My biggest fear, as a creative, in advertising, in a recession, again (showing my age) is that rather than use innovative creative thinking to deliver maximum impact and make marketing budgets work really hard, advertisers start to want to simply tell consumers what they are trying to sell and hope they will be the product of choice.
Perhaps this is why there seems to be an emergence of direct response-style ads at the moment.
I am reviewing the gocompare.com ad. You will know it. It's the one with the very nice shrunken male and female presenters who hop around the kitchen table. Then they go onto gocompare.com and tell us how to 'gocompare' more car-insurance sites than any other comparison websites and find the best car insurance for us.
On paper, this ad should work. It is to the point and highly branded, not cluttered with creative stuff, clever concepts and endlines or unnecessary crowd-pleasers. They say gocompare four times; it is branded on screen for 90% of the time; the name is in the 'Why gocompare anywhere else?' call-to-action endline with a jingle to help you remember; and the whole script is about how gocompare.com can save money on your car insurance.
Having watched it a couple of times now, I realise I am the target audience. That is me, the smiling ageless lady in the little pink tank top, and that's my handsome husband in the baby blue jumper, with his neatly coiffed hair, both of us looking like we have just stepped out of a stilted 50s washing powder ad uncomfortably into this high-tech internet thingy.
The really scary perception is that having seen this ad many, many times and having just been through the process of renewing my car insurance, I definitely ought to have realised this before. So why did this gocompare ad fail to engage me as a consumer?
Maybe the next 12 months is the perfect time for adspenders to use - wait for it - creativity to add value. A liberal sprinkling of creative insight makes things happen, even in a recession. Moreover, even if it feels like the risky option at times, it's not. This is a moment when, more than ever, people want to be entertained as well as informed by what is, after all, one of the world's greatest advertising industries.