But are memories really truths? (Okay, you might ask, "Where in heck is she going with this? And what's that got to do business or marketing?").
Read the Editor's Note in the January issue of ADOI magazine today. In a nutshell, it's an ode to the past, a lamentation of glorious days gone by when ad legends did awesome work.
But what constitutes advertising awesome-ness? Aside from the dubiously-won awards attached to the work (as some may argue), the only thing I could think of that would give credit to the work would be if enough people remembered it.
I remember the "755-25-25" Pizza Hut jingle, the "Boh...ada ummmph!" ad for tea, "Maggi Mee Cepat Dimasak" jingle, "Minum Milo, anda jadi sihat & kuat" and much more. Many out there would remember them too. And because many remember them, you could say that those campaigns were considered great since they were so memorable......Not sure if they were successful though, because I don't really know whether they met ROIs and all that jazz.
But here's where memorability ain't all that. I know that the reason why I remembered all those jingles and TV ads is because I watched a lot of TV when I was a kid. There were no other screens to compete for my attention, there was no Pay TV with its gazillion channels, yet. No mobile phones with cool, time-wasting apps. No WiFi-enabled laptops that allows to surf in the loo. So, the ads stuck. Chances are it's the same for pretty much everyone.
So, is it really fair to say that those campaigns were great in the first place? Would they have been thought as good enough for today's media-fragmented, multiple-screen scene?
In those days, one had to create a truly creative piece of advertising that can enrapture the audience in under 30secs. That is a real skill, folks. Some may say it's fluff but it's got to be said that creating ads in those days was akin to alchemy, a combination of magic and science. So, it does take time to create such work.
But the time we have then is not the same as now. Brands do not have the time to languish and wait for agencies to come up with flashy, foot-tapping ads. As a result, the ads we see now are somehow diminished in quality and you've got old people like me lamenting about how come they're not as wonderful as the ads of old.
Nowadays, a brand has to be everywhere. And the place to be these days, is on the net. Coz' that's where everybody is at (okay....maybe not everybody, but still, it's a lot of people). And the brand has to continuously refresh its messages coz' each message can get pretty stale after a short while.
And that's how it keeps staying memorable these days. No longer with the one-off TV commercial, but continuous bombardment of messages, some carrying conversations with their target audience via social media tools.
Am I saying that messaging quality is compromised? Well, it ain't a fair apple-to-apple comparison.
But those old ads sure were something good.
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