“Believe. Or leave.”
Jeff Kling and I talked about the future of advertising. It’s all about owning a culture in order to change culture.
Advertising is a bet on the future of a brand. Advertisers invest without a guaranteed outcome. But having Jeff Kling lead the creation of your ads has proven a wise choice for Nike, Miller High Life, Dos Equis, Arby’s and Loctite.
How does that kind of success happen? On Wednesday, June 20 I sat across from Kling to kick off the tenth year of Conversations About The Future Of Advertising (CATFOA), to find out.
Long story short, the future of a brand boils down to culture and confidence.
As Ira Glass once put it:
“Everything wants to be mediocre, so what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such a fucking act of will.”
Kling is focused on the fundamentals, less so the latest technology. His approach begins with a premise: Advertising is not easy to make—whether the end result is derivative or changes the world. Whatever your attitude, the endeavor requires time, effort, attention, maybe even passion and definitely money. So it begs the question, if you’re willing to suffer, if you’re willing to engage, if you’re willing to invest in such a difficult process—why settle for anything less than remarkable as a result? Or as Kling puts it:
“If you do advertising that is invisible I guarantee it won’t work.”
Indeed. And yet so much advertising is waste and very few efforts stand out.
This is the challenge Jeff Kling is unafraid to confront. As a creative, as an account person, a planner and especially as a marketer client—your choice is simple, asserts Kling.
“Believe. Or leave.”
Believe your job, your assignment, your purpose in marketing and advertising is to effect noteworthy and lasting change. Inventing the future requires nothing less. Your work must be transformative—delivering a lasting impact on culture. Not clichéd. Not uninspired. Not banal. Not invisible. Kling said, “You have to have an opinion to break through.”
You can imagine how frightening and divisive this stance must be.
To creatives, it might seem glorious at first—until you realize just how high the bar is set; until you spend one too many nights searching the fog of the unknown for just the right articulation of an idea. What if you don’t find it?
For everyone else—mortgages and college funds seem literally at risk. To willingly, consciously embrace the unknown and spend precious corporate dollars on instinct and belief (even if bolstered by rigorous facts) is quite often too much change. How will we know it works? Kling said as muchback in 2005.
“We’re in a difficult business of asking people to pay for difficult work.”
As far as I could discern from our conversation, there simply isn’t an easy path or neat resolution to this conundrum. Too many escape routes exist to pardon resisting the effort. We’ve all been in those meetings.
And so it boils down to culture.
Those who attempt to change the world, those who wish to write the future must nurture an environment, an esprit de corps with that fearless goal in mind. A bond must be created between marketer and agency that nurtures an audacious trust. The true madness lies in presuming a noteworthy result is possible without any risk, without fear as a constant companion. Kling puts it this way:
“Stubborn, willful ignorance is the biggest problem in the world today.”
Thanks for your candor and insights, Jeff!
Kudos to the team at the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association for producing the Summer of CATFOA series and to OPAL and ICF Olson for sponsoring our dialogue.