Advertising is rich in theories but none can claim to be the sole font of wisdom in a complex world, according to Guy Murphy of marketing and comms brand, JWT.
The agency network’s worldwide planning director told a gathering held to celebrate 50 years of Warc’s monthly magazine, Admap – the anniversary issue of which explores the future of brand communications – that this confusion was nothing new, as he reminisced about acronymic ideas such as AIDA and DAGMAR.
“There’s never going to be a right answer,” he concluded, “just answers that have a greater degree of rightness about them than others.”
And despite the range of ideas about advertising and communications, he had noted a creeping anti-intellectualism in the industry, as people started to regard action as more important than thinking, to believe that “thinking holds things up, thinking makes things slow”.
That resulted in such nonsensical statements as “thinking just is acting” or “strategy just is doing”.
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