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Brenda Atkinson wonders why ads in
trade magazines are so bad – and who creates these sub-standard promotions
I was paging through a copy of Engineering News recently. I know less about engineering, but I maintain a healthy interest in a wide variety of topics, and have been known to frequent garages and hardware stores. I have also read Car magazine on occasion and usually find some form of imaginative challenge in a metallic-sheened world that wants you to buy what it sells.
Unfortunately, paging through Engineering News, the frisson I was expecting from a sublime coincidence of advertising and engineering technologies was not to be found. Instead I was assailed by a mess of cheesy line-drawings and bad deep- etches of things called “magnetic drive chemical pumps” or “screw-conveyors”, as notable for their awfulness as for their grey ubiquity.
With all that sexual innuendo going on, you’d think that advertising clients would beef up their style a little. So what if it’s been done to death almost everywhere else – a little “melting, forging and heating” of the creative could go a long way.
And once that barrier had been crashed into, clients could take a leaf out of almost any other book and actually employ advertising agencies to take their products to new heights.
Given the dismal standard of the creative in most trade publications, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a certain sector of the ad industry is about anti-aesthetics; a sector driven by a chain-gang pushing out sub- standard ads for an impossibly dull target market.
Flip through any glossy magazine on the other hand and you’ll be soothed into consumer-oriented creative wonderland. Beautiful bodies advertise desirable products; new technologies have added numerous dimensions to aesthetic expectations; everything from clothing to food to furniture conspires to pull us into a world where aspirational values and cultural cachet are encouraged and applauded.
This is advertising as most of us know it: it’s about building relationships with brands, anticipating the needs of the consumer, and then fulfilling them. Agencies want you to feel strongly enough about a brand to choose it over a competitor. But they also want you to feel that you share in the brand, that you understand.
You know this is working when the mere sight of David Duchovny driving a forest green Ford Mondeo makes you want to sell your Toyota and go look for aliens. Whether watching TV, going to the cinema, or opening an upmarket lifestyle mag, we know that we’re going to be challenged and entertained.
But beneath the innovation of this hi- tech world there are universes of adverts that might as well have been made by aliens. Do we view them as discrete entities and leave it at that, or is there creative and profitable potential in their improvement?
Martin Creamer, who founded Engineering News 17 years ago with a desk and a borrowed computer, is clearly not a man worried about the turnover of Martin Creamer Media cc. The company, which distributes Engineering News to a weekly readership of 18 000, and also runs a mining publication, makes a neat turnover of R15-million. The company itself spends R80 000 monthly on its own self-promotion.
It would be easy for Creamer to lump engineering ads into a “special case” category and protect his own hide, but this is a Renaissance man who believes that our education system retards our thought and prevents us all from being Leonardo da Vincis.
“The engineering industry can’t be seen apart from any other,” says Creamer. “A good ad is a good ad wherever it appears: it has to communicate well. Unfortunately our advertising clients don’t capitalise on their ad-spend. They give us a very tight brief, and the creative is not an issue. It’s about what the product does and what it looks like.”
According to Creamer, this approach to advertising is in part a result of the fact that for years engineering consultants were forbidden from advertising, which was seen to be inappropriately self-laudatory. While the profession is now allowed to advertise, it has yet to come round to the idea that advertising might in fact be a financial investment.
Creamer believes that the industry could benefit greatly from a push in the creative direction, and indeed, it seems that a market paging through at high speed will inevitably want a sight for what are inevitably very sore eyes. Are engineers not also consumers of other products?
Do they not desire and aspire to fridges and cellphones and cars? If so, then, as clients, they should be encouraged to go to agencies. Trade publications should tell them that if they don’t, they will fail to feature, to sell, to enter the millenium with more than a deep-etched blur and a suggestive headline verb.