When I was a little younger we used to discuss the ultimate measure of an ad campaign’s success: if you happened to be in a taxi, the driver might ask what you did for a living. After sheepishly admitting to your career in advertising, a second question would invariably occur: ‘Anything I’ve seen?’
And that was a reasonable question to ask; after all, our work would usually appear in the kind of places regular, everyday people (like cabbies) would see it: billboards, newspapers, magazines and TV.
The question was a test of how memorable or famous your work might be. If someone outside the industry, who would not generally read Campaign or Creative Review, was aware of your work, then that was the true mark of success. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel that The Taxi Test should still be the most important assessment of what we produce. If we are paid to communicate on behalf of brands, then the better we do that, the more famous the brand should become (yes, we also create work in niches that are not aimed at everyone, but the broader point stands). The problem is that much of our work can no longer achieve a Taxi Test level of fame.
‘Anything I’ve seen?’
‘Well, I made a really cool thing for Brand X where we took over its social feed for a day and pretended that the Cookie Monster was writing its Instagram posts.’
‘Er… I don’t think I saw that.’
‘Really? It won a Silver Lion at Cannes and a Bronze at Creative Circle.’
‘What’s that, then?’
‘Just… awards for good ads.’
‘Oh… right… Anyway, have you seen Keir Starmer’s been going down the Arsenal for free?’
Look at the list of Cannes Grand Prix winners of the last few years…
Leaving aside the ones that appeared in other countries, how many did you see ‘in real life’? The number is probably quite low, but the number seen by that taxi driver, or your own mum and dad, will be even lower.
Those ads are supposed to be the best of the best of the best, but for the vast majority of the population they didn’t even happen.
Beyond that, many of them now need a two-minute video to explain why they’re good; a two-minute video that’s usually populated by massaged figures, half-truths and meaningless numbers intended to convey just how many people cared about them. If those numbers didn’t exist, we’d have no idea if the work mattered to anyone at all.
The problem is that advertising creatives are rewarded for the wrong things. If you can increase sales by 10% or create something every cabbie knows about, no one in the industry will care. However, if your ad is seen by nobody but wins a Gold at the Clios, you will get a raise and/or a promotion.
So, as per Goodhart’s Law, ‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.’ We are incentivised to aim for the obscure award-winner over something famous but un-awarded, and after 20+ years of that folly, we now find ourselves with very few ads the cab driver has heard of.
But that cab driver has been the canary in the coal mine. Once we started to mumble apologetically about experiential takeovers, rich media banner ads and post copy, we should have known we’d strayed too far from the intrinsic point of the entire industry.
Clients usually want us to create work that makes them big, famous and known by cab drivers
But when we create work that is is none of those things, they might reasonably ask why they should pay so much for what we do. Sure, they are also somewhat complicit in the rush to digital obscurity, but we are guilty of enthusiastically leading them down that rabbit hole. As new media channels have appeared, we have tended to rush towards them for fear of otherwise seeming to be out of touch (for example, find a time machine and check out how much the 2002 ad industry loved Second Life).
Ironically, our desire to ensure that we do not miss out on the latest shiny toy has led us ever further from creating reliably famous work.
But how do we regain the fame and realign our priorities to where they ought to be? Simple: get the cabbies to judge Cannes.
Featured image: Clem Onojeghuo / Unsplash