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An Overview
Irreverent Maverick
So what happened to all the really funny commercials? When did advertising all get so worthy, so high-minded? So, frankly, dull?
It would perhaps be unfair to lay the blame for
the quality of today’s advertising entirely on the ubiquity of Purpose, but you can’t deny it’s taken the bloody fun out of things. You could always count on a beer ad to make you smile, for instance, but now it seems a beer is no longer simply a beer – it exists to bring people together across political divides. And that’s no laughing matter. And if
there was any lightness of touch to be found in communicating the benefits of a cloud storage solution as a handy way not to lose your files, that was lost when your brand instead became a tool for ‘unleashing the world’s creative energy’. Over the last 10 years we have all become a group of people on a mission to save the world, and that’s some serious shit. It requires solemnity and respect.
But there is a group of challengers who see the world’s seriousness as an opportunity – that there’s a little room for a joker in the pack: the Irreverent Mavericks. It may be that they don’t feel the need to have a Purpose, or it may be that being serious on the inside is not best served by being serious on the outside. Either way, this challenger narrative is one of provocation, a poke in the ribs, deliberately setting out to entertain and engage – even court
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