It took millions of years for man’s instincts to develop. It will take millions more for them to even vary. A communicator must be concerned with the unchanging man, with his obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care of his own.

–Bill Bernbach

“I can do it myself!” says the little child. The thought comes instinctively, and the need to prove it is pressing. By creating, we become somebody, earn our spot on the team, find our place, have a chance to feel needed. Even in the sandbox, the two-year-old grasps the spade and seeks to show the others who they’re dealing with.

It’s not all unusual for one little person, whatever else they may be, to do something that captures the imagination of the world. “They laughed when I sat down at the piano but when I started to play…” That was the headline of an advertisement for a piano school. I was young and green and had scored a job at the best ad agency in the country, but received no more guidance than the group’s, and especially the boss’s, quiet confidence that I could do it. I remember I got the shivers when I read that ad.

The agency in question was not like any other. In fact, it was so new and different that it gave rise to a revolution that transformed Swedish advertising from the ground up in the space of a few years. It was like a sandbox. Open to any game you wanted to play, yet also facing tough competition and thus inspiring. And also self-regulating. Everybody thought the best of everybody until they no longer shared the inspiration and nobody wanted to play with the others like before.

In all my years in the partly wonderful world of advertising, always subject to the world’s – including the experts’ – inexpert gaze and preconceived notions, the desire to show what I can do, especially for myself, has been my guide. I long believed that the art of creating good advertising starts with the art of identifying good ideas. Searching through the sludge of facts, often contradictory and mostly completely uninteresting. I thought in my ignorance that the place I should be looking was in the client’s and the consumer’s worlds. I’ve long since learned that it’s my own world where the golden apples grow. They’re hanging from my own branches, in the tree I’ve inherited from countless older generations. These are the wellspring I draw from.

The tree belongs to everybody. It has roots stretching into all communication, and thus apples for anybody who’s reaching for a tool. But the advertising industry as I know it after sixty years and countless attempts to understand why everything doesn’t come out well, or even better and better, is suddenly working in the other direction. People simply browse right past millions of earlier creators’ attempts to solve the same eternal problem. As Bill Bernbach said of instincts, will take millions of years for them to so much as vary.

Now, the truth is, as they say, an idea. Everybody has a right to their own. Those who can afford it can even have theirs publicized. But are the artists of advertising the only ones who reject their predecessors’ work? Picasso was an avid museumgoer. A few years back, the exhibition “Picasso and the Masters” ran at five different Paris museums. At each one, his work was compared down to the last brushstroke to the works he had studied. Works, if I remember correctly, by Rafael, Titian, Goya, Velazquez, Duchamp. He did not paint like any of them. What then did he see?

Recently, several members of the Platinum Academy got together for a long lunch. One story followed another, yet only a tiny fraction of what we call good advertising, though we don’t always formulate it the same way, came up. Of course we talked a bit about AI, too. Nobody was particularly worried about it, because everybody knows that our golden apples will not reach the technology even if it stands on its tippy-toes. Our feel for “the game”, built on inherited instincts, the thing we call communication, cannot be copied. If this should become possible, then humankind can take its final bow.

We also agreed that the distinctive thing about good advertising is that the solution, once identified, feels so obvious. Where is the archive, then, where these forms are stored?

Sandcastles can be even bigger and more beautiful if two people are building on the same foundation, if one is constantly contributing techniques and building blocks the other is missing. At a good advertising agency, it is showing first yourself, then your partner, then the agency, the client, the consumer and finally the rest of the world what you can do that makes the job so interesting. One thing leads to the other, not the other way around.

In the next room, no matter where I was working, sat people who demonstrably wanted to and could do it themselves. “Misuse of resources”, many an agency chief has thought. Why not release all your creative powers at once? Those who have tried it know that not even the winners end up happy about it. I remember a big consumer company with an army of marketing people and a huge range of product categories that came up with the brilliant idea of bringing all the agencies they employed together to be heard in a rented auditorium. Suddenly, nobody could do it by themselves. We all felt abashed, not before the audience but before one another. Who am I to tell you how to find ideas? Our apples were rotted by our self-denial.

The origins of creativity are still unexplored, perhaps because they should not be explored. Nor is commercial creativity uncomplicated. It is constrained yet must also be free. It is with great pleasure that I read that sharp minds at the university have finally realized that the humanities, with everything they bring to creativity, are finally being included in economic education. The human being behind the numbers, one might say. A Nobel-worthy subject.

The introductory quote is about sixty years old. The man who formulated this eternal truth probably knew nothing of AI, and if he did, he was not afraid of it. He understood that the future begins in history, and it is what people have felt, known and experienced that shapes all development, and therefore the tools development requires. Such as, when it comes to the art of communicating: the chisel, the pen, the ballpoint, the typewriter, the computer. He would see AI as one more tool, and quickly steer his creativity towards close collaboration. Learn what the hand can contribute, not what it can replace.

Today, however, many in the advertising industry think the future began yesterday and that new tools, such as those of digitalization, are replacing all others. That millions of years of human instincts can thus be left behind. Or even – a horrible political thought – be reevaluated. At the same time, the Golden Egg shows what is still possible. That there are people who both can and will. Who aren’t afraid of AI learning to read and write, to sing, to paint and even to repeat others’ thoughts, since the art of creating good advertising isn’t about that. It’s about creating new narratives.    

In business terms, advertising is a factory. Like all factories, it seeks to optimize its benefit by “selling more in a simpler way”, that is by developing faster, simpler industrial processes and cheaper, more precise means of distributing the message. As an industrial creator, a robot’s advertising will by definition be industrial. Yet also effortlessly so smart that it is invisible. In a world in which everything is becoming advertising, and every citizen their own advertiser, there is an obvious risk that digital advertising will be far more dangerous than cute little analogue ads, the plugs for porridge that 1970s critics warned us about. Only now it can seriously invade our privacy in the way people only used to joke about. In the shadows of what is presently visible, the wizards are already building their crafty new factories.

The only thing that ultimately can stop this development is the people with the money, and I don’t mean primarily those who draw up budgets but rather those who make budget decisions. Not until advertising is viewed as an important investment, as valuable as the construction of a bigger server farm, will it become as good as everybody involved wants it to be.