Advertising continues to be misunderstood.

Advertising continues to be misunderstood. And it’s annoying. Anyone in the media and marketing industry should know better.

Every time, a new big scale campaign is launched the same thing happens. Take the new Tourism Australia campaign featuring Kylie Minogue. Everyone is entitled to a point of view. That is the nature of advertising.

But when the so-called ‘experts’ wade in, they really should know better. Anyone with a decent history in advertising creation can comment on story arc, casting and even production values. They may even have some core principles that they can hold it against.

For example, Unilever used to have the SMILE model. An acronym that helped you evaluate advertising. But the most important factor in evaluating advertising is the brief. Yes, the BRIEF.

I was taught that whether I like the ad isn’t really that important. I made some campaigns I loved and some that I didn’t. The bigger question and one that matters is does the ad do the job that it was intended to do.

NO ONE can answer that question unless they have the brief in front of them. Everything from business goals, key messages, target audiences and beyond.

Otherwise it’s the futile debate of what I call, ‘you like, I like’. It simply doesn’t matter.

I would often work with leadership teams to explain the brief and the briefing process then share the creative process as well the output. We were very clear, this is the job the campaign is designed to do. This is why we believe it is right. This is how we will measure performance and impact.

So we can and perhaps should take a view on the Kylie Tourism Australia campaign if we feel qualified to. I’m a Brit who works in marketing and knows the British audience. I also feel strongly about climate change and its huge impact on Australia.

I cannot however evaluate the campaign without the brief in front of me.

So whether you are an advertising pundit or a TV show host (& let’s remember, the primary goal of a TV show is ratings), you need to ask the client for the brief. Perhaps TA are targeting a particular audience. Perhaps they have identified a particular need state through research and tracking. Without context, we are reviewing a restaurant without context, or a piece of art without it’s history.

Advertising is a commercial game that should help grow a business. It combines both art and science. It is about content and context. With the TA Kylie campaign, what we can debate is context. All my progressive UK friends and family are actually asking if we are ok. Can we go outside very often? What action is being taken by leadership on so on? This is their context.

A well made, funny, high production piece of advertising might not have read context very well. After all, brands at their core are promises. The advertising often sets up the promise, the product needs to deliver the promise. A broken promise is a broken brand that will fail to grow a business.

All that said, I would always want to see the brief before I go beyond just sharing a view and speculating. What do you think? Has anyone seen the brief?