Chris Kyme’s Postcard from Hong Kong: What goes around comes around

Chris Kyme (pictured above) continues his ‘Postcard from Hong Kong’ series. So there we are. Chinese New Year is up and running with the Tiger and it all kicks off now. I always think (from a Hong Kong perspective at least) that the New Year in general doesn’t really get going until after the CNY festivities. So, Kung Hei Fat Choy or Gong Xi Fa Cai to all. I love this time of the year. Fresh start. New challenges etc.

Personally I’ve started the year with an interesting new project in that I was invited to lecture on The History of Advertising at Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design. Not that I’m an academic or anything, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be the right guy for the job. However, I have to say the topic fascinated me and I took up the challenge, which commenced with lots of research and homework and I literally wallowed in it. Unearthing facts and stories and joining the dots as to who did what when. Of course it’s not exactly a subject which has never been tackled before. Books have been written on it. And history bloggers abound online.

So anyone with a casual interest can dig up much of the facts with a cursory search. But that’s not the point for me. I don’t want to just stand up and be regurgitate what I’ve read from others and state timelines which are set in concrete. The whole point is, I’ve lived through a good 30 years plus of this throughout my whole career, and that means I can mould the entire syllabus based on my own experience, observations and perspective. When I cover the glorious years of UK advertising, I can actually show (and not be ashamed to show) some of my own work from that period. I was there. I lived it. I worked with some of the great people I’ll be talking about. Same with the Hong Kong story, which I’ve written the book on. I was there and did some of the work that’s remembered to this day.

That gives me immense pride and means I can present with a real passion. And along the way, while I hope that what I can inject into this story can inspire the young people I’m telling it to and perhaps help encourage them as they consider their own future careers, I’m finding that I’m learning a lot to. Thoughts occur to me. New revelations light up in my head as I nod off at night.

For example, I was researching and compiling the story of the ‘Mad Men’ days, through the 1940s and 50s. The ‘golden age of advertising’. When, although it was a time when the industry was booming and television was coming of age and deals were being done over 3-Martini lunches, it has to be said that the advertising of the day was, for the most part, very formulaic. Everything was hard sell. Print ads all looked the same. As did TV commercials and radio and so on. It was very hard when digging through the archives to find any examples of creativity which broke the mould. With the exception of a few wayward mavericks like Bill Bernbach or Howard Gossage which rallied against the advertising establishment.

That didn’t really happen until Bernbach lit the creative fuse that was to fire up the 1960s US creative revolution (the session that followed in my story). What I called ‘The age of intelligence’ when advertising started respecting its target audience and putting up ideas that made people think a bit.

And what occurred to me one morning on my way in to work (I still have a day job) was – have we come full circle? Let’s forget the technological evolution of the global media landscape today, and online and social media and all of that (which really means that direct marketing just went online basically). Just stop for a second and look around.

Outdoor.

It still exists. It’s still there, it hasn’t gone anywhere. Yet when do you ever see a decent outdoor ad in your city or wherever you live? The only time we really see great work is in award shows right?

If I speak for a moment on what we see in Hong Kong day in day out all year round. It’s mostly formulaic rubbish. Seldom do you see any messages which are even remotely intelligent. Are we living back in the 1950s yet again? Where every agency is doing the same old stuff for the same old clients and they all think that’s okay?

A few months ago, we were invited to do work for Airwallex, a fast-growing fintech company, for a nice huge billboard smack in the middle of busy traffic in the city. Now rarely do we get such an invitation these days. Most of the large sites are filled with the usual celebrity-driven bland and boring shouty same old trash. But here we were being asked to have a crack at one, for an exciting young company. I was all over it. I must have written about 30 lines over the course of a week, which got whittled down to about 5 and eventually one was settled on, and with some simple nimble art direction, we soon had this half decent big ad up which turned quite a few heads of quite a few drivers. And by doing so, I was making a point – it doesn’t have to be bland and boring. You can make the effort. So why is what we see most of the time so mind-numbingly bad?

So I put this idea as food for thought to my class to ponder. Of course we’ll be getting into some brilliant work as we move forward, I’ll be talking about the emergence and evolution of the internet and great online campaigns from all of the world. But that little excursion back in time did have me wondering.

Has the industry gone backward not forward?