It’s time to stop fetishising our demise

They say a builder’s house is never done. Perhaps it’s the same for our industry too.

At our best, we help clients get to the core of what they really offer consumers, and maximise that power. “You don’t sell X (insert product), you actually sell y (insert emotional benefit)” is a bit of a clichéd format, but it’s the heart of what we do. We unlock a brand’s potential. And it works. Unlocking that Dove could sell confidence, not just soap, drove decades-long growth. Conversely, imagine what a different story it would have been had Blockbuster seen itself as the seller of a big Saturday night in, not just the purveyor of videos and DVDs.

Why is it we struggle to see the potential in ourselves?

I know that crises get clicks, but our industry’s narrative is becoming a fetishisation of misery. We are told the same old tropes in conferences, trend reports and media: Nobody engages with advertising. Young people don’t want to enter our industry. Shoppers are so bound by the cost-of-living crisis that they don’t have money to buy our products.

If I was the strategist for our industry, I would see things differently.

I could start by saying, “You don’t sell ads, you build brands’ intangible value.”  We can turn cloth, metal, and more into status symbols. We can turn inanimate objects sitting on shelves into things that meet deep emotional needs and so much more. Our value as an industry isn’t the assets on a deliverable list, it’s the magic layer we add that makes our clients’ products feel needed, desirable and crucially, worth paying more for. And the last time I checked, most businesses were still pretty interested in selling their products, and selling them at a good price.

But there’s more wind in our sails than that alone.

Our method of building a brand’s intangible value is through storytelling. Great news! We are now watching and listening to more stories than ever before. Sure, they may not be in a 30 second ad (though they often are), but to bemoan the changing parameters of storytelling, rather than revel in the astronomic increase in the amount of stories being consumed is surely a case of going right to the heart of the periphery. If half our business is to crack the story, and the over half is to tell it, the fact people want more stories, in more ways, is a good thing.

If I was the strategist for our industry, I’d also try to unpack the nuance of our targetable end consumer – the people who buy things with their money. Whilst the cost-of-living crisis is real, and it is shameful that foodbanks have become a permanent solution for many, this does not paint a complete picture of spending power. Those over the age of 55 are the richest generation in history. And beyond age, as a nation we are persistent excess savers who have built up between £143bn and £338bn pounds in the bank. In the first few months of last year, British households saved 11 per cent of their salaries, a figure which is much higher than our US counterparts, where spending has been an important factor in economic growth. Rather than focussing on the cost-of-living crisis, as advertisers, we should be engaged in unlocking the big, concentrated pockets of wealth that people can afford to spend. Not only will this help our mood, it will also make our clients more money, and serve our economy.

And lastly, if I was our industry’s strategist I’d reframe the conversation about the war on talent that we are apparently losing. While it’s true that we have much work to do to stop missing out on talent for exclusionary and lazy reasons, the idea that young people, in general, do not want to work in our industry is simply not true. When children start secondary school, unsurprisingly, the no 1 career choice is being a footballer or equivalent. But you know what comes second? Creative and Media. By the time they reach year 11, when they start making big decisions, Creative and Media is at number one. When we look at it broadly (which is the way young people look at careers when they are at the start) we are number one. For clients, and for us, that’s compelling stuff.

I’ve never found it helpful to catastrophise. As a strategist our job is a positive one. It is to find potential and unlock it. It’s time we saw our own industry in the same way. To flip the story, we need to start measuring ourselves by the value we create and stop obsessing about assets and deliverables. We need to break free from unhelpful and negative consumer generalisations. And to top it all, we need to remember that we are at the helm of an industry that young talent want to be part of.

So let’s look out, look up, and not put the next generation, ourselves, or our clients, off the incredible work that we do.

 Matt Waksman is Ogilvy UK's head of strategy