The fate of the firefly: Why today’s advertising flickers and fades

Yesterday, I met Mohammed Khan, iconic writer of yore, founder of probably 3 legendary ad agencies and an influence on Indian advertising the like of which your LinkedIn chomping innocents of today cannot even begin to imagine. A day earlier, a GenZ girl who works with us had quoted to us in a discussion on strategy, “It should be something like this ad line I read about eggs - The best square meal in the world."

Cut back to yesterday evening, I told Mohammed this. He had a smile and a hearty laugh over it, while delivering a wisecrack over the pathetic state of advertising and advertising networks today, adding, I sold my agency way back to the person who I least liked/admired in advertising, Martin Sorrell. Now, I’m quoting from a two drinks down memory, so I could have got some of the words/facts muddled, but I’m pretty sure about the gist.

In response to his rather acerbic and cynical take on the State of the Bunion, I joked that the world of advertising networks is going in the opposite direction of the name of one of Khan’s surviving agencies - Rediffusion. I struggled with this graphic mind picture, realising that, what I was grappling with was probably the concentration or defragmentation of the networks.

Networks are falling back into themselves. Something like how black holes form.

Today, I have an interview with Martin Sorrell on my desk and somehow I’m reminded of an incident at Mullen Lintas, my version of founding an agency akin to Mohammed’s Enterprise. We were discussing putting up a symbolic self-portrait in our workspaces, and I had a lot of trouble coming up with a spirit animal because that was the theme. Finally I settled on the firefly, that glorious self-igniting, self- illuminating, little creature native to where I come from, Murud-Janjira.

Now I know a training in copywriting is supposed to make my writing quite precise and well-directed, but the moment I write about advertising as opposed to for advertising, some reverse instinct kicks in. Freed from the self-imposed guardrails, I ramble, uncaring of the limitations of print column-space that I was trained in. I realise, I must make all this mean something to those of you, who are still somehow hanging on to this piece.

I feel that, that self-portrait that I got painted for myself, a firefly, has probably become the self-portrait of the industry that we all inhabit.

That we have all become this jhund of jugnus, fireflies buzzing about in the event horizon of the aforementioned black hole of the advertising universe that we are all doomed to get sucked into. There, make sense of all those mixed metaphors!

Practitioners like Mohammed, glowed for a long time and their glow is still evident in the fact that one line he wrote 40-45 years ago for NECC, still finds an echo today. Still recalled, still memorable, still quoted! Now compare that to today’s brandwork. Designed to make sense sometimes only for a day, most dying out within hours, many not even getting a thumb-touch, far less a thumb stop.

So transient, so temporary, so eminently mortal.

Exactly like a firefly.

It’s only destiny to flicker somewhere in the collective consciousness of a digital network that is itself made of miniscule electronic impulses, and get lost forever. I liken such pieces of work, (referred these days as BAU or business as usual or creative assets or even more dismissively as ‘posts’), to one of the dots in the static, chaotic, white-noise screens of Doordarshan days. Dots that would exist and die before the program or the ad films actually came alive!

The impermanence of the work will eventually lead to the impermanence of the creators.

Those who live by the post will die with the post, at least metaphorically. The professional lifespan of today’s creatives will mirror that of their work. And most of them will not even live their tiny professional lives in the neon, incandescent beauty of the Lampyridae genus.

Dare I take the argument a step further? Dare I postulate that this Indian variety that I recently chanced upon, sounds particularly portentous to not just the work of today and to the creators of today, but to today’s brands as well?

And which, quite fittingly captures the species peddling half-baked products with half-cooked promises, flitting about the D2C internet? And who has no inkling about its ephemerality? It’s named, the Abscondita!

Amer Jaleel is co-founder of Curativity and former Group CCO and Chairman of the MullenLowe Lintas Group.