Lack of Creativity: Pakistani Advertising

The consumers of today are hit by thousands of advertising and communication messages every day, and even though we know that it is a point of saturation in terms of amount of advertisement flowing in through multiple communication channels, we continue to do the same things every day. Even as marketers, in majority of the cases, we keep on trying to repeat the same formula for success for every brand we work for throughout our lives. I do agree that experience and learnings do play a key role in understanding the formula for success, but that doesn’t mean we apply the same formula for everything we work for. But sadly in my opinion, this is a mistake that we as consumers can also understand.

I’m not writing this to whine about the current marketing tactics of the companies, nor I am trying to blame someone. But the objective that made me start writing today on this topic was something very different. One of our blog readers Ms. Shaista, commented on the post Street Wall Adverts: Wonder or Blunder, regarding why does a brand have to put a logo everywhere? I agreed to this fact that, why does everything has to go commercial to maintain brand presence and brand recall? And when you come to think about it, although I agree that a logo is one of the main attributes that gives a brand its identity, what else do brand managers work upon in order to give their brand a life?

Honestly speaking, I don’t see many people working on the brands even thinking into that direction. The problem that I see, lies with the vision and a linear approach to thinking. Look at it this way. All of the advertisements that we see on TV, Print and Outdoor or we listen to on the Radio, has essentially the following things apart from the normal visuals and sounds:

· Brand Logo

· Positioning

· Tag Line / Slogan

This is what makes an ad, and it is working for people because there is already so much demand. But the thing that marketers don’t see is that, these are ONLY the essentials. EVERY ad out there comprises of these three elements apart from the storyline which is based on the positioning again.

The point that I want to raise here is that, WHAT extra are pouring in to get the desired impact? The answer is that except for a few brands, none of them work ahead of this line of essentials. And that’s where the problem in creativity lies. And this is why in my opinion Pakistan hardly competes in international advertising and creativity competitions, and then we just whine about India getting it. The advertisers and marketers in our country should realize that Indians are putting in more than the essentials in the ads that they are making, and that’s what’s taking them ahead. I know a lot of people might want to argue with me on the fact that Pakistani’s are now making better ads, but the fact is, very few of them actually go beyond the essentials that I have mentioned.

The problem is that the creativity we talk about is on the lines of the storyboard, linking the positioning to the story board, high quality visuals and somewhat humor. But we miss out on the conceptual connectivity element, and we have been playing on the same lines that our fore-fathers have been playing on. We just change the visual elements and modernize our culture according to changing scenarios. How can we expect to go a step further when we always want to play safe, like we are following a religion? That’s not what marketing and advertising is all about? In fact marketing and advertising should not have boundaries that we don’t understand in Pakistan. And boundary-less does not mean following an external culture in advertising but that’s in terms of giving a creative edge and conceptual connectivity to the brands.

Coming back to the aspect of adding more value on top of the essentials, a good example to illustrate what I mean can be the involvement of rituals. For example Coca Cola is doing a great job with their “Brrr…” campaign, they have the essentials {i.e. the logo, the positioning (storyboard) and the tagline (Mast hai Coke Zindagi)}, and on top of that they have started the Brrr… effect and everyone knows about it. People have started using it commonly in their lingo and chats, which is what really shows how impactful can be the campaigns that go beyond the “My List of Essentials for an Ad” in my opinion.

I am in no way stating that “Coke Brrr..” is an award winning campaign or not, but the simple fact is that if we want to move ahead with times of clutter, we have to move on physically, mentally and conceptually.

Think BIG & BEYOND!!

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