still your lecture was sobering. Why do you think advertising sucks today?
Tobias Wacker: There simply are too many bad ads out there, and people are frustrated with being interrupted and underestimated. Content needs to stand out to make an impact on people, and content should be so interesting that people want to spend their time with it on their free will. We still need to think much more about human motives and emotions. And we need to use data and all the tools we got to support that thinking, currently the analytic part of the work is too disconnected from the emotional part. Also, the way how advertising campaigns are bought, planned and rolled out is still very similar to how it has been done years back, but the world has changed dramatically. Advertising is still out of sync with the development speed of the real world.
Media Marketing: You underlined that we should reinvent ourselves as marketers. How should that process look like?
Tobias Wacker: First of all we need to look into that what we call strategy. Very often brands are lacking a purpose and a mission, a reason to exist, which is the only way to give them meaningful and relevant roles in people’s lives. And the only way to give a competitive advantage. Most brands have a brand strategy, but very often it is neither insightful nor relevant and competitive. It’s just technically executed. Instead of thinking how marketing can help to sell products and services, we need to think which brands could sell certain products and services. But talking about the process, lots of things need to change. Organizations should be brand driven and look into what a brand promises to people, even in B2B companies.
Agencies need to collaborate with a much wider set of creative people and blend different kind of talent to be able to find really new solutions instead of selling the talent they have. The best brands and agencies out there do that already, but for most it is a long way to go. Maybe too long.
And last, we need to learn to focus again, there’s a million things to do in terms of technology and channels, but we need to select the best and most impactful ones for our brands instead of doing them all and being mediocre.