ADVERTISING IS NOT AN IDEA!

Early this year I interviewed for a general manager's role in an advertising agency and one thing that stuck with me but didn't sit well with me during the interview was when the CEO introduced his agency as one that is built on IDEAS. He believed that advertising was built on ideas so much so that their tagline was "just an idea", to him this was the starting point of advertising, an idea. I didn't accept the offer and that is why I write this letter to the community of advertisers who think advertising starts from having an idea.

I believe Ogilvy defined the purpose of advertising in this quote and to me this is the ultimate goal for advertising, TO SELL. If it doesn't sell the client's product or services then it isn't creative and I believe in this statement one hundred percent and believe that this is the sole aim of advertising. I worked in an agency that has a three-pronged approach to brand building and these were AWARENESS, ENGAGEMENT, AND CONVERSION. In theory, this is a great approach to the brand building but is only great in theory because, during my time there, we churned out hundreds of ideas for each stage in the approach above but never measured how those ideas impacted the bottom line of the business we were brainstorming for. I also never saw any tangible results these ideas brought to a client's business and this started my inquest into why we do what we do. Many advertising companies forget the most important thing a client does which is they run a business and therefore expect their business to thrive so that they can stay in business to pay the staff they work with who in turn have families to feed. I recently met a general manager of a retail company who said they employ over 200 "families", it took me some time for it to register that he was talking about the individuals they employed but to him, they were not just individuals but families. Hope by now we are feeling bad for collapsing businesses with just ideas that never sold an item or a service and in return rendered "families" jobless. We call them "clients" so much so that we forget that they have entrusted us with a business to help keep alive.

Pretend every business or account as we like to call them is a family that has a sign around their neck that says, "please put food on our tables tomorrow", and beyond putting food on the tables of families are also the payment of school fees, the payment of bills and the many other challenges and complexities life throws our way. As an advertiser, your first aim is to sell that product or service so that the business stays alive and if you don't have this as your core responsibility then you don't belong in this industry.

It always broke my heart whenever we lost an account at this agency and we lost many because we believed in the theory of awareness, engagement, and conversion more than the actuality of this approach. Beyond the failure of this approach was the discredit it brought to the agency and agencies in general. Now we have to talk twice as much at pitches and convince twice as much just because we keep losing the plot of why we are in this business.

What is the purpose of advertising? At my current agency which is a startup, in all honesty, https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/hashtag-africa1/?viewAsMember=true we believe in bringing brands back to purpose, therefore, the need to bring back the main reason for advertising which is to SELL. Let us always ask ourselves whether this strategy or idea sells the product or service I am working on and if it doesn't, remember that family with the sign on their necks depending on you to put food on their table.