I’ve said in the past that one reason I love advertising is that it’s creativity you can win at. You’ve got goals, indicators, KPIs, and you’re being creative while also trying to achieve things. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I also love creativity for its own sake, but I love the challenge of being creative plus.
That said, I don’t know that “win” really is the most accurate word. Achieving goals isn’t necessarily a “winning” kind of thing. There’s beating PRs as much as opponents. And (outside of, obviously, winning out over business competitors) advertising and marketing aren’t a thing where any of the parties have to come out a loser. Theoretically, we can all win. As long as we all want to.
And I’m not saying people are going around trying to specifically not do that. I’m just saying it can start to slip in. “Adversarial marketing” is the kind where it turns into marketers vs. audience, where you start to see the audience as an obstacle to your goals, and now your job is to get around their defenses and figure out angles that will make your product/service/brand look like something they need so you can get what you need from them. Which is not how it’s supposed to work.
Staunch, fluff-headed headed idealism
It’s (usually) not something we mean to do or something we’re taught, but when (for instance) a changing industry puts new demands on us while our goals and tools don’t adapt to meet them, everything can start to look like an obstacle. And anything can start looking like a necessity to overcome it. We might start doing things that aren’t effective. Or things that aren’t entirely aboveboard — even if they don’t meander all the way into an ethical breach or technically cross any lines in terms of (just for one example) truth in advertising, it’s still close enough that it it makes me, at least, uncomfortable.
Because you might have picked up on the fact that I’m a staunch, fluff-headed marketing idealist, haunted by adorable visions of some abstract rightness and how advertising and marketing are supposed to go. How we’re supposed to be promoting the right product or service to the right audience, and creative isn’t even so much about convincing as it is about communicating. We have information the audience would benefit from hearing, and message strategy is just a matter of finding the best way to connect with them to provide them with such information in a way they can understand it.
Hey, there’s this product that you should look into. We know you’re dealing with X, and you want Y, and our product, Z, would help with those things. You should look into Z. Here’s how to do it.
Obviously, the actual execution of conveying said message is a little more nuanced and graceful than all that. People don’t respond to stuff like that, and straight-up our job exists because creative, compelling, connective ways of communicating are the most effective way of doing it. But we’re doing it because it’s the best way to communicate that information they would benefit from knowing — not because if we can just get inside their heads, we can manipulate them into doing what we want them to do.
How it should be done (says the fluff-headed idealist)
Done right (Done Right) marketing shouldn’t have to be adversarial at all. We go in knowing who our audience is, and what our product is, and that our product is beneficial to our audience. If marketing wanders into adversarial territory — if we start facing off against our audience, doing whatever we can to get the conversion, meet the KPI — that means something is off.
If the audience isn’t responding to the message, it could be because we don’t know enough about them and/or the product to properly craft and convey our message.
If our messaging isn’t compelling to the audience, it could be our strategy is off.
If our strategy isn’t right, it could be the audience or product insights we’ve been handed are incomplete or inaccurate.
(Of course, in all situations, we have to accept that “maybe there’s no one else to blame and we’re just bad at our job” is a possibility. Sorry.)
And while it can be tempting to think about it as something that happens to creatives, anyone in the team can fall victim — anyone can, over time (or even over not much time), fall into the idea that the insights, strategy, creative, whatever we’re generating are our tools for defeating the audience adamantly standing between us and success.
Marketing needs to be a partnership between the marketing team and the client. But it also needs to be a tacit agreement with our audience that if they’ll listen to our message, the message we send them will be legit. If they listen and what we send them is hinky or manipulative, we’re falling down on our end of the agreement. I mean:
- Do you ever get mad at your audience for not responding to your efforts?
- Have you ever found yourself delicately excising a pertinent detail because you’re worried your audience would find it off-putting?
- Are you ever presented with an aversive for your audience and look at it as an obstacle to get around, rather than a factor to inform the way you communicate with them?
- Do you ever feel like you’re tricking them as much as you are compelling them?
It’s not because you’re a bad person, or bad at your job, or unethical. It could be you’ve stopped looking at your target audience as people — leaning on the target and not so much on the audience. You’re so loaded down with everything you have to do that some things, even important things, are going to slip. You’ve been assigned a goal and an audience that don’t mutually vibe, and something has to give.
(Or maybe you’re bad at your job.)
What to do about it (she says)
The answer involves a mindset shift. Remind yourself that there really are human beings at the other end of the communication chain. Do some research to re-familiarize with them as people with needs and fears and joys and worries. Look at the benefits of the product and reframe them in terms of solutions to those needs and worries and whatnot, and not just bullet points to help move weight. Talk to your manager about getting additional audience and/or product insights that can help add more human context for you. And if all else fails, mentally place your grandmother in your audience and think of how mad you’d be if someone tried to sell to her adversarially.
(Assuming you like your grandmother. If not, sub in someone you do like.)
Of course, one of the things that can make it extra frustrating is that when the point of failure falls elsewhere in the process, you don’t always have the authority to do anything about it. If you’re a creative presented with bad strategy or insights, if you’re a strategist provided with bad info, if you’re facing down the barrel of a client who insists on ineffective tactics in the face of all reason, if you’ve been given the task of selling blergs to an audience that neither needs nor wants blergs, you could have a lot of responsibility and not a lot of power.
Do… what you can. Have that talk with your manager about getting you the right stuff. Talk to others in the project team and see if they’re getting what they need, and if there’s any way to work together to get the work done right in spite of it. Do research on the side to see if you can sneakily connect the right messaging with the right audience. And if all else fails… maintain a paper trail and a reasoned explanation in case you don’t hit your KPIs. Life sucks, get a poncho.
But always remember it’s people on the other end. They’re agreeing to consume our messaging, and we can’t take advantage of that by handing them bullshit.
Marketing and advertising, as an industry, are challenging, but the audience isn’t the challenging part. They aren’t the obstacle — they’re the point of the whole thing.
Audiences are friends, not food.
Good luck.