If I had to append one word to today's advertising industry, especially as we enter yet another overblown awards cycle, that word would be disinformation.
Most things, in fact, that pertain to the larger world, also work their way down to the smaller world. Most things, good and bad, can toggle back and forth between macro and micro. Accordingly, I find parallels from the real world to the advertising industry about a dozen times a day.
Everything coming from washington today--regardless of party--feels like disinformation. Its lies, spin, wishful thinking, politics and playing to bias.
Lately, I feel the same when it comes to advertising. Especially as award season looms. I keep thinking of the single word I wrote above: disinformation.
Every day on Linked In there are about 200 glowing photographs of people gloating about being a judge, or about how many pencils they've won, or about their impending week or so in Cannes. Based on those brush strokes, you'd think these are halcyon days for the advertising industry.
I saw a short awful film celebrating the renewal of a contract between the world's largest plastic polluter and a company called Wire Paper and Plastic. Here are three stills that will disinform and disembody you from your cranium.
To call this disinformation overblown makes me think of the Hindenburg.
Meanwhile:
Parties are happening.
Work is winning trophies.
People smiling and glossy.
They're influencing culture!!!!!
Yet, there's an alternate reality.
People being replaced by AI.
A general dullness of the work I see.
And no one cares, I mean no one in the real world.
The lack of job security for anyone, regardless of their skill or tenure, unless they work for the holding company itself.
The lack of long-time account-agency relationships. Or agencies who have built their stature based on the accounts they've built.
The massive contractions in the industry--with literally hundreds of thousands of people being fired, and entire agencies being subsumed and disappeared.
Plus, with all that, salaries are lower on a real dollar basis than they were ten years ago, and much lower than they were fifty years ago.
Finally, and perhaps most glaring, is the proliferation of awards and award categories I'm unable to understand. If so much work was good enough to win so many awards, you have to ask yourself why you're not seeing it in the wild.
Or you have to whisper silently to yourself:
It's all disinformation.
Pretending there's a life and a vibrancy in an industry that is decaying and moribund.
The award for best carcass goes to: Some bald guy on a yacht.
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