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- The Guardian, Monday June 4 2001
The D&AD awards are to advertising what the Oscars are to film. Adland's obsession with the funny-looking yellow and black pencils D&AD hands out as trophies is such that any creative carrying one off at the end of the evening can depend on a hefty pay rise and a slew of job offers from pencil-hungry rivals.
So last week's decision to award the year's most coveted advertising prize - a gold pencil - to an ambient marketing campaign for a little-known dot.com selling modern art may have seemed a little perverse. Particularly when you consider that last year's gold award winner was the gloriously high-budget Guinness Surfer ad last year, and that in 1999 the D&AD judges did not see fit to award a gold to any of the entries from the advertising world.
This year's gold pencil winner came from Mother, a Clerkenwell-based agency with a reputation for the unconventional, and beat entries from established creative agencies such as Saatchi & Saatchi and Bartle Bogle Hegarty. Mother came up with the ingenious idea of sticking black and white labels on everyday objects such as paving stones and lampposts, describing them as though they were works of art.
The campaign is an example of so-called ambient advertising - putting ads in unusual places in the hope that the surprise of seeing them will make the consumer remember the product - and it was not the only ambient campaign to impress at this year's awards. Another successful campaign, for Scrabble, used letter keys from the board game to make strategically placed new words. So the "i" in a streetside No Parking sign was turned into the word "fascists", while the "s" in a sign outside a dentist's surgery was used to create the word "sadists".
Gail Porter projected onto the Houses of Parliament to promote FHM magazine, images of England footballers on the white cliffs of Dover to sell Nike trainers, and bus stops that squirt Impulse body spray at passers-by - all are examples of ambient media. But whereas it used to be the preserve of low-budget advertisers who couldn't afford to pay for "proper" media space, ambient advertising is now being used by everyone from dot.coms to major blue-chip companies.
David Kester, chief executive of D&AD, believes the success of campaigns such as Britart.com is a sign that the industry's snobbery about ambient advertising is changing.
"If you go back a few years there was a sense that television advertising was God and everything else was inferior," he says. "Now there's much more of a recognition that communication has to be a homogeneous affair. It's also incredibly difficult to be innovative in a medium as mature as television. In ambient media no one had really pushed the envelope out until now. We'd all seen adverts on bus tickets and lampposts, but this campaign turned all that on its head."
Recent research from the poster company Concorde shows that ambient is now the fastest-growing advertising medium, having seen revenues for the sector leap from £17.4m in 1996 to £90.1m in 2000. The company predicts it will top £110m this year.
The medium is also becoming mainstream. Mother's campaign for Britart is technically illegal flyposting of the kind that (most) major advertisers would probably steer clear of. But agencies are finding ways to get their major blue-chip clients involved without breaking the law.
Jennie Soffe, marketing director at the media agency Universal McCann, says the company's clients - which include Nestle and L'Oréal - have all used ambient media. The agency recently planned a campaign for Asahi beer using rickshaws and taxis in Soho to catch the attention of people out drinking in the city.
"The world has moved beyond traditional media," says Soffe. "You can use just about anything to communicate and if you want to weave your brand into people's lives you need to do something different. But it has to be relevant to the brand. You can't just stick a projection of something up on the Houses of Parliament and hope it will sell your product."
The industry's new-found enthusiasm for ambient campaigns is partly driven by increasing media fragmentation. Once upon a time advertisers could rely on half the population seeing the 30-second ad they broadcast during Coronation Street; now those same viewers are spread across hundreds of TV channels and are much more difficult to reach.
The other problem with TV advertising is that viewers switch off - literally and figuratively - because they are so aware they are being sold to. Ambient advertising incorporates the element of surprise that is impossible to achieve in a five-minute ad break. No one expects to see an advert on a paving stone, so they'll take the time to read it, work out what it's about and - so the theory goes - will remember it.
Andy Medd, a partner at Mother, believes most advertising agencies have been slow to respond to the changing environment: "In our view, the TV-driven response is not enough. It may be appropriate to do TV advertising, but you shouldn't start by assuming it's the best way to reach people.
"It's about matching the medium to the brand. Britart is about popularising art and making it more accessible. So putting ads on paving stones and bus tickets seems right. I'd like to think that if Britart had had £5m to spend on a glossy TV campaign they'd still have gone down the same route."
But if ambient advertising is so dependent on surprise, it contains the seeds of its own destruction. A few years ago ads on the back of bus tickets were considered innovative - now they're part of the mainstream. The first person to advertise on the side of black cabs was considered a pioneer of ambient advertising, but ads on cabs are now the norm. It is probably just a matter of time before advertising on paving stones or lampposts loses its ability to surprise.
There are signs that Britain is beginning to rebel against the rising tide of advertising. Figures recently published by the Advertising Standards Authority show complaints about ambient advertising have soared from just six in 1999 to 61 last year.
Already, local authorities are beginning to object to some of the more wacky advertising experiments. Earlier this year Kensington and Chelsea council successfully applied to the high court for an injunction forcing department store Harvey Nichols to remove an enormous poster advertising Versace from its Knightsbridge building.
The worst thing an advertiser can do is to annoy potential customers, and agencies will have to be pretty imaginative if they are to continue to amuse rather than irritate as our public spaces get filled up with advertising clutter.
"There is a danger that it could turn into litter," says Medd. "No one wants the streets to turn into one big advertising campaign. You have to wonder where it will stop - does anyone really want to see a new advertising message every time they pull a piece of toilet paper off the roll?"
