By Ashoke Agarrwal
There was a phase in the late fifties when advertising in the US was in crisis. After decades of high growth, business and people, in general, had begun to sour on the advertising industry, seeing them as a bunch of mediocrities pushing product features – “reasons why to buy” in a ho-hum fashion. As a result, marketers began wondering whether they were better off spending their advertising budgets on other marketing mix elements. In this scenario, ad professionals with a different view of the creative function in advertising rescued the advertising business. As a result, in the decade of the sixties and the seventies, advertising in the US was at the peak of its centrality to business and culture.
What creative school led to the renaissance in advertising in the sixties and the seventies?
Samuel W. Franklin, in his book, “The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History”, traces the emergence of creativity as a societally desired trait in individuals. As his book’s title suggests, he found that the history goes back to the post-WWII era. The US emerged as an economic and military superpower after WWII. It built a consumerist society in direct contrast to the system its rival USSR was building. However, the race with the USSR was tight as the late fifties rolled in. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 increased the unease in the US.
How was the US to prove the superiority of a free, democratic society over the regimented ranks powering the USSR? One idea was to assert that an individual’s freedom in the US was conducive to him being more productive and happier because it helped them tap into their intrinsic creativity.
In the forties and the early fifties, creativity researchers focused on the Great Man theory – the Einsteins and the Picassos of the world. The idea was that creativity was the province of the few and was demonstrated only by producing great works.
The need to make creativity the happiness and productivity-enhancing engine of a free democratic society led to what Franklin terms the “democratisation of creativity”.
The first school of creativity that emerged from this democratisation of creativity hypothesised that a key to creative ability was a fairly pedestrian cognitive ability called “divergent thinking”. Divergent thinking had three dimensions – fluency, originality and feasibility. All society needed to do for creativity to flower in its people was give people the means to practice and perfect divergent thinking in their professional and personal lives. And the leading evangelist of the idea that everyone can be a divergent thinker and, therefore, creative came from the advertising world – Alexander Faickney Osborn – the O of the ad agency BBDO. Osborn invented and promoted the technique of brainstorming. His bible on divergent thinking and brainstorming – ‘Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Problem-Solving’ published in 1953, is still in print and has many followers. Osborn also set up the Creative Education Foundation and the Creative Problem-Solving Foundation.
The crisis that the US advertising industry faced was likely a result of applying the divergent thinking process to develop ‘reasons to use’ advertising—leading to hackneyed, me-too creative work that failed to differentiate in the public minds products in a particular category from each other.
Away from the school of divergent thinking and frankly contemptuous of it was a school of psychologists, among them Frank Barron and Abraham Maslow, who believed that creativity was an act of self-actualisation. It was the result of achieving a psychological balance. According to Frank Barron, a person reaches their creative self when they accomplish this balance. Such persons score high on self-confidence, independence, curiosity and work ethic. The inner balance prevents the creative persons’ high self-confidence from spilling over into arrogance and is offset by honest self-assessment. In Barron’s research, the creative person tests high on “ego strength” that allows them to access irrational and erotic energies without yielding to bizarre, hedonistic, and self-destructive behaviors. Barron described the creative person as a productive amalgamation of opposites – both “more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, crazier and saner than the average person”.
This philosophy equates creativity with self-actualisation and the flowering of the inner self that led to the renaissance of advertising in the US in the 1960s and the early seventies. This approach to creativity drove the greats of the advertising renaissance – the Bernbachs and the Ogilvys. They based their advertising on more profound psychological principles than the then over-used “reasons to buy” approach. People don’t just buy products; they buy ideas about products. So, they sought to create advertising that imbued brands with meaning: meanings which, with a wink and a nod, put the target on the same self-actualization path as the creator/s of the advertising.
In a way, the receiver of the advertising message became one of its creators as she decoded the message’s meaning. Bernbach’s path-breaking campaign for the VW Beetle was a prime example of such advertising. It went beyond the banality of car advertising in the 50 and 60s, which extolled souped-up engines and tail fins. The VW Beetle campaign imbued the brand VW with a counterculture that sought self-actualisation by means other than the material. In that sense, the consumer of the VW Beetle campaign was as much the creator of the meaning of the campaign as Bernbach, and his team were. In that sense, the advertising of the sixties and the seventies spread the gospel of creativity far and wide. The 1984 ad by Apple and the Nike “Just Do It’ campaigns came from the same mould.
In my five decades in the advertising business in India, I saw a creative renaissance in advertising with the coming of the TV revolution. The Hamara Bajaj, Mile Sur Hamara Tumarah public service campaign and the Titan watches campaigns tapped into rich veins of meaning. Also, in my experience of interacting with creative people in advertising, the best were Renaissance men – well-read, well-rounded personalities—for example, the late Geoffery Frost of FCB, Chicago and later Nike. Geoffrey’s interests ran far and wide with a persona that was eager to engage as a lifelong student of people with anyone – high or low.
In the post-modern world, creativity has come to occupy a central place beyond what the Cold War warriors of the 1950s and sixties had envisaged. As a result, a new class of elites has emerged over the past few decades – The Creative Class. In his 2002 book, “Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life.”, Richard Florida argued that the new dominant group in society are those who create new ideas, new technology or new creative content, including scientists, engineers, teachers and even bankers with a “super creative core” of artists, writers, designers, filmmakers, architects and the sort.
The broader definition of the creative class is a significant shift away from the branding of creatives as eccentrics and nonconformists, people viewed as bizarre mavericks operating at the bohemian fringe. Instead, today “the creative class”, as defined by Richard Florida, is the very heart of the process of innovation and economic growth.
In their way, the Bernbachs and the Ogilvys were at the vanguard of the movement that catalysed this change.
Where is advertising today in the pecking order of the creative class? Quite likely far from the top. In the eighties advertising, as economic turmoil hit the world, advertising slid back to its hardsell days. A few decades later, the digital and social media revolution has made the creative side of advertising the handmaiden of martech and adtech as armies of cubicle warriors fight the performance marketing wars. So, will another creative renaissance of advertising ever come about? That would depend on where the AI revolution takes marketing communication. If AI platforms take over the drudgery of performance marketing, it could present the opportunity for creative minds to enter the advertising industry and build creative resonance with the creative selves of consumers on behalf of brands once again. But, on the other hand, AI could so wholly take over marketing with a brand’s AI engines in conversation with an individual’s personal AI engine (read my column AI, B2I and CI and Advertising’ published by MxMIndia on November 24, 2022, for my take on this scenario) then the creativity in the advertising industry will mostly be in the technology arena and not in the gestalt where individual psychology intersects with cultural memes.