Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Ekrem Dupanović, ekrem@www.media-marketing.com
I know I’m already boring you with my talk of how fear is destroying the advertising industry – the fear among both agencies and clients. The other day I was at lunch with a friend, who runs an advertising agency, and I said, “ISIS kills 100 people, and they immediately publish it on social networks and claim responsibility. An agency makes a campaign, it starts, everyone sees it, but they still can’t deliver news for Media Marketing until the client approves it, which sometime takes up to ten days for the news to pass all the levels of compliance on the client side. I’m not sure who is crazy here, but I know that everyone is shaking with fear.” Of course, I know, I made a stupid comparison, but I don’t know with what to compare the situation anymore?
And it’s not just with campaigns. One agency buys another, or a strategic partnership gets signed between agencies, and this is news that sits and waits for two to three months until it receives the approval of PR. I wonder whether someone was conned there, if someone took or stolen something from someone else, if the business is legal even? “Yeah, but you know, procedures …” I don’t understand any of it. Everything is legal, everything is clean, everything is in everyone’s interest, it’s also in the interest of the industry because it creates better and more creative units, but alas, PR is a PR – they have to do their thing, period.
Joe Cappo, for many years one of the top people of Advertising Age, in his book The Future of Advertising said that during the sixties and seventies of last century, Americans on television could see brilliant and very memorable ads for Alka-Seltzer, Volkswagen, Pepsi-Cola, Benson & Hedges, 7UP and many other brands. Viewers watched commercials with the same attention that they paid to the rest of the program. Creative directors of agencies – such as Mary Wels, Jerry Della Femina and Bill Bernbach – became stars. But even more than creative people, they were business people, who built a business that would make them rich.
“Those were the great years of advertising,” wrote Cappo. “With the exception of 1971, when cigarettes were banned from television and radio, advertising budgets were constantly growing.” For decades, the industry exuded with luxury and splendor. It was an industry in which hordes of young people wanted to work, willing to sacrifice everything to get a job in advertising. Young men from prestigious universities were willing to accept a job as a courier, hoping to attract the attention of heads and transfer to a media or creative department. Women with a university degree worked as a receptionists, with pathetically low wages, hoping against all odds that they would rise on the professional ladder or maybe just find a husband from this profession. “This is not a sexist remark but an honest account of those times,” Cappo wrote.
Today the situation is completely different. Young people don’t want to work in advertising. In addition to considering it insincere and aggressive, they also dislike the atmosphere in the agencies – the submissiveness towards clients, which is unconditional, and incomprehensible and unbearable for the youth. I’ve talked in recent months with many young people of different specialties who work in agencies. They dislike the attitude of clients towards them. They say clients don’t understand the basic processes of the agency. Their understanding of democracy does not correspond to contracts in which clients bind the hands of agencies, put a gag in their mouths and lead them in a totally unequal position. One young man asked what would happen if everyone who are buying and ordering something from someone in this world were to start acting as clients who order and pay for services of creative agencies? He believes the world would regress in development.
Two years ago when we organized the first meeting of the national associations in Belgrade, Damir Ciglar, the then president of HURA, proposed that all associations unite in a campaign to attract young people into the industry. The campaign, of course, was not realized. The situation today – I believe – is even more difficult. On Friday and Saturday presidents and directors of the national associations will again meet in Belgrade. The host will be UEPS and its president Viktor Nikolić. The attitude of young people towards the industry and how to attract them will certainly be discussed at this meeting.
Bojan Hadžihalilović from the agency Fabrika has a simple recipe how to attract young people: “Let’s publish an ad and invite them to come and change the industry!”
I was very pleased with an afternoon phone call from Zagreb. Marina Čulić Fischer called to inform me of a deal made in BBDO. Luka Duboković (CEO, BBDO Zagreb) and Almir Okanović (Chief Creative Officer, BBDO Zagreb) will go to Cannes on 18 June, and every day from 19th onwards, they will send us by noon one exclusive article in a series entitled Four Days of Cannes! Thank you Marina, Luka and Almir for an excellent idea. If we indeed receive texts by noon, we will immediately publish them in the Croatian language, and about two hours later in English, along with the “breaking” newsletter to bring our advertising public all the news directly from Cannes. Knowing Luka and Almir, these will be exclusives worthy of the Cannes festival.
