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Golden Age of Creative Advertising?

The examples that we talked about in the previous post all date up to the 1950s. The 1960s were the decade that media channels became mass, in fact in the UK it was 1966 to be precise – thanks to the World Cup, we witnessed the mass adoption of colour television.

The World Cup was the watershed that heralded what I’ve called it the era of “inner-directed creativity” – by that I mean that suddenly all the creativity that had previously gone into creating stuff like the Tour De France, or the Lyons Coffee House record label or the radio soap Ma Perkins, now went into traditional mass Advertising.

So you had the likes of Ridley Scott making TV commercials: 1984;

Advertising that decades later people still talk about like Nick Kamen stripping off to his boxers for Levis

British Airways advertising from 1989 that still makes the hair tingle on the back of my neck tingle.

Creativity was focussed inwards, focussed on specific media channels.

Now thanks to consumer empowerment, media fragmentation and a move from “deference to reference” (i.e. we ask other people rather than believing the experts), we seem to be in a period when creativity once again (just like 1900-1966) needs to focus outwards again.

Are we moving towards a time when it will be just as hard to reach mass audiences through conventional media as it was 100 years ago?