Why advertisers should never stop searching for black swans

The term “living legend” is thrown around too frequently – our language loses the intended impact as superlatives are overused to describe the ordinary.

But this week on the Inside Marketing podcast, I spoke to someone who is as close to advertising royalty as you can get: Sir John Hegarty, one such “living legend” when you consider his impact on culture.

This week on the Inside Marketing podcast we're joined by true advertising royalty, a man so good at what he does that he received a knighthood for it. Sir John Hegarty takes us through his era-defining career and shares his thoughts on the marketing world with us. Listen now: 

He’s so good at advertising he received a knighthood for it. Even if you are unfamiliar with the name, you will be familiar with his work – his back catalogue is an embarrassment of creative riches.

To illustrate what I mean by impact on culture, consider the 1985 Levi’s 501 campaign. If the brief was “make people think our jeans are better” then imagine how the client felt hearing the pitch.

A good-looking guy walks into a laundrette, strips down to his underwear, throws his jeans (and some rocks) in the washer, sits down beside an older gentleman, reads a magazine while waiting for his denim to stone-wash, all to the backtrack of a song that was a hit 20 years before.

The most powerful advertising finds itself in the truth

I’m not sure I would have bought it, as the jeans barely figured, their only role to be thrown in a washing machine, but that’s the craft of great advertising.

Great campaigns change the fortunes of a company, but brilliant campaigns transcend advertising, making a mark on culture and creating fame. That ad increased sales by 800 per cent, launched Nick Kamen’s career, put a 20-year-old song back in the top 10 (when that meant selling a lot), and unintentionally created an entire market for men’s boxer shorts too.

That campaign was a black swan, so it’s unfair to use it as a benchmark, but it illustrates the point about how advertising can create fame and permeate culture.

I asked Hegarty whether advertising impacts culture like it used to.

“There have been some in recent years. One that springs to mind is Marmite, which has elevated the concept of being ‘Marmite’ into broader social culture, the idea of something now ‘being Marmite’ has a cultural reference that is nothing to do with a yeast spread,” he says.

Consistency

The Marmite campaign also highlights the importance of communications consistency and the power of the truth. “The most powerful advertising finds itself in the truth. Marmite discovered a wonderful thing, people either love or hate it, but rather than shy away, they embraced it in a creative and entertaining way that has consistently worked to build the brand,” he says. “You’re trying to build a long-term relationship with somebody, how do you do that if you’re telling lies? It doesn’t work.”

Marmite’s marketing directors have resisted the urge to change the core idea behind the campaign, remaining consistent for decades – a consistency which, Hegarty believes, is often lacking today.

“Think about the Bond franchise, they refresh it, but they don’t change the fundamentals, they keep the same end line – licence to kill. They don’t say, ‘let’s reboot and say licence to thrill.’ That’s what a brand would do, they’d be so stupid as to change it. It plays to the new marketing director’s ego, this idea that I have to change everything,” he points out.

“Brands change all the time, we’ve forgotten that we have to be consistent. You make a huge mistake when you keep changing, you stop that development of a relationship.”

Products are created in the factory, but value is created in the mind, and that’s what advertising strives to do. In a world where products are easily copied, advertising creates an emotional point of difference, trying to create preference by elevating a brand’s status within society, to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

We’re seeing less and less of this today, and Hegarty points to some of the reasons. “It’s partly because people have lost faith in the broadcast concept, we can target niche audiences digitally and that dilutes the ability for advertising to permeate culture en masse like it used to. At the same time, agencies are losing the skill of how to create something truly powerful in 30 seconds. We now live in a world where stories are told in two- or three-minute pieces of content, not the 30-second spot.”

Breakthrough campaigns are fewer

There’s something fundamentally flawed about agency/client relationships today – the trust needed to do something different is hard to find. Maybe agencies are less effective at selling ideas, maybe business is more risk-averse, maybe both, but breakthrough campaigns are fewer.

Hegarty believes that “creativity is about standing out and being different, but the problem is it’s hard to know with any certainty whether it’s going to work or not. As a species we have always felt this need to understand the future, but we can’t, no matter how hard we strive to create models for it.”

And so, to reduce risk we turn to focus groups, but I wonder how well “501 Laundrette” would have tested in focus groups at an early concept stage? Hegarty points out that “the market is not always right. This concept that the consumer is always right is false – they are often horribly wrong, and brands often get it horribly wrong.”

Ultimately, he believes that we're not building big famous brands that can withstand competitive pressure like we used to. "Advertising isn't funny anymore, we're not emotionally engaging enough, we're too instructional, telling you what to do and not driving people to get to a point of view themselves," he says. 
Irreverence is something that Hegarty thinks is hugely important, and largely lacking today. "I realised most things I loved were irreverent, they were constantly challenging the status quo, challenging your perceptions. Irreverence is a powerful force because it's forcing you to reconsider, to think again."

I often think advertising is a career for the nomad, the writer who doesn’t want to be a journalist, the economics graduate who doesn’t want to work in finance or the creative who won’t earn a living as an artist.

“It is a creative industry, and we need mavericks, but I think we have fewer people who are prepared to challenge anymore, to not accept the status quo. We have professionalised the industry and it has become a bit boring,” Hegarty says.

On what it takes to be a great creative, he says: “Great creatives are observers, outsiders. If you’re a creative person you need to observe what’s going on around you; if you’re wearing headphones all day you’re cutting yourself off from the world around you. Staying tuned in helps your creativity, you’re seeing things from another point of view, not sitting with an entrenched attitude. You’re looking at other influences and hoping they influence you.”

Left-brain dominance

Another concern Hegarty has is that creative companies need creatives at the top. “It’s only our industry where creatives don’t lead. The musicians, writers, architects all call the shots in their industry, but advertising is increasingly run by finance people,” he says.

This left-brain dominance is an issue that often arises in ad land, but Hegarty has an interesting take on it. “I blame the creative people, I adore them, and I am a creative, but I think they have gotten lazy, they need to step up into leadership more.”

After our discussion I realised advertising is still a great career. It felt like Hegarty was issuing a call to arms for the mavericks, calling for creatives to step up, lead agencies and not pass the responsibility. Advertising isn’t different enough, as Hegarty says, “when the answer to a brief can be, ‘let’s make something that says we’re exactly like the competition.’”

He's right. Nobody needs more of the same – we need difference. In a world where products are largely homogenous, the last bastion for difference is your creativity and your personality. 
Or, as Hegarty puts it, "when the world zigs, zag."

Dave Winterlich is chief strategy officer at Dentsu Ireland

[ irishtimes.com/insidemarketing ]