Global ideas, designed to unify a brand with one creative message that runs across the globe, don’t work, according to legendary ad man Sir John Hegarty.
Hegarty, the founder of BBH, said that the more international work he looks at that offers a global creative, the more he believes it doesn’t work. Because it doesn’t resonate with people on a culturally relevant level.
“Increasingly I’m looking at international work and I’m thinking that global advertising does not work. I’m looking at work that glides past people and doesn’t touch them, isn’t a part of their culture and doesn’t connect with them. I think we have to start challenging this idea that global is the right way to go. It might be for some things, but for most global work I’m seeing a decline in impact, a decline in creativity."
It’s a product of clients looking for more cost effective ways to build brand messages because it's more cost effective to create one piece of global work and take it around the world, but it’s not working, he said.
“It’s not touching people. My big thing at a global advertising conference is to say I’m not sure global advertising is working and something, I think, has to change.”
Sir John was speaking alongside David Droga, founder of Droga5, who also thinks going global could be diluting brand creativity.
He said: “I agree with John. The vanilla of global is dangerous, mediocrity rules, right, but the stuff that hits that emotional core, that’s what translate across boundaries. So I’m obsessed with just trying to keep it real.”
For Droga, the context of an ad is as important as the content and the medium, because that’s how it becomes relevant to people.
Talking more specifically about the US work Droga5 developed for Newcastle Brown Ale with the Super Bowl spot that never ran starring Anna Kendrick, Droga said: “I love it, but who knows if it will translate here because it’s very US-centric and I feel that knowing your market and who you’re talking to is very important, because we’re an industry that talks about content and canvas. Content is the idea and canvas is the television, mobile, print, but we never talk about context – like what context something will be consumed in and I think when you add that layer on to something it really adds a different dimension.”
For more on what these two industry heavyweights discussed on stage at Cannes and other highlights from the Festival of Creativity, pick up the next print issue of AdNews, out 27 June.
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