‘Big Advertising’ needs to think small

There’s no shortage of advice out there about how to do the big things well. How big brands have used big budgets, in big channels, with big ads, to make a big impact. And Q4 is always the golden quarter for this kind of thing.

At October’s IPA Effectiveness Awards, it was big brands that picked up the really big plaudits, with the Grand Prix going to adam&eveDDB’s work for McCain – a decade of classic brand advertising which helped the brand do something that shorter-term, less consistent approaches would struggle to do: sell its chips for a bigger price and so increase profits.

The IPA Effectiveness Conference saw System1 launch new research on the power of creative consistency, with an analysis of TV ads from 56 brands aired over five years (with a media spend of £3.3bn in total, or around £60m per brand). It was great to see more evidence for the principle of consistency that many of us have been banging on about for years. Its lessons were as comforting as a chippy tea for the more conservative marketer: for big results, stick with your current agency, your current campaign, and spend big on TV.

Christmas ad season always leads to a glut of marketing content from all the ad testing companies on how the big advertisers’ big ads have scored on their proprietary testing methodologies. Finding top scorers at Christmas seems to have become a turkey shoot. Which may be just as well, as the rest of the year is extremely slim pickings these days.

But the biggest moment for me this year was actually more nuanced. Less of a comfort blanket, more of a wake-up call to a part of the ad industry in danger of sleepwalking into irrelevance.

New era of effectiveness

At the IPA Awards dinner, Catherine Kehoe, chief customer officer of Nationwide, delivered a sermon on the future of effective marketing, to a hushed room of hundreds of rarely silenced ad people. The content was fire and brimstone, the delivery ice cold. Everyone should read the full text here.

It was this section that chimed especially strongly with me: “We have entered a new era of marketing effectiveness, but still much of our thinking has been honed from the age of ‘air power’, that saw carpet bombing and surgical strikes managed from a central command post, powered by enormous targeting and machine learning in media buying. But this is going in reverse now.

“The growing weakness of TV as a mass-reach and mass-event medium is well documented; whilst data privacy laws mean the huge machine-learning data opportunities now sit in walled gardens controlled by Google, Meta and others. And so, we are increasingly entering into a world of brands being built on the ground, by armies of influencers, by brand partnerships and collaborations, and by in-feed and in-game activations. Hand-to-hand marketing is replacing fire-and-forget. And that means we are all learning new lessons every day in so many ways. And there’s no way any of us can keep up unless we work together.”

This was a big brand marketer, famous for making long-running, pure brand TV campaigns with big name agencies, and who’d just handed the coveted IPA Effectiveness Grand Prix to McCain, telling us all to get in training for a very different kind of marketing; a form of hand-to-hand combat, not the air war adland is currently better equipped for (sorry for the military metaphors).

‘Big Advertising’ used to be the epicentre of adland’s creativity, but its dominance in the creative ecosystem is being chipped away.

This section of Catherine’s speech resonated with others really strongly too, including Magic Numbers founder Grace Kite, who has her own perspective on media fragmentation and its impact on strategy and marketing effectiveness – a theme she talks about as ‘lots of littles’ (more of which in the second part of this article, coming next week).

Specialists in the worlds of social, content, SEO and influencer marketing reacted to me posting Catherine’s speech on LinkedIn by claiming this is nothing new and they’ve been saying this for years. Fair enough.

But the reason her talk was so notable for me was less the originality of the message and more the context and the audience – it was delivered to a group that has shown a tendency to resist this view and its consequences for a decade or more, and often for really solid reasons. They’ve rightly been demanding to see the evidence that other kinds of creative work can be effective, which is now emerging. And they’ve been struggling to find ways to make it pay. So they’ve been waiting for the decline in the reach of linear TV to become a real problem before fully embracing emerging forms of marketing creativity.

Changing adland’s perspective

The speech raises big questions for a part of the industry – let’s call it ‘Big Advertising’ – that still sees the big ad as the epitome of effective advertising. Big Advertising is not a malign force like Big Tobacco or Big Oil, but its dominance has led it to adopt a similarly conservative, protectionist perspective, somewhat at odds with the industry’s self-image of being progressive creative radicals and misfits. The things that it still celebrates above all seem to have less and less in common with the things that the wider creative economy actually produces today, and that the client community is increasingly keen for its brands to benefit from.

