By Ernie Schenck
“And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”—Friedrich Nietzsche
Imagine that you go to work tomorrow morning and you get an assignment. But the assignment is unlike any assignment you or anyone has ever gotten before. Not Bernbach. Not Gossage. Not Clow or Droga or Hughes or Goodby. Because this brief isn’t for a beer or a running shoe or an insurance company. You have zero chance of winning a Lion or a Pencil or of seeing your work in this very issue of CA. There will be no FWA site of the month, or site of the year or site of the anything. And yet, if you crack this, you will forever redefine what it means to have a big idea.
Deborah Morrison is the chambers distinguished professor of advertising at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. Recently, she wrote a piece for Co.Create in which she calls on advertising people to transcend the consumption cycle and train the full might of their creative firepower on what she calls the great and wicked issues of our day. You know the ones: Global warming. Hunger. Energy. Gun violence. Mass extinctions. Overpopulation.
As I write this, Dr. Morrison and nine advertising students are in Alaska studying climate change. They’re learning how to find the stories in the science—stories that most of us would never see, and not because they aren’t compelling. On the contrary, they’re beyond compelling, the stuff of nightmares without end. The stories are there all right, but they’re mute and colorless and shapeless, entombed beneath a mountain range of data. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Data can do many things. It can prove theorems, send rockets to the stars and cure diseases of every stripe. What it can’t do is light a fire under the collective ass of society. Data can’t do that, but stories and ideas can.
Dr. Morrison is the first to admit that advertising people are very good at creating awareness, even if, at times, the only awareness is in the eye of an awards show judge. But even the greatest campaigns can only go so far. Yes, they might get seen. Yes, they shock us and disgust us and put the fear of God in us, but in the end, do they change anything? “The brute force of intellect and creativity our profession offers the world is evident,” Dr. Morrison says. “But if we’re using it only for the consumption cycle, then what a mess we’re causing with those great skills.”
In the days and weeks following 9/11, like everyone else, I wondered why our government hadn’t seen it coming. I live two miles from the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. There are brilliant strategic minds over there. Surely, they could have foreseen a scenario where an airliner would be hijacked by a group of religious zealots and turned into a missile. After all, thriller novelists think up stuff like this all the time. All I could think was, “Why isn’t somebody like Tom Clancy or Brad Thor working with the government to imagine doomsday scenarios like 9/11?” In Debt of Honor, published in 1994, Clancy conceived of a 747 being flown into the Capitol. You do the math.
For such a creative industry, we’re awfully small thinkers. We confine our talents to selling soft drinks and hamburgers, cars and life insurance, movies and video games and smartphones. When we do it well, it can be brilliant and inspired and, at times, jaw-dropping. But we could be doing so much more. So why aren’t we?
“John Hegarty recently stated he thought the industry had lost its courage,” says Dr. Morrison. “He was talking about the big idea and an industry fetishism with digital. I’d like to suggest that we also need to find the creative courage to become the industry that solves the most pressing problems of our times.”
We’d better find that courage soon. How many young and brilliant creatives might we lose to other transformative industries where their powers of innovation can truly make a difference, not just at Cannes, but across the planet? And that would be a shame. This is an idea business. It’s always been an idea business. The question now is, can the same prodigious talent that so often graces these pages rise to a new challenge? Dr. Morrison thinks it can. I do, too. ca
Imagine that you go to work tomorrow morning and you get an assignment. But the assignment is unlike any assignment you or anyone has ever gotten before. Not Bernbach. Not Gossage. Not Clow or Droga or Hughes or Goodby. Because this brief isn’t for a beer or a running shoe or an insurance company. You have zero chance of winning a Lion or a Pencil or of seeing your work in this very issue of CA. There will be no FWA site of the month, or site of the year or site of the anything. And yet, if you crack this, you will forever redefine what it means to have a big idea.
Deborah Morrison is the chambers distinguished professor of advertising at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. Recently, she wrote a piece for Co.Create in which she calls on advertising people to transcend the consumption cycle and train the full might of their creative firepower on what she calls the great and wicked issues of our day. You know the ones: Global warming. Hunger. Energy. Gun violence. Mass extinctions. Overpopulation.
As I write this, Dr. Morrison and nine advertising students are in Alaska studying climate change. They’re learning how to find the stories in the science—stories that most of us would never see, and not because they aren’t compelling. On the contrary, they’re beyond compelling, the stuff of nightmares without end. The stories are there all right, but they’re mute and colorless and shapeless, entombed beneath a mountain range of data. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Data can do many things. It can prove theorems, send rockets to the stars and cure diseases of every stripe. What it can’t do is light a fire under the collective ass of society. Data can’t do that, but stories and ideas can.
Dr. Morrison is the first to admit that advertising people are very good at creating awareness, even if, at times, the only awareness is in the eye of an awards show judge. But even the greatest campaigns can only go so far. Yes, they might get seen. Yes, they shock us and disgust us and put the fear of God in us, but in the end, do they change anything? “The brute force of intellect and creativity our profession offers the world is evident,” Dr. Morrison says. “But if we’re using it only for the consumption cycle, then what a mess we’re causing with those great skills.”
In the days and weeks following 9/11, like everyone else, I wondered why our government hadn’t seen it coming. I live two miles from the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. There are brilliant strategic minds over there. Surely, they could have foreseen a scenario where an airliner would be hijacked by a group of religious zealots and turned into a missile. After all, thriller novelists think up stuff like this all the time. All I could think was, “Why isn’t somebody like Tom Clancy or Brad Thor working with the government to imagine doomsday scenarios like 9/11?” In Debt of Honor, published in 1994, Clancy conceived of a 747 being flown into the Capitol. You do the math.
For such a creative industry, we’re awfully small thinkers. We confine our talents to selling soft drinks and hamburgers, cars and life insurance, movies and video games and smartphones. When we do it well, it can be brilliant and inspired and, at times, jaw-dropping. But we could be doing so much more. So why aren’t we?
“John Hegarty recently stated he thought the industry had lost its courage,” says Dr. Morrison. “He was talking about the big idea and an industry fetishism with digital. I’d like to suggest that we also need to find the creative courage to become the industry that solves the most pressing problems of our times.”
We’d better find that courage soon. How many young and brilliant creatives might we lose to other transformative industries where their powers of innovation can truly make a difference, not just at Cannes, but across the planet? And that would be a shame. This is an idea business. It’s always been an idea business. The question now is, can the same prodigious talent that so often graces these pages rise to a new challenge? Dr. Morrison thinks it can. I do, too. ca
Ernie Schenck (ernieschenckcreative.prosite.com) is a freelance writer, a creative director and a regular contributor to CA’s Advertising column. An Emmy finalist, three-time Kelley nominee and a perennial award winner—the One Show, Clios, D&AD, Emmys and Cannes—Schenck worked on campaigns for some of the most prestigious brands in the world in his roles at Hill Holliday/Boston, Leonard Monahan Saabye and Pagano Schenck & Kay. He lives with his wife and daughter in Jamestown, Rhode Island.
