Time and Space in Advertising

Paraphrasing former CCR´s president Guillermo Oliveto, "... we Argentines have an innate need to be part of everything, suddenly during the '80s everyone had a video club, in the ´90s who didn´t own paddle courts was out of the business fad . Later on the Maxikioscos (where you can get everything from band aids to butter) appeared and now the Cybers are the tendency”. Today in advertising, creative schools mushroomed without any structure or regulation. Young people enter this "factories" with the dream of being directly employed by the entire world, not only nationally but also internationally. But they do not realize that they get mediocre lessons of discredited teachers, who are copywriters and heads of art without. The graduated students barely understand what a concept or brief is, but they don´t know anything about more sophisticated issues like how to create a communication strategy.

Why is Argentina currently advertising so devalued?

The profession is being taken as an art ... why art? ... Because those reputed copywriters and heads of arts can´t deal with their high elevated ego not with your ego and use the client´s money to shoot their short movie clips. The art is precisely the expression without personal and subjective limit of an individual or group. Regular and average audience like to see commercials which are entertaining, the problem is that a very low percentage remember the brand, who supposed to be the star of the spot.

An other consequence to interpretate advertising as art is that in Argentina just two or three years ago some strategic planners opened the local branch of the English APG (Account Planning Group). There are only 20 members, while in London there are up to 2000 and it was established during the ´60s.

Zygmunt Bauman in "Globalization: Human Consequences" talks about two important concepts: time and space, which dominated the human mind for centuries. In modernism, many architects designed whole cities requested by the kings to be built far away from what had been written so far of human history. This era saw history as a contaminated and distorted element, therefore drawings of mathematically perfected cities were outlined, which would be populated after completion. The owners of these utopian cities had the power because they decide what type of work and were each inhabitant would dwell.

This reflects what happens in Argentina: the space is populated by creative schoolhouses, but time, the real power satellite, will finally impose itself. Within time there is strategy evolving inside agencies, gaining more and more leadership. A tangible example is to compare the salaries of both departments.