Waiting for the rebirth of advertising

In 1987 the Saatchi brothers tried to buy Midland Bank in London. They were promptly laughed out of the city. Quite right too. It was a stupid idea. In spite of their hubris, however, they still made a massive statement that changed the business.

The fact that the most famous advertisers in the world wanted to get into banking was an unmistakable sign that the action had moved on. Greed was good, global finance was king and advertising was small fry.

Not surprisingly, the house of advertising has been on something of a downer ever since. The procurement officers have slashed and burned the place. We've been unbundled, floated, integrated, forced to put telephone numbers on our ads, pushed into ambient media and frog-marched online.

All the while the bankers made unfeasible amounts of hay with their deregulated money markets, leveraged investments, private equity, hedge funds, mortgage securities and God only knows what else. They pocketed so much money so quickly they made advertising look like a kiddies playpen.

Advertising has always struggled with its risible importance, even when times were great, but once the bankers started making silly money advertising seemed to choke on its own lack of confidence. When the confidence evaporated, the romance soon followed. It was replaced by a grim determination to squeeze as much out of the lemon as was physically possible.

Then came the GFC.

You can actually train a horse to drink less and less water until eventually it falls over and dies.

When you heard about mega-brewer Anaheuser-Busch refusing to pay retainer fees to their biggest agency in Chicago, or agencies being forced to pay to pitch for clients in India, or big FMCG VPs saying they expect to get most services for free (thanks all you crowd sourcing guys) not to mention countless redundancies and closures, it feels like that's exactly what's happened to advertising.

But the night is darkest just before dawn, apparently. The problem is, depending on whom you talk to or which poll you read, the darkest part of the night is dragging on a bit. So when are things going to turn around?

I mean the bankers have blown it, obviously. Parts of the global financial system have been exposed as the biggest ponzi schemes in the universe. The idea that you could lend money into existence and then use it to force up house prices to ludicrous levels, sell the associated sub-prime mortgages as AAA securities then go and buy corporate jets on the proceeds has been well and truly discredited.

Advertising by comparison is looking positively honourable. By no means are we paragons of puritan thrift. Some of us are still doing Kafkaesque scams, we still seem to need our self-congratulatory award fix and we persist in dressing up what is pretty simple stuff (research, inspiration and imagination) with fictitious half-science that no one really believes.

But we are solvent, just. We haven't been nationalised or bailed out. The government didn't cap our bonuses, not that they ever needed capping.

On top of all that, they just passed finance reform in the US. I haven't read the bill but I assume it means that banks have to start acting more like banks than casinos. So now that everyone realises the world is a much better, fairer place when banking is a comparatively safe and boring business, isn't advertising the best job in town again?

It should be. Because make no mistake, what we do is valuable. In spite of all the changes, criticism and loss of confidence in the last twenty years, mainstream advertising is still the most cost-effective way to sell mass-products to mass audiences. As such, it will remain one of the best ways to help keep the global economy going.

This is a fact that marketers appear to be rediscovering. AD Age, one of the most vocal champions of digital in the last few years, recently stated that due to renewed interest in TV, "marketers may be finding that TV is a better buy for the money [compared to digital]" (June 21, 2010).

So is this a sign of the long-awaited recovery for advertising? That remains to be seen. One thing is for sure, we'll know if things are on the up soon enough. Unlike the financial markets, advertising works out in the open under the public's scrutiny, which is, as we all now know, a far more exacting test than any financial regulator's.

In the meantime ZenithOptimedia have estimated global ad revenues will rise higher than forecast in 2010. They believe there won't be a double dip. I hope they are right.

Nick Cocks is creative partner at The Clinic.