Wessel Stoltz | Copywriter | Boomtown | mail me |
There are ads in airports and on aeroplane food trays; over highways and on the airways. There are ads in hospitals, grocery stores and sports stadiums. They adorn walls in video games, they are splashed across cinema screens and voyeuristically gawk at us in public restrooms. Not even our schools or the bottom of pools are safe from calls to action.
H.G. Wells, had such an aversion to advertising that he once passionately proclaimed, “Advertising is legalised lying!”
And Wells has much support in this regard.
Kalle Lasn, a filmmaker, author, magazine editor and activist, called advertising “the most prevalent and toxic of the mental pollutants”.
In turn, Hanno Rauterberg, a journalist for DIE ZEIT wrote about advertising: ‘[n]o dictatorship was as cheerful as this. So colourful and happy, so brightly lit. She doesn’t want anything bad for us, definitely not. She wants to seduce us, wants our great happiness. But as in any dictatorship, there is no escape from this, the dictatorship of advertising.’
But luckily, the antidote to the perceived toxicity could lie within one of the tools we use every day: good ideas.
Houston, we have a problem
At the heart of it, creatives are problem solvers.
Day-to-day tasks for designers and art directors, strategists and copywriters, centre around solving clients’ problems (briefs along the lines of ‘please-make-my-bang-average-brand-break-through-the-clutter’ or ‘help-me-reach-my-until-now-unreachable-audience’) by coming up with good ideas. And for the most, we (as an industry) are pretty good at using creativity to do it.
So why not go a step further and use our good ideas for good?
Why not work towards…
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Read the full article by Wessel Stoltz, Copywriter, Boomtown, as well as a host of other topical management articles written by professionals, consultants and academics in the April/May 2020 edition of BusinessBrief.
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