TV channels can help improve advertising quality

Nowadays, the immediate reaction of guests is to look vague as they desperately try and remember some ad they have seen on TV and then carrying on animated conversations about Jacob Zuma, electricity outages and boorish Australian cricketers.

A lot of people tend to blame this decline of great TV advertising on the brain drain of creatives from South Africa but I disagree. South African creatives are world class and as good as ever.

Ads pulled

Our problem is that clients and ad agency management don't have the balls to stand up to them. If any brain drain is affecting advertising, it is the flight of top class brand managers from this country. Advertising intelligence at brand management level is on average pretty dismal, to say the least. And to top all of this, the Advertising Standards Authority is making it very difficult for anyone to 'push any sort of envelopes' or stand out from the crowd for fear of upsetting some old tannie in Bredasdorp and having their ads pulled. And then having to not only cough up huge legal costs, but watch a multi-million rand campaign get torpedoed.

Now, with international research showing fewer and fewer viewers watching commercial breaks, there is a danger that TV advertising - the Cinderella of the ad world - will simply become as boring as the rapidly diminishing classified sections of newspapers.

All talk

Now, the ad industry has for a number of years been threatening to actually do something about improving ad quality and selling itself to both business and the public as important contributors to the economy. But, so far it has just been talk and more talk.

Perhaps it is time for the TV channels to get involved. After all, they cannot simply sit back and watch their lifeblood ebbing away.

And I reckon the best way they can do this is to insist that all TV commercials carry the ad agency's name for at least a few seconds at the end.

A lot of countries allow and insist on this. And up till now the only reason I can see that it was not allowed here was because the TV channels probably, quite rightly, felt that production houses and ad agencies were being paid quite sufficiently - if not excessively - to produce ads and had no reason to need free publicity on air.

Ensuring quality

But, it is not about free publicity. It is now all about ensuring consistent quality. Have a look through the newspapers any day of the week. Notice how really great creative ads always almost carry the ad agencies' key numbers and names at the bottom or on the side?

Bad ads just have a key number and no name... Clearly the ad agency concerned is embarrassed and really doesn't want its name associated with an ad so hacked about by the clients.

But, if TV channels insist that all ads carry the ad agency, and maybe even production house, name, you can be sure that a lot of ad agencies and production houses would be a lot more forceful with their clients in terms of fighting against having the impact of ads diminished by clients not willing to push boundaries and take risks.

Which is essential, because any company today that is not prepared to take risks will simply not survive.

Identification of the agency and production house behind the ad might well end up with some agencies being fired for not bowing to clients' demands. But, this will be short term, because the next agency won't last long either and inevitably the only way clients will get to be on television will be to allow quality advertising to be created.

Time is short

It really is time that the TV channels get involved somehow. Right now business is booming and they're all meeting ad revenue targets. But, come a slowdown in the economy and TV ad revenue could start going down faster than a homeless mole. Best to not leave things too late.