Advertising will eat itself

When did the collective navel of the world of design and advertising become the thing most likely to sell people noodles, bank accounts and soft drinks?

"I'd love to see fat girls from Ohio in our industry or Muslim girls from Bankstown or shy kids from Bendigo or an introverted genius from Mount Isa."

Now I know we all fancy ourselves a bit right now, but I hope and pray that most of you will have spotted that as a rhetorical device, rather than a challenge to create another self-referential advert. Evidence suggests you might have gone and done just that.

The advert about advertising is more contagious than swine flu. In the case of Comm Bank's seemingly endless 'Determined To Be Different' campaign it's also been brought back from the U.S. and ought to be put into quarantine. It's a shame because someone somewhere in the Comm has done something different, they've stopped double dipping on ATMs and suspended executive bonuses. However someone's found it hard to resist the sheer pleasure of pointing out how crass and stupid advertising people are... exactly in order to make the point of just how subtle and clever they are. I believe that's called 'narcissism', and that term was never supposed to be positive.

Think about the noodle ads that are set in a focus group. The idea that this probably went into testing in a focus group where, lo and behold, it seemed to ring a bell. Well, you daren't even imagine what that debrief must have been like, the layers of complex irony there are too much to even ponder, needless to say if one carries on unpeeling them they will, like an onion, make you cry.

It's not just advertising. The first thing that way too many designers look at on receipt of a brief is designs of other things that are just like the things that they're designing. Now I might be a pedant but I have a suspicion that not every suburban mother is looking for every category in her supermarket to look like its been stenciled by Banksy.

Perhaps the problem is institutionalization. Advertising and design has been collated, curated and published to the point where you wonder whether we need consumers or clients any more. Maybe we could all just blog to one another? Perhaps, like betamax and floppy disks, punters have outlived their usefulness in the inevitable march to the bright future where we are installed in the creative pantheon. Heaven knows I'd like my home designed by the people from Mad Men as much as the next man, but I suspect that this won't have punters falling at our feet like women at Don Draper's immaculately polished brogues. However if some of you are thinking that might be a good thing you really ought to start writing that novel now.

If advertising and design assume the significance of 'proper' culture it might also do well to wonder what happened to other popular art-forms. There was a time when classical music, jazz and even painting were all central to mainstream culture, people consumed them, talked about them, had an opinion on them. And then? Each of these started to take as its main subject itself, its history and descended into a self-important vortex of navel gazing. That ought to sound familiar. Of course our industry won't disappear up its own earnest goatee but into its own ironically retro T-shirt.

Despite all this the irony is that at our most narcissistic we've lost a sense of irony. The Gruen Transfer might be really, really popular for a show on the ABC but it's hard not to forget that most of the people watching it don't even watch ads and probably think they're too clever to ever buy anything because of one.

There are bigger issues at stake here. Spend some time, if you can, looking round a few agencies and remind yourself just how monotonously faux-hemian we all are. Every day is dress down Friday and there's a lot of people in the same difficult spectacles and eighties sneakers. By making more and more of our output about ourselves we reinforce our rightness and our specialness, and we exclude everyone else.

I often hear from, non-industry, friends that The Gruen Transfer makes advertising look like a big boys club. That's pretty undeniable, and whilst we hear reports that it is increasing the number of kids applying to do media courses you wonder just who they just might be. That people out there think that they might want to be in advertising because it might get them on the telly is not exactly a ringing vindication. Millions of people want to be on Big Brother, that doesn't make any of the contestants a contemporary Oscar Wilde.

Finding more ways to find more people who are more like us than ever is a dangerous thing. The more smug and homogenous our industries become, the less likely we are to communicate deeply, directly and effectively with those people who might just pay our wages.

In the 1991 documentary, 'Hearts of Darkness' Francis Ford Coppola said "To me the great hope is that now these little 8mm video recorders and stuff have come out, some... just people who normally wouldn't make movies are going to be making them, and - you know - suddenly, one day, some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart". To say that was prescient was an understatement.

I'd love to see fat girls from Ohio in our industry or Muslim girls from Bankstown or shy kids from Bendigo or an introverted genius from Mount Isa. It's not because I'm that bothered about inclusion or equal opportunities but because I believe new ideas come from the places we don't usually look... not from the mirror.

By John Matthews, Blue Marlin's Head of Strategy, for:
Australian Creative, August 2009