After my Cannes cartoon a couple weeks ago, I heard a lot of crazy stories on how the sausage gets made in the world of advertising. This week’s cartoon was inspired by an anecdote a reader named Mark shared with me about filming in Fiji.
In another story, Hershey’s once filmed an ad in a small town in Canada that was supposed to show American kids eating s’mores. They ran into unexpected trouble when it became clear that none of those Canadian actors had ever actually eaten s’mores before. So they had to train the kids how to handle the s’mores realistically before they could shoot the ad.
These anecdotes reminded me how advertising production is under the marketing spotlight right now. We are increasingly rethinking how we produce marketing communication in a digital world.
Some of this is driven by cost-cutting. As marketers are under increased pressure to show ROI, there’s a lot of attention on the ratio of “working” (media) versus “non-working” (production) dollars in their marketing budgets.
But a lot of this attention to advertising production is driven by the sheer unprecedented volume of content that brands create nowadays. Marketers no longer work in a one-off campaign world. There’s a steady drumbeat of communication that marketers need to plan for.
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
“Super Bowl Advertising” February 2018
“The Evolution of Advertising” November 2017
“Marketing Procurement” July 2017
