This is one of those things I've been thinking about for a while, trying to come up with a good way into it. But I haven't really got one so I thought I'd just launch in and see what happens. I was reminded to write something by this great post from Gareth. But I think he's talking about a private corporate archive and I'm talking about something more public.
My basic thought: There ought to be a long tail for ads - but there isn't really.
Think of all the good, big brands that do good advertising and comms. They churn stuff out. Dozens of reasonably high quality bits of communications a year, most of which hang around for a few weeks and then completely disappear. And these are expensive bits of film or print. They've got good music and big stars and good jokes. Or whatever. You could probably stand to watch them again.
And you could defintely stand to watch them 5 or 10 or 20 years later when all the nostalgia kicks in. And at that distance even the bad ads look good. Or at least seem evocative of something or other.
I've seen the reaction you get when you show old ads to fans of a brand - they can't get enough.
And looking at a brand's history of advertising, would, I think, be a really good indication of the kind of business they are. So, as an ordinary customer, you'd imagine that you could just go to most brands corporate homepages and look at an archive of all their work, and of course, most of the time you can't.
The various buy-outs of music, artists etc mean that most ads are locked in corporate vaults never to be seen again. I remember when we did 'cog' at w+k we didn't have the rights to put the ad on our own homepage - couldn't afford it. And Honda didn't have it on theirs for very long. Fortunately someone took it into their own head to make a file of the ad available and served it up to the world. If they hadn't we wouldn't have been able to.
Obviously people like Adland are doing noble work creating an archive of stuff from now on, but imagine all those ads from the last however many years are just lost.
Now I don't know much about business affairs and buy-outs and that, I'm just a planner, but is this something that people are negotiating with artists these days? -Some kind of 'longtail buy-out'? ie we buy the rights to put this ad in a publicly accessible archive online but won't be actively promoting it, or sticking it in the Superbowl or anything. etc.
That seems like it might be an interesting idea. If we're supposed to be rethinking 'advertising' - thinking of it as 'content' (which I think we should) we also need to address the legal/copyright issues which make it so ephemeral. I also think it would make our work better if we planned on it having a life beyond the next 6 months, if we built advertising for the long-tail we might build better stuff.
Does that make sense?
(Before anyone writes in, I'm using advertising as a shortcut term for the full plethora of brand communications. Obviously.)
Russell, thanks for posing the question. I'm going to give this a try in the near future and let you know how I get on trying to weave it into the negotiations...
Posted by: Simon Pearce | January 25, 2006 at 08:10 PM
i think you are certainly right about this. Ad agencies may need to learn to be better curators. Social networks such as Flickr have begun to compile and organize the ads we let be forgotten. perhaps advertising could learn to love advertising a bit more. - could there be something psychological going on here?
Posted by: Tim | January 26, 2006 at 02:38 AM
Simon,
I suspect you're taking the piss here. But I'm not sure. Forgive the ignorance of a dumb planner. Is this a completely impractical idea? Or is it something everyone's already doing?
Posted by: russell | January 26, 2006 at 08:09 AM
...one more thought on this....i think part of the problem is trying to figure it out as an internal issue. brands live out in the market...can we help curate that?...perhaps help organize what is already going on...conect it up.
my sense is that if you want ot build a cult for your brand the worst thing to do is to try and focus on ownership...think of how badly that mindset has served the record industry. agencies should think of ways of fueling the cult of a brand so the "long tail" lives out in the marketplace on it's own wind behind the sail.
the ads are also more deeply connected to other cultural narrative if they are cultivated that way. see the search tags people associate with ads they collect and archive. that is a crucial part of the story. you miss this if it done as a purely corporate initiative.
Posted by: Tim | January 26, 2006 at 02:59 PM
Russell - Great thoughts. You and I are on the same wavelength!
As a hobby, I'm archiving/tagging/discussing hundreds of great, good, and bad *online* ads -- perhaps the most transient form of advertising of all -- for posterity:
http://adverlicio.us
Check out our small but growing collection and please encourage your readers to submit their work to us. We accept everything and will give creative/agency credit.
We've even got a bunch of Super Bowl online ads up for discussion:
http://adverlicio.us/superbowl
Enjoy!
Posted by: adverlicious | February 03, 2006 at 01:31 AM