A BRIEF HISTORY OF SELLING STUFF
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There are several paradigm shifts in the history of advertising.

One was the moment when the first Egyptian turned papyrus into a poster. Another was the creative revolution of the sixties, when advertising creatives first began working in teams.

And another took place roughly last Wednesday.

Until very, very recently, most of advertising was divided by media specialties. If you wanted a multimillion-dollar cinema commercial, you went to one type of agency.

If you wanted a mass letter informing housewives about an exciting development in frozen foods, you went to another.

In turn, the men and women who created ads defined themselves by whatever media they focused on.

ATL meant “Above the Line” and represented where most people wanted to be: making TV commercials, hanging out with photographers shooting press ads on beaches, driving past enormous billboards of their work at the weekends.

ATL was renowned for a certain type of, um, confidence.

After all, sitting around a film set being handed mocha-choca-lattes or seeing your ideas replicated twenty-feet tall is a huge ego kick… and can fairly easily lead to the mistaken belief that you’re in The Rolling Stones (which is odd, because “washing powder salesperson” is a more accurate job description).

And then there was BTL, or “Below the Line.” Rather unfairly, BTL was seen as ATL’s awkward, trailerdwelling, snaggle-toothed cousin. Mostly by people who worked in ATL.

BTL dealt with the less glamorous end of the business. Direct mail was produced, vouchers designed and wobblers created. (A “wobbler” is a plastic strip attached to a supermarket shelf. You don’t need to hang out on a beach with a photographer in order to create a wobbler).

While BTL wasn’t quite as showbiz, darling, it was more effective. Perhaps not always creatively, but from a purely business perspective your shilling was better invested in a well-crafted pamphlet. Daring, expensive TV ads are career Russian roulette: clients lose their jobs if the mild uptake they were expecting turns into a nosedive of complaints and negative PR. By contrast, a brochure is always a bargain, and its success is directly measured by the number of responses you get to the voucher printed in the back.

One way to understand the ATL/BTL divisions is “sex” and “work.” ATL was “sex.” At its best, it was the craft of creating desire. In its most extreme manifestation you bought into a belief system, not just a product. The ultimate example of this is Nike, still referenced to death in every meeting every day within the advertising industry. You bought Nike and you stood for optimism, struggle and victory (echoed in the name itself, of course).

And that was at the very least. At most, buying Nike meant joining a modern religion, something that gave your life purpose and meaning (as argued by James Twitchell in Adcult USA). BTL, meanwhile, was about getting on with it and paying the bills. There is little religionmaking involved in sticking a “2 for 1” on dog food down your local supermarket.

Now, these definitions are somewhat artificial. There are plenty of examples of brilliant experimentation within BTL. And there are plenty of hard-headed sales ads on your TV every night. But there is a general truth in the “sex” and “work” descriptions, and perhaps also a general prejudice. Generally speaking, it was a lot harder to make outstanding work in BTL, and (generally speaking) a lot more fun to enter the paradise of ATL. The two never crossed paths. ATL and BTL folk were rarely even seen in the same building together. When they joined forces true collaboration was limited, submerged in hierarchy. The ATL agency passed its ideas down to the BTL office for adaptation into… whatever it is they did. Leaflets or something.

These divisions applied for years. In fact, you might argue that they apply still, in old-fashioned agencies run mostly by greying Twitter virgins. However, for the most part, a time of change eventually swept across the kingdom. It came in the form of things that looked like TVs, only with things that looked like typewriters attached to the bottom.

Its name was Digital.

At first, online advertising was dispatched to the BTL ghetto. The product of early digital agencies was seen as a sort of futuristic direct marketing, wobblers for the web, animated brochures. Predictably, the people seeing things this way were ATL agencies, and they were doing their best to preserve a way of life involving as many palm trees and helicopter shots as possible. To be honest: who could blame them?

Unfortunately for ATL, Digital proved to be a growth market. More than a growth market, it was a fecund jungle of creative and technological innovation.

Whereas advertising journals once wrote sceptical articles doubting Digital in every edition, soon they started giving special awards to Digital agencies. Moments after that, even the idea of Digital awards became strange and quaint. Why? Because Digital as a category was ceasing to exist. It was so successful that it became irrelevant, it became everything. Where Digital stopped and other forms of advertising began now seemed problematic: press ads existed only to encourage visits to websites, thirty-second television ads premiered on YouTube.

The very notion of talking to the public through one medium seemed bizarre. Suddenly, making a oneoff, big-budget TV commercial felt like advertising time travel, back through a mysteriously glowing portal marked “1980s.”

Finally, there was an irony of the delicious variety. Some years ago the more open-minded, bigger ATL agencies abruptly decided they were no longer ATL. To some degree, they had said this for ages, but for the most part little was done beyond producing Power-Point presentations and spin.

Now, however, ATL meant it.

Whole Digital departments sprung up over night, stuffed into the designer attics of international ATL agencies. Being a creative meant replacing your battered leather portfolio with an online one, full of online examples of online work. Job interviews in the most traditional agencies opened with “The future is online. What’s your online experience?” Frequently, a director’s most interesting work had never appeared on TV, but on a website.

Which brings us to the present: an industry that’s as unsure as it’s possible to be. There are ATL agencies that still farm their work out to Digital agencies. There are ATL agencies that no longer call themselves ATL. There are BTL agencies that have become Digital. There are Digital agencies that have as much power as a traditional ATL ever did. There are Digital agencies that merely program, and Digital agencies that supply creative. There are BTL agencies that make TV and radio ads. There are ATL agencies that could make a hundred glitzy cinema ads a year, but would rather make websites.

Every possible variation of every possible model is being explored, often within the same company. It’s an exciting, messy time.

It’s a time when advertising can be hated in whole new ways, but also occasionally admired for its bravery and experimentation.

All in all, the industry as a whole feels like a frontier again – a bit rough, but as different from the days of Nine Out Of Ten Doctors Smoke Camels as an abacus to a trumpetplaying robot.

Welcome to advertising’s Wild West, where the cowboys wear limited- edition Converse and go on detox weeks to Thailand.