My misadventures into Advertising

My relationship with advertising and branding has some parallels with my relationship to learning and schooling. In my blogs on schooling and learning, I have made it very clear that I was a person who struggled and suffered considerably under a compulsory 11 years of schooling. That happened because I had an idea of what learning and education should be and schooling not only frustrated my personal development but damaged my goodwill towards the idea of helping people learn.

My relationship to branding and advertising, thankfully, did not last 11 years and I did not suffer the same emasculation of enthusiasm from it. I withdrew from the path early enough before the delusions of 'career advancement' and the dependence on a 'salary' and 'a particular lifestyle' weakened my reserve. But in both instances, schooling and advertising, I entered full of hopes and ideas and philosophies, thirsting to learn and grow so I can add more value to people's lives. But in both, I found that the players were more interested in what they want to hear, say and do than to create value for others. In both, their own idea of their own importance, 'abillity', seniority or ability to suck-up to whoever to get the next bonus/promotion seemed to trump the importance of putting their ears to the ground, understanding and delivering the goods.

But my experience in both schooling for a diploma and schooling to learn about advertising wasn't for nought. My favourite part of school was learning languages and my favourite part of LICT was the psychological aspects of branding and consumer behaviour. Both were about how people perceive the world and then express themselves based on the messages and symbolisms they received. Like language expression, consumer behaviour isn't android behaviour. The belief of both advertisers and researchers that consumers will react and behave in highly predictable ways year in and year out is highly flawed, just as the Skinner-Pavlovian school of thought about language learning is. It might take decades for the people vested in these industries to take notice but it's harder to change a person than it is to replace them with someone else. In other words, by the time 'archaic' teachers and advertising people turn around, they would be rendered null and void. Not only is information doubling at a faster rate than any other time in human history, it is my opinion that teachers and advertising people are too into themselves to want to accept learning and change.

Advertising people and teachers want to position and re-brand everyone else, but themselves. Schoolchildren resist the indoctrination happening in school and consumers' resistance to (sometimes, distaste for) traditional advertising messages is getting to the same level. Many people experienced schooling as a dumbing down process; many consumers feel the same way when coming across most ads these days. It's no longer just 'dissonance' consumers feel, it's outright disassociation with a brand.

When I was a freshman in college, I chose one of my assignments on the topic of "How Effective is Advertising." I remember I was the only one in class who did not advocate the merits of advertising. Everyone else was going the way of what the textbook says - you know, 4Ps, creating awareness, image, etc. My classmates were horrified at the stand I was taking and the way I chose to respond to the question of whether advertising is necessary to creating astronomical sales. They were horrified at me because, here we are paying top dollar to take a course in advertising and, I was saying Advertising is not necessary. I had chosen the brand CLAIROL to illustrate my points and tell my 'story' as 'the target audience they missed by a mile and a day.'

That assignment was to be marked by one of the leading women execs in the industry then. To the rest of my classmates, I was marking my own advertising-wannabe grave; I'd never get a job in an industry that requires its workers to BELIEVE that advertising WORKS because our salaries and advancement in the trappings of life DEPEND on that to happen!

I got an A+ and my lecturer, this really awesome lady (married to a Mat Salleh, hint hint)asked the class to applaud the essay that no one else would write. I wouldn't want to speculate, but I think her approving of my stand against advertising being the 'King' of branding efforts might have something to do with her withdrawal from the industry just a few years later. I had prepared myself to get an 'F' for my paper if my lecturer had thought I was being so stupid for coming to advertising college just to say advertising isn't King.

Word got around soon after that I was the first person who had gotten an A+ from that particular lecturer and for a good 7 minutes, I had a reputation of being the slacker from Penang who outdid the kids from the big city. I had two minutes of glory of being 'intellectually respectable.'

