It may seem like a bygone era now, but back in the 60’s, great print advertising was every bit as revolutionary as digital marketing is being held up to be today. Bill Bernbach helped to kick off this print revolution with memorable, hard-working ads for Avis and VW, which set the precedent for further innovations from agencies like Ogilvy & Mather, Chiat/Day, and—leaping forward to the heady days of the 70’s, 80s and 90s in the UK—Abbott Mead Vickers, Leagas Delaney and CDP.

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to become yet another ‘listicle’—an endless parade of everyone’s favourite ‘do you remember?’ print ads and campaigns—we all have those we still love.

No, the reason for this article is the ‘why?’

Each great print ad that still lurks at the back of our memory banks—remembered from award books past or, in the case of some of us, from actually seeing them in the papers and magazines of the day—was built on great thinking and stellar execution.

And yes, some of us look back on those wonderfully creative years with a great deal of affection. We occasionally put these ads into presentations in the hope that their elegant simplicity will inspire new generations of both clients and creatives. To spark a desire to approve or create ads of their own that might one day be famous, too. 

But the key ingredients that made all these ads great:  simplicity, strong thinking and well-crafted execution are as vital and relevant today as they’ve ever been.

Simple, well thought-through, well realised.

I hear the desire for those three elements repeated by people at my agency every day. Clients echo it. Pages and pages have been written proclaiming “simplicity is everything”.

And I frequently hear someone say, “today, we have to be strategic in our thinking and brilliant in execution. After all,  consumers only spend 3 seconds on an ad.” As though this is all new thinking and the need to arrest and engage quickly has somehow never been important before. 

Yet despite this mantra being repeated over and over, the quality of the print work we see has fallen from the giddy heights of the ads we hold up as being ‘great’. 

This ‘discovery’ that the ads we create have only 3 seconds to hold the reader’s attention (which I can only assume has been arrived at by studying hours of research and data) has—rather than sharpening messages to a point—reduced print ads to a rather sad smorgasbord of mush.

Logos have grown larger—presumably in the desire for ‘better branding’—so at least people see the brand name in the time it takes before they turn the page. 

Pack shots dominate, in case the logo alone is not big enough to register the brand.

Bullet points have made a remarkable comeback, as has “make the important points in the copy bold”. 

In fact, why have Copy at all? No one reads it, surely? No one has time. 

Then there’s the “KV”… The key visual. Let that sink in for a second. It’s a visual, and it’s key. So surely this should be given tremendous amounts of thought, laboured over night and day, a work of unbridled genius?

Hardly.  These days they tend to be the “creativity killer”. They shouldn’t be, but they’ve become the piece of communication most fret about. But I do worry whether all that angst is for the right reasons. The most usual result is that the KV shouts the strategy from the page. Great for the internal meetings, wonderful for the accountant and a big tick in the marketing box for ‘done that’.

Boredom for the consumer.

Invariably it’s a pack shot with a starburst and a straight copy line mimicking the planners thought starter. 

So I wonder (often, and sometimes aloud); would there be one client today brave enough to buy ‘Lemon’. Or an agency— for that matter—brave enough to present it without having a good old ‘safe option’ in the back pocket?

What print ad have you produced recently that can be held up and compared to the famous ads of old, the print ads we look back on and love?

For me, none. Not that I haven’t tried. 

So has creativity on the printed page lost its lustre? Have we simply forgotten how to do them well? Or has the art of selling them been forgotten?

If print has indeed turned up its toes and died as a creative medium, we need to look elsewhere for a creative outlet. So the other day, I tried a little experiment; if you cut and paste some of the finest simple, highly creative ads of yesteryear and drop them into a Facebook or Instagram template, the results are quite startling. They’re still great.

Yet I see little on social media that works hard in its efforts to stop you in the way those old ads can. If ever there was a time to make the social post creative, it’s now. 

Look at ‘Lemon’ for Volkswagen from the 60’s. The visual is square. The headline is short enough to conform to Facebook’s ‘20% rule’ with several percent to spare. The words could easily be edited to create great post copy. It’s still got great stopping power—even if today it’s stopping a scrolling thumb, rather than a licked finger turning over a newspaper page.

How about the “Got Milk?” campaign? More snappy copy. And it’s got celebrities in it! You can’t tell me that wouldn’t be a popular social campaign today…

Hell, even the best of the old UK Heineken print work from the 70’s wouldn’t look out of place. The headline was never that big anyway. Quick re-edit to put the before and after top and bottom rather than side-by-side and there you go.

The point is, if the opportunities to do great print ads in a printed medium seem to be diminishing, let’s not be daunted by data, “3-second rules” or the unspeakable cruelty of rogue scrolling thumbs. Let’s look at the social post as the space to be more creative. Great work can stop people, a bigger logo perhaps not! Maybe that way, in a few decades time, the work we do today can be held up as being a great way to cut through.