FAIRY TALES FOR TREND SPOTTERS.

Here’s a story about Western society.

It goes like this: Sometime in the last twenty years, we all turned into hippies. Some of us became big hippies, some medium-sized hippies, and some quite small hippies – hippies in suits with BMWs. Nevertheless, compared to “Homus Eighties,” we all might as well be playing acoustic guitars with sun-flowers in our unwashed hair.

As part of this general hippification, products and services that promote a more selfless consumerism became the norm.

Take recycling, for instance. Once exclusively for New Agers, but now widespread and unremarkable, with even the most conservative householder separating glass from plastics, and paper from organic compost.

Or take biological food. Our indifference to what we eat is waning. Slowly we’re voting with our store cards, slowly produce is becoming friendly: to people, chickens, pigs, fish, olives, tomatoes. Even the peanuts in peanut butter die with grace and dignity. And words like “by-catch” and “bio-industry” can be used in daily speech without anyone requesting a dictionary definition.

Today, sustainability is a topic for Presidential speeches.

Today, nobody thinks it’s a grand statement if you buy Fair Trade. Today, multinationals spend millions on commercials touting their environmental good deeds.

Today, Oscar winners include Inside Job, a complex, partisan documentary about banking corruption and the wrong inflicted by money.

Even if we’re not exactly a species of Joni Mitchells just yet, the West seems on course for Planet Hippy.

At some point, these attitudes found their way down to what’s traditionally seen as a moral basement: advertising (one floor down from lawyers, take a right at the guys who train child soldiers).

About as socially acceptable as arms dealing, advertising is still considered “poison gas” (to quote the legendary art director George Lois). At the time of writing, Morgan Spurlock has released a new film about the perniciousness of branded content, and the likes of Peter Joseph’s Zeitgeist Movement condemns commercial creativity as the devil’s work. Mostly, ads are judged to be subtle manipulation, emotional blackmail or simply plain old remorseless propaganda.

We’re not disagreeing.

But while these opinions are mostly/ all true, there’s a counter-culture even within the ad industry. In the nineties, agencies began to emerge that swept the Mad Men stereotype aside, embodying a different set of values, perhaps closer to the present’s more responsible outlook.

These agencies were reformers on all levels. They experimented with more liberal, open-minded creative practices, more transparent business policies and more grown-up ethics. They turned down tobacco, they turned down airlines, they turned down reactionary political parties. A massively influential example of this type of agency is Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury, the co-founder of which, Steve Henry, appears in these pages.

These agencies could do what they did because advertising is basically morally neutral. Believe it or not, advertising’s nature doesn’t inherently make you anxious, or create a burning desire for pointless junk. Granted, that’s how it’s most often used, but that isn’t what it is.

One of the contributors to this book, Alex Bogusky, defines advertising as “asking for attention,” and likens its ethics to sex: you can do some pretty horrible things involving sex, and you can do some pretty amazing ones too (make a family, for instance). Ultimately, sex and advertising are just sex and advertising. Both are only as warped as the people involved.

In short, when the values of the people making ads change, so does the great snotty beast itself. To be fair, this change feels glacial, but it’s a pretty fast-moving glacier, one with plenty of cracks, one that occasionally, very occasionally, doesn’t feel like a glacier at all, but a slow and slushy river.

One of the primary reasons for change is that, ultimately, advertising is a creative industry, and creativity is all about transformation.

Now, from the outside, all those endless standardized ads for face wash and tampons don’t look remotely creative, but the process that spews them out is a creative one, absolutely, positively, definitely.

Trust us on this.

Behind every horrific model skating along a beach at sunset, there are a hundred, a thousand, wonderful ideas. In fact, there’s a graveyard full of them, each one murdered by fear, compromise and office politics. But to say that these wonderful creative ideas died isn’t the same as saying they never lived. And it sure isn’t the same as saying there aren’t a hundred thousand more where they came from.

So let’s think glass almost half-full.

Probability states that the new responsible societal attitudes described above will increasingly manifest themselves in advertising (which very often only reflects what the world is thinking). There will come a day when that dark army of skating models is struck down and replaced, one by one, by fantastic ideas. Perhaps ideas that provoke and engage, instead of comparing you negatively to some tedious Photoshopped rollerblading bint. Or perhaps ideas that just make you giggle, or feel better disposed toward whatever’s happening in your day.

The point is: you can’t be in a creative business like advertising without being experimental, and you can’t be experimental without questioning the status quo – even if the status quo is usually paying your bills.

Question hard enough and long enough, and good things will happen.

From inside advertising you can see glimmers of this, and not just from agencies.

As of a few years ago, even the largest, staunchest corporations have put “responsibility” at the heart of their internal conversations. It’s also standard practice for clients to request not simplistic old-school ads, but multi-disciplinary projects encouraging creative collaboration with their product’s audience. Open source over hard sell.

So this book promotes a type of advertising that we can all live with: brand stories that are honest, engaging and open. It’s a style that’s been around for a while, but is only now evolving in a way that’s consistent and long-term.

Or so we hope.

Like we said, this is a story, and stories are often merely wishful thinking.