We know the cliche that those who do well on school papers and exams don't always do as well in real life. That was very true for me. A few years after that A+ paper, I spent a total of 6 months in various advertising agencies as a copywriter before realizing how contrived the whole thing was. I know people are bound to say I'm stupid for writing for free (blogging) now but what's dumber is writing something that totally isn't you for a client that has no vision of what they want. Granted, it's the agency's 'job' to 'create' a 'vision' and paint consumers a rosy picture of the values the company's brand represents. In the advertising world, that's called being a gifted spin-doctor; if the Halo Effect follows, you get a promotion or bonus or both. If the dominos don't fall on cue, you're fired. - But if you try pulling that same spin in all other industries of 'real life' you could get sued for false representation or arrested by the Securities Commission for misleading information. The Consumers Association of Penang has a container(trailer) load of articles on this, so you know.

I could lie to myself and work harder than 20 hours a day to be in line for a ticket to the 'Emerald City', but I had one currency that couldn't be traded for Ringgit. I could not live with myself for being part of a team of spindoctors lying to the average Joe for "mindshare". The tough part about believing in a definite unravelling is that everyone thinks we're insane to give up something promising. I've written a blog recently about how people frame their future based on their past experiences and then base all their other observations and choices on that illussion. I still believe to this day that those people who thought 'advertising was a promising avenue' for me framed their expectations from the big bonuses and maverick appeal of larger-than-life copywriters of the 80s and early 90s - a bygone era where the kopi-writer was a romanticized icon of "the new creative workforce". Since 1999 and the years that followed, I had found it difficult to lie about what I studied for and did for a living; I dare not say I'm a copywriter because I know the image it conjures in people's minds and it was not an image I believed to be valid nor has significance. It's not that I'm completely ashamed of my naivete for choosing to study advertising instead of, say, journalism at Brown University or Law at Harvard....hahah, as if! But it appeared to me as if the market is so desperate for someone who can proofread, write copy and edit 'releases' that any one who 'has some kind of writing experience' gets offered a job.

Advertising has one big flaw : the belief that assembling a motley crew (someone to give creative direction, a designer, a copywriter, a sales face with a short skirt, a fallguy and an errand boy) could somehow outdo the best research in sociology, anthropology,psychiatry,logotherapy, economics, etc to come up with the answer of how to elicit a desired set of behaviour/response from the general populace. I can hear the argument that beauty advertisements 'succeeded' in making women feel insecure about themselves but who's to say whether the chicken or egg came first? I could easily say that advertising did the bidding of astute entrepreneurs who understood the hidden insecurities of women in certain societies. The entrepreneur wrote the score and arranged the symphony, the ad-agencies just played the tune for the audience.

I respect humanity too much (in general) to see them that way, as if they are like anemone that sway to the "Creative Wave" The Team created. The truth is, sooner or later, young 'advertising wannabes' grow up and realize they need meaning in order to have a fulfilling life. Being part of a team of spin-doctors, living in a world that cares about nothing else but the client's and their own bottom lines and awards, young people grow out of the neediness for approval and become weary of the glitter that isn't gold. I feel guilty in a way for not writing this 10 years earlier because I recently heard that a distant cousin of mine isn't doing so well in life after going to the same college I did and working herself to a frenzy in an industry known for not having night or day. I don't know her well enough to tell her anything about the choices and philosophies she builds her life from. I can just hope that it wasn't my aunt who opened her big mouth years ago about how fantastic my college was going for me, prompting other people to buy into the illussion those full page black-and-white ads conjure. Because I know of at least 3 other people my aunt could've talked to whose children ended up in that particular college. The Hair might've been pretty pleased with himself for 'realizing' his dream of setting up a world-class institution but I really don't think it was the advertising that was working. Whether he realized it or not, whether it was a factor he had manufactured or a coincidence, it was his ability to enter the market at the right time, when Gen-X-ers were looking for other choices other than Law, Medicine, Engineering and Business. He had the good fortune of attracting the most radical, creative, affluent children to accept the old bungalow and 'metal' containers as 'classrooms'. Looking at the new campus now, no one could've ever believed that classes were once conducted in rectangular, industry-standard trailers and in a building which creaks with every step you take.