Welcome to Vibevertising

What's more important in modern advertising, ideas or vibes?

For most of my life the word vibes meant the British DJ, Gilles Peterson, talking about Roy Ayers records, but in the last few years vibes seem to have become the most important thing in advertising, overtaking ideas. Well, ideas in the traditional sense. 

What might a traditional advertising idea mean? When I was at Watford the late, great, sadly missed, Tony Cullingham drilled into us the importance of an idea. What he meant by this was a creative idea and strategy baked into one campaign. For example, every time I use my Dualit toaster I remember a campaign a team did at Watford with the idea that a Dualit toaster will last longer than most marriages. Is that an insight or an idea? I don’t know. I do know it’s highly memorable. 

Often when I’m cutting garlic next to my Dualit toaster I get a flashback of the image from Goodfellas when Paulie cuts garlic with a razor blade in jail. Is that an idea? It’s not a strategy, but it’s a visual idea. Even though this piece of creativity is highly memorable Tony would have chucked it out because it didn’t have an idea. That scene may be short on ideas but it’s not short on vibes. Masculine Italian hard men somehow managing to smuggle a razor blade into jail only to use it to slice garlic, because real men, real Italian men, cook. 

When I left Watford in 1997 the trend for ‘The Big Idea’ or ‘360 Thinking’ as my first real employers, Ogilvy, would call it was dominant. Today these kind of big insight based campaign ideas are being dwarfed by the need for vibes. My initial reason for starting this project was to lament the loss of ideas but as I have been thinking about it more, maybe that period and the search for the big idea was not as important as I once thought. Perhaps it was an excuse to ask for more money, to get the integrated budget?

It’s traditionally assumed that a big idea is like gold dust. I remember when BBDO first came out with, ‘You’re Not You When You’re Hungry’. That felt like a big idea. Perhaps the last big global idea. Seeing as we now live in the world of our tech overlords let’s actually call that a ‘Platform idea’. Other platform ideas could be ‘Love it or Hate It’ for Marmite. Or ‘Should have gone to Specsavers’. I would define a platform idea as one that is inherently linked to the product and lets you write adz for dayz. 

Any optician could own the ‘should of’ idea, there are other foods that are polarising or fill you up but Specsavers, Marmite and Snickers committed to those ideas. These days many brands commit to a vibe. Oatley captured a massive market purely on a vibe. Same for Liquid Death. A new canned water brand has just launched in the US. It’s called Not Beer. It’s almost an anti-idea but it’s super high on classic Americana vibes. Same with Vacation sunscreen. It stole a huge market share based on nothing more than an 80’s Miami Vice Vibe. Vacation is co-founded by an ex agency planner I used to work with. Perhaps he knew something about the declining importance of a platform idea?

One could argue that with not much product benefits, one oat milk or bottled water is much the same as the next. The only sensible thing to do is to go on vibes. Like cigarette advertising in the past. Or that these are new brands, with no heritage, the DTC trend etc etc, but the current king of the vibes is a huge global brand with years of advertising heritage; British Airways. 

The window BA posters don’t have a line or a logo, just pure unadulterated vibes. I’ve seen people complain that these posters don’t solve the issue of BA being a crap airline, that they are arrogant. But it’s not the fault of BA’s agency, Uncommon, that BA planes are delayed, have shit food and cost twice as much as anything else. It’s a little like having beef with Arsenal beating Sheffield United 6-0. What were they supposed to do? Hold back? As a creative, if you can find a client who’ll sign off posters with no logo or words then it’s your duty to exploit that to maximum effect. Chances like that don’t come across often and you’ll have a very nice week in Cannes. 

I don’t know the ins and outs of the BA campaign or client relationship at all. But when a great agency has a client in the Jonathan Middenhall mold, someone who wants to put out work that will get talked about and win shiny things, often above other more prosaic matters, that can be extremely fruitful, for the agency at least.

The BA film with the babies is pure vibes too. I only just realised there is a frame at the end of the film that has a baby looking out of a plane window. I assume someone saw that and said, ‘You know what? That would make a great poster’. The idea for this film is, ‘Everywhere you go makes us everything we are’. But that feels like an excuse to show a lot of really cute pictures of babies on planes coupled with some beautiful destination shots. Cram in as many vibes as poss. The actual strapline is ‘A British Original’, which has nothing to do with anything. Where I once would have tut-tutted about that lack of purity, maybe that’s ok these days? Do people care about straplines? Are they there for anything other than winning pitches?  Do you think the planners talked about being a ‘British Original’ in the creative brief? Was there even a brief? 

Same deal for the Avios film. Some dudes and dudettes coming into shore on Hydrofoils. Looks like a blast, total vibes. Do I get that these people are doing ‘everyday things’? Not really. What is an Avios? How do they work? Not important. More vibes please. Back in 2013 I was freelancing for Anomaly London on a big campaign for Skype while living in New York. I would get flown over on BA Business for meetings nearly every other week. I racked up a lot of miles, I mean Avios, whatever. That was 11 years ago, I still haven’t found a way to sensibly use those miles. 

Time will tell whether this vibe based approach works. I see no evidence of it going away. We’re coming up to Cannes. I’m sure the BA executions will work there. But I’m interested to explore whether it’s enough to get people to talk about ads, single executions usually, rather than landing a platform idea.  

What’s more important, vibes or ideas? 

Thanks for reading this first post. I’ll be doing a weekly post on this topic moving forward. There will be opportunities to chat. I’d love to know what you think. 

Toodles, James