No change or evolution ever happens in a straight line – it will have moments where the tectonic plates shift more dramatically. Perhaps this was one of those moments and we will now see Big Advertising adjusting its big black-rimmed glasses and seeing things from a new perspective.

I’m not writing this to be contrarian but out of love for the industry. This is not about either/or. I love big ads as much as anyone in adland. I used to work in the corner of the agency world that was and still is obsessed with creating the perfect single example of the art, craft and science of the big ad. I arrived at AMV BBDO in the afterglow of it making perhaps the greatest single commercial ever, Guinness’s ‘Surfer’. I’ve made big ads for McDonald’s, Mercedes-Benz, Sainsbury’s, Dulux and many other big brands. I’ve seen first hand the hundreds of scripts sacrificed in pursuit of the perfect John Lewis Christmas ad. Like many in the industry, I love this kind of work, the emotional impact it can have on people and the commercial impact it is repeatedly proven to have – and still has – for brands.

But it doesn’t take a genius to look at any of the screens or platforms we get served ads on, to see that advertising of this type is now only a vanishingly small proportion of the industry’s total output, and declining. And that the very rarefied kind of advertising (where big ads tend to be over-represented) that makes it to the IPA Effectiveness Awards probably represents rather less than 0.1% of all advertising.

We can mourn its loss. We can try to slow the decline. But we can also look to the future and try to drive our industry’s constant and inevitable reinvention. And we can try and make the quality of the new stuff, which is too often not great, better. (None of these options are mutually exclusive – it’s perfectly possible to do all this simultaneously).

Big Advertising used to be the epicentre of adland’s creativity, but its dominance in the creative ecosystem is being chipped away by the democratisation of advertising and content creation tools, self-service ad platforms, and brands working directly with platforms and influencers.

And now we see the inevitable rise of GenAI creative solutions which, whilst currently mostly being deployed fairly low in the funnel, are starting to climb up it, with rapid improvement in the quality of GenAI video. Coke’s GenAI version of its ‘Holidays’ ad inspired a thousand hot takes, as did Vodafone’s ‘Rhythm of Life’ film, but whatever your take, the implications are undeniable: GenAI’s coming for the world of big ads too.

Bigger isn’t better

The story of the last decade for Big Advertising has been one of disintermediation. The story of the next one will be the same.

Big Advertising has been shrinking because it hasn’t been listening hard enough to the client community or responding to their needs as fast as other, newer types of businesses. It has been slow to innovate and evolve its core product and so is losing share in the wider category of creative marketing. Big Advertising is an industry that’s not moving as fast as its clients, and that’s a problem.

And Big Advertising’s latest move? To bet on getting even bigger being the way forward. The acquisition of IPG by Omnicom shows that the industry at its heart still believes that big is beautiful – in contrast to the message from clients.  

The niche-within-a-niche that is the marketing and advertising effectiveness community – despite all the incredible work it does proving the effectiveness of what has worked in the past – needs to focus as much time on exploring new theories and practice as it does proving and reinforcing existing principles.

I love the IPA Effectiveness Awards and owe a lot to them, but rather than see them decline in relevance I would like to see them evolve faster, or for the IPA to find additional new ways of celebrating the effectiveness of new kinds of work. The big brands currently benefit from a kind of ‘double jeopardy’ that makes it easier for them to enter and win, and harder for newer, smaller brands and organisations to prove their case. This needs to be addressed, either by significant reform of the core awards or by introducing new types of effectiveness awards and case studies. My hunch is the latter is a better bet.

The client community needs access to more fresh, current case studies with a level of rigour and proof far greater than the standard LinkedIn post on Liquid Death or Duolingo they’re currently having to rely on, but which is also far more accessible than a full IPA Effectiveness case. IPA entries are a huge effort and cost not only to write but also to access. Yes they’re the gold standard but they must be a driver of innovation, not a barrier to it.

So this is a plea to adland’s agencies, industry bodies, suppliers and research partners, to understand, evaluate, champion and of course learn to create new forms of advertising, at least as much as established forms. This happens in pockets, of course, but it still feels piecemeal and lacking in collective ambition, commitment and urgency from the industry as a whole.

Advertising is now a thousand kinds of smaller thing, not just one or a few big things. If we don’t embrace this truth our industry will fail to benefit from the massive shifts we’ve seen in the wider creative and creator economy.

This is the first of two columns on changes in the marketing ecosystem. The second will be published next week and will cover the implications for brands.