Advertising is King Lear. Creative is Cordelia. Will the King of France restore the kingdom?

(*Tortured Metaphor Trigger Warning*)

If you’re not familiar with the story (shame on your high school), the aging King Lear decides to divide his kingdom amongst his three daughters based on their declarations of love. His two eldest daughters, Goneril and Regan, insincerely flatter him. His youngest daughter, Cordelia, refuses to engage in such nonsense. Lear banishes her and divides his kingdom between Goneril and Regan. This leads to betrayal, chaos, and ultimately, Lear's descent into madness. The King of France invades Britain restore the kingdom and win Cordelia’s love. And in typical Shakespearean fashion, lots of people die along the way.

Advertising, primarily in the hands of a few holding companies in search of flattery (read: short-term profits), forgot the merits of keeping the kingdom together. They divided it between digital performance and media. But like Cordelia, Creative couldn’t indulge in false praise when product quality and the long-term health of brands was being ignored. So, Creative was banished.

As expected, Digital Performance and Media eventually betrayed the business through trickery, manipulation and outright lies (I could’ve added hundreds of links to back this one up). This left the advertising business, like King Lear, destitute, lost and drifting into madness.

Though Creative is sometimes viewed as stubborn, it was always an act of integrity. Believing love of the business, clients and brands, should be shown through the work, not empty proclamations. The more Creative stuck by these principles, the more intense the banishment.

Creative knows we can only do what we do with media’s help, and that reach means little if there’s nothing of substance put in it. Creative also knows Everything is Brand, and Everything is Performance. For virtually anything being sold, only 5-10% of people who see an ad will actually be in the market. For them, there MUST be a performance outcome. BUT, for the 90-95% who are not currently in the market, you need to at least put a penny in the brand bank. Otherwise, it’s complete waste.

Creative KNOWS you have to keep the kingdom together for it to thrive. Otherwise, you’re just roaming the stormy heath with delusions, erratic behavior and symbolic acts of madness.

Is there a metaphorical King of France wanting Creative’s love so we can restore the Kingdom to its previous glory? I believe there is. Even if the King doesn’t recognize it yet.

The creative opportunity of our lifetimes is already on the 60” screens in our living rooms. Ad-supported OTT/CTV can be mass and addressable and brand and performance. And with proper creative thinking, it can do it all at the same time.

Imagine the premiere of the final season of Stranger Things, with only a single ad beforehand from McDonalds. A brand message integrated with the show. AND, it was connected to the McDonalds app for McDelivery while you watch. A fun, integrated, mass-market, culturally-relevant story for the 90-95% who weren’t in the market. AND an immediate performance action for the 5-10% that were.

OR, during Thursday night football on Amazon, a Nike ad like “Dream Crazier” which inspired so many women (the NFL’s fastest growing fans, btw), but the final scene at the end used addressable information to show the latest shoe for the sport you played with a “send to my phone” shopping option.

OR, a big car brand that sells me an entertaining brand story, using addressable data to show me a car I can actually afford, in a color that’s in-stock at the dealer closest to me.

That’s just off the top of my head. There’s a whole AR shopping component of this that would lead me down a rabbit-hole of Lear’s hallucinations. And the branded content potential for this is off the charts. Branded content with performance metrics? Yeah, it’s possible with today’s tech.

Our potential Kings are Amazon, Netflix, Disney/Hulu and YouTube. But today, they’re a mess, as if King Charles IX was the tech bro in charge of OTT. I won’t torture another metaphor, but IYKYK. They’re trying to scale up thousands of $500 self-service media buys similar to Google AdWords, pitting brands against their retailers/franchisees. Making the viewing experience a nightmare of homemade videos. But, if any one of them actually got Creative, Media and Performance together, they could consistently be selling $30 million upfronts.

Imagine being able to make ads again. Ads that reached millions of people via entertaining stories. Entertaining ads that also used addressable data to target specifics. Entertaining ads that returned demonstrable performance metrics. All for a fraction of what it costs to run on cable during live events today. Even cheaper than the thousands of horrible A/B-tested banner ads sitting on expensive tech stacks with corrupted 3rd party data.

Imagine being able to buy locally, regionally, nationally, or in some cases globally. Scale as big or small as you want. It could be the next creative revolution.

So, which King is going declare their love of Creative and help us restore the kingdom?