Challenges of Advertising

We deal with an awful lot of information, and it is really important that we have that information in our heads when we sit down to solve a problem. It isn’t like being a painter where your only constraint is the size of the canvas; in our case the restrictions become much tighter. We may have an 8 by 11 page in a magazine we are working with, it may be a full page in a newspaper, or it may be a 30-second TV spot. In any case, we begin with very tight constraints that we have to deal with. We have 30 seconds to capture the viewer’s attention and hold it. With print, we have about three seconds. The number of people who will spend the time it takes to read body copy in a print ad is negligible: All readership studies say that, at best, three percent of the people who see the ad will actually read the copy. Basically, what you are getting is the time people will spend to look at a visual and read a headline and then they are on to the next page. The medium with the shortest attention span is outdoor advertising. We are restricted to no more than seven words on an outdoor board because people don’t have time to read more than seven words – although we occasionally stretch it to eight or maybe nine. When you look at it in this way, advertising is very different from art as a traditional means of expressing oneself, but it is so exciting and rewarding when you can come up with a solution that does everything a good piece of advertising can do and you’ve done it within these enormous constraints.

One of the things that can get in the way of doing good work – and this is a significant problem consistently – is dealing with multi-layered clients and the necessity of going through a complicated approval process. Very often there can be as many as five or six approval levels before work actually gets on the air or into print. That is a tedious, dangerous process because the work is often tweaked at every level, and it usually doesn’t make it any better. It can be frustrating for the creative person and ultimately an unproductive process for the client. But as most agencies do, we always try to streamline the process, often successfully.