Brenda Atkinson
Mixed Media
A couple of months ago, an excitable tide of telltale rippled through the Johannesburg ad industry.
Mike Schalit, creative director at Net#work and outgoing chair of the Creative Directors’ Forum (CDF), had called upon all CDF affiliated agencies to take up the cudgels for creativity in this country by toppling John Farquhar’s querulous discursive regime.
Or something like that. Depending on whom you spoke to the stories varied, but the essence of the reception remained the same: someone had finally had the balls to take on the old lion of AdVantage magazine, not in a corridor or at a bar, but formally and publicly by way of faxed invitation. Collect all your AdVantages, said Schalit and the CDF, and we’ll dump them at Primedia as a gesture of protest.
If Farquhar can persistently trash the industry, then the industry can trash back.
When the AdVantage police came into my office demanding that I release my magazines, I had a twinge of anxiety: what would I do if I needed to look something up? And as I eyed the CDF fax, I wondered if this was a bid by Schalit, aka “A bird in the hand is worth nothing if I can’t have all the birds in the bush”, to claim the upper hand in a war that has seethed in the industry since Farquhar took his stand as its ethical sentinel.
Farquhar is an object of ambivalence to most of us, even those who cringe every time he exposes another trumped up, deviously conceived award-winning ad campaign. His magazine is one of the most important and informative industry publications, but it is also the cause of profound discomfort to a new generation of creatives for whom awards are a legitimate form of kudos.
Schalit, whose winning streak has been perceived both with envy and admiration, is an unequivocal, if apparently benign opponent of what he sees as Farquhar’s old school mentality. Its result, he believes, is an insidious erosion of local credibility which causes clients, in particular, to regard their agencies with suspicion.
“If you’re a creative agency in this country,” says Schalit, “then you’re seen as a bunch of wankers, largely due to the understanding propagated by AdVantage that creativity is irresponsible.
But, in fact, the opposite is true: we need creative solutions in this country, and we as an industry can lead in more ways than through making ads.”
Farquhar laughs heartily when I mention the CDF coup d’etat. “These guys have an ejaculation every time they win an award,” he says. “They walk around with their egos on their sleeves, desperate for peer approval, and they don’t care whether or not they sell the product.”
Farquhar’s favourite crusade is against “creatives” in South Africa who refuse to address local context, where by far the lion’s share of spend resides in the mass market. They buy in, as he puts it, to the advertising formulae of international awards: punning language with an in-your- face funkiness that’s at odds with South African idiom.
“Advertising is not rocket science,” says Farquhar. “Local agencies address an elite market which speaks the global language of status symbols, but 99,9 % of adspend is parochial. For the majority of South Africans, who have never been abroad, their picture of the world comes down to where they live and what they do daily.”
Is there a hint of patronising old guardishness in Farquhar’s accusations, or are ad agencies – which are still largely run by white men – overly seduced by the idea that aspiration to the lifestyles represented by global brands is what drives local consumers?
“Farquhar is less a purist than a traditionalist,” says Schalit, “and he’s misusing a powerful platform in the process. Although the South African ad industry is tiny, our impact at international awards exceeds our size. AdVantage should acknowledge that there’s a lot of great talent here, and that some of the best brands have been built on creativity.”
I ask Farquhar to comment on Net#work’s award-winning Hoezit my bra print ad for Big n’ Tall clothing, which featured an ample black woman smiling down at her bra-clad breasts. The question elicits a tale of dedicated private detection: on a trip to the Big n’ Tall outlet in Strijdom Park, he finds a “dingy hole” of a store which “clearly has never advertised in its life”.
Another example of an ad campaign rustled up in time for the awards, strategically placed, says Farquhar darkly, in print publications targeted at men.
There is something honorable, if annoying, about Farquhar’s relentless quest for evidence of a Big Idea that grabs consumers and actually makes them want to buy a product. But there is equal merit in Schalit’s comment that AdVantage is a quality publication that needs more depth, and an editorial directive that drives its writers to look for the industry’s achievements.
The South African consumer landscape is perhaps more complex than either Schalit or Farquhar suggest. It is one in which emerging markets complicate the paradox of a Third World poor relation hungry for First World products and technologies; it is marked by the economic and cultural confusion of a frontier that is obsessed with the new, and which frequently succeeds at innovative pioneering.
What is certain is that the debate over creativity reignited by Schalit is beneficial to an industry in which too many feel they are beyond reproach. Conducted in a spirit of constructive criticism, it can only make things more interesting.
Brenda Atkinson is director of DDB Digital South Africa