Why a lack of happiness may be the biggest threat to our industry.

I’ve been reading more and more about the scientific pursuit of happiness. How psychologists like Ed Diener and Martin Seligman have been investigating just how important happiness is to the human condition. And I’ve also been paying closer attention to reports from the World Economic Forum about the measurement of the happiness of different countries. And how those countries, in turn, have been promoting their level of happiness as a way to drive tourism. 

And the more I read these things, the more I can’t help but thinking that, as obvious as it sounds, happiness is important to people. But I mean, important in a way that previous generations haven’t prioritized it. Where previous generations postponed happiness (“I’ll have time to be happy when I’m older; right now, I need to work”) or tried to buy it off with materials goods (“This car, these shoes, this house will make me happy by filling the void in my life.”), increasingly consumers today are willing to do neither.

And if current consumers (and by “consumers”, of course, I’m speaking broadly and really mean “humans”), are taking their own happiness more seriously, then it follows that this fundamental shift in priorities MUST be reflected by advertising agencies.

Why?

For two reasons, though I am sure that the will uncover more.

First, because one of the things that makes our business unique is that we are intimately concerned with understanding what motivates people. What makes them want to buy, yes of course. But also what makes them happy, what makes them sad, what they aspire to and what they fear. Great advertising – and the great thinkers among us who have made it – has always been deeply aware of all their targets’ motivators, and how they were changing. 

And if this “pursuit of happiness” is more important to the current crop of consumers than it has been for preceding generations, then it is essential for us to figure out how to reflect it in our work. 

Now, does this mean we should replace images of brooding actors and pouty models with ridiculously happy, smiling, morons? Probably not. As with any insight, the power of this will be revealed in a thousand subtle ways by brilliant creatives, strategists and other smart marketing people. 

The second reason this insight must be reflected by all of us has to do with the simple fact that we, by and large, tend to employ the very humans who are prioritizing their lives in this new way. And if happiness is more important to them than it has been to other generations, then that can’t help but impact the way they expect to do their jobs, engage with their employers, and even choose careers.

The fact that many of them also turn out to be the people we’re selling stuff to just makes all of this that much more important.

In other words, the importance of this insight is not only that it changes our task for our clients – it changes what our very own employees hope to get out of doing their jobs at our agencies for those clients.

And sure, you can puff out your chest and say “ah, suck it up; being happy isn’t everything.” But clearly that’s not true any longer. Being happy IS important now – and the smart agencies will be the ones who not only understand how that affects the consumers they are speaking to, but also how it affects the employees they hire. 

Because I would posit that people who are NOT happy, who do NOT prioritize happiness in their lives are fundamentally not able to understand how to talk to people who do. Or said another way, hiring people who are not pursuing happiness will probably produce work that is less effective at reaching people who ARE pursuing happiness than work produced by people who are. Because it’s an essentially different way of looking at the world. 

And my guess is that this insight will literally change the structure of agencies. Because people who prioritize happiness will be much harder to buy off with bigger offices, bigger titles, bigger expense accounts, or bigger whatever-else-agencies-have-been-assuaging-the-egos-of-unhappy, unfulfilled employees with for decades. 

Which means the product we make will change, and the way we produce that product will change.And I realize that’s a lot of change to embrace, and you may balk. But the stakes couldn’t be higher. Because if I’m right about happiness, and we as an industry don’t figure out how to embrace it, the companies we call our clients will stop using us. They will forgo our entire industry for one that will help them tap into this prioritized desire for happiness. Heck, you could make the case that they already are.

It’s up to us, of course. Marcus Aurelius said that all you needed to make a happy life was within yourself, in your way of thinking. 

And it makes me happy to think he may be right.