Ramsey Naja is chief creative officer at JWT MEA
“When, recently, markets looked like they had been listening to a Leonard Cohen song again, my heart sank. Not because I have a fortune dependent on the Nikkei’s whims, but because, just like truth in wars, the first victim of a recession is advertising creativity.
Economists often gauge the state of the economy by the length of women’s skirts (a theory happily discredited) or the waiting time to get a cab in London. It would probably be just as accurate to judge it by holding a Bland-O-Meter next to a pot-pourri of ads that appear during a specific period of time. Wall Street’s mood will be pretty obvious: the higher the blandness factor, the darker the faces on the Bloomberg channel and the more agitated Richard Quest.
It may be common sense: at times of uncertainty, everyone looks to the comfort of familiarity as the best refuge. As a result, “the Safe Option”, that ugly child, born from the unhappy union of self-preservation and blinkered vision, becomes an outright winner in any presentation or, at least a must-have before we consider anything else. The Safe Option, however, is as mischievous as it is misleading. While suggesting Volvo-esque standards of accident avoidance and shock absorption, it cleverly conceals the fact that, as far as its raison d’être is concerned – making a brand, product or service noticed – it is not particularly good. In fact, it is notoriously dreadful to the point of pointlessness, unless huge amounts of cash are thrown at the media that promote it.
We experience this every day, in fact. Or not, as the case may be: pick up any international business magazine in a recession and I challenge you to remember any of the advertising it carries on its pages. I actually believe that there are ads that are so spineless in their timidity, so camouflaged in the inoffensive, so bloody invisible, that it would have been better for the advertiser to give the media money to charity and bask in the warm glow of positive PR. You see, safe is – as the saying goes – just dangerous. Or worse, it is expensive.”