Did The Rise Of Online Cause The Extinction of The Advertising Creative?

Recently, I read a very interesting post in the Ad Contrarian, one of my favorite marketing blogs. Essentially this post stated that the rise of online has killed the advertising creative. Let me be more precise and actually use his exact words:

“Unfortunately, what is evolving in the advertising world seems to be an even more emphatic creative dead end. Intelligent people can disagree about the effectiveness of online advertising. But I don’t see how anyone can be anything but dismayed at the dismal absence of charm, artistry and imagination in most online advertising.

Is advertising creativity really going to devolve into writing meta tags for search and brain-dead tweets? Is the future of advertising really asinine ’YouTube’ videos and invisible display ads and the pathetic neediness of ‘Facebook’ likes?”

Pretty strong words. Leaving aside the fact that I actually enjoy asinine You Tube videos, I would actually argue that the rise of digital has created an unprecedented increase in the creativity in advertising. Where I believe the Ad Contrarian and I disagree is in the definition of creativity: if you define creativity as pure copywriting and visual, he may (and I strongly state, just may) have a point. But what digital has forced is a much broader definition of what creativity is: it isn’t just the print ad or the spot, but how everything works together, and the rise of social has only forced that to increase. To make a comparison with the arts, it is a little bit like the emergence of mixed media: the message it’s not just what you represent, but is how you get there and the materials that you use to communicate the message.

There are many brands that in the past 10 years have leveraged the medium to be really creative, think about a couple of really famous examples like the Old Spice campaign last year or the Burger King subservient chicken a few years ago.  One that caught my fancy recently is the Tweeting Fridge, a campaign launched in Brazil by Bonafont. Looking at it, it is pretty hard to argue that the advertising creative is on the verge of extinction…