citra pariwara...?

Last Friday I went to the a celebration of creativity and craftmanship, something that everyone waits for a whole year, a place to meet the industry and yes, a chance to show off your talent. The holy Citra Pariwara.

And how did it turn out?

For this kind of event, during my whole advertising half-life, I was only frustated twice. The first one was in AdFest 2005, when I looked at rows and rows of creative advertising and excellencies of ideas. I was flabbergasted on how we are way behind those guys in terms of outputs. The second was, well, last Friday.

Frustated because after all these times, what I see from the gallery doesn’t show any improvement. Au contraire, we could see a very noticeable decline in terms of ideas and craftmanship. Of course there were some ads that outstand others, but when you take a second look, they doesn’t have something new to offer. The way of thinking is very western, and it’s not something that was supposed to happen in Citra Pariwara.

You see, Indonesia is a vast multicultural melting pot that has became a nest for different cultures and ideas. It’s a country where you have everything. The way of living is so varied you could find new things every single day. Unpatterned life. And like a diamond, there are so many facets and angles to look at and every single one of them shine.

Yet, in Citra Pariwara, we could only see communication problems being solved by very few angles and most of them are being seen with western binoculars. Indeed, you see every tools of advertising being shown, from the witty headliners (in english, while you are supposed to talk to Indonesians) to the everlasting thing-transformed-to-other-thing-to give-a-new-meaning.

But the soul is missing.

Now, I know I don’t have the qualifications to say whether an ad is good or bad, heck, even my entries didn’t get as far as I hoped. But I know one thing; that there were none of them striked my heart as powerful as, let’s say, IKEA’s “sale on sale” print campaign with an idea so simple you would’ve die to have it (which is not necessary, you need only to observe things, but that’s a different story).

The theme of this year Citra Pariwara is “Surviving Change”. I didn’t see any change, thus I didn’t see why would we need to survive it. Indeed, advertising industry is changing globally as it evolves into a new species. But we do not need to go there yet because there are so many homeworks to be done first. Like finding the uniqueness of Indonesia.

Wow.

That’s a big word. Uniqueness.

But that’s what, I think, we are supposed to do.

Thailand rarely put any of their traditional dances nor their art. They simply put their thai life in their advertisings. And that what’s makes them unique in front of international judges. They dare to be honest with themshelves. We talk funny, let’s make it a strength instead of being ashamed. We have silly habits, let’s put them in ads as they are. The creators observe things around them, almost without missing a single thing.

We should look closer around instead of thinking the way those award-winner hotshots think. It’s not “what would Droga do?” but rather “what would Droga not be able to see around him”.

Our environment is our uniqueness. And that’s something Kelly, Judee or Guerrero don’t have.

Another factor that comes into the equation would be our inability to think strategically. What I see in the Citra Pariwara are often eye-candy advertising. I see Jessica Simpsons instead of Catherine Deneuves. We need beauty with brain. Not dumb blondes. It’s the scam/initiative factor when you do an ad for the sake of craftmanship and forget the very core dna of advertising: communicate with people. No, it’s not a grammatical error, instead of communicating one way TO people, we need them to respond, to build a dialogue between producers and consumers. That is why you need a good strategy to back up your ads. It’s not “I have an execution idea, let’s do it!”.

It’s time to really put the suits’ names in the certificate not for the sake to fill the blanks.

Strategy is always the biggest part of a creative process because from there, we could truly give birth to outstanding ideas that would hit the right spot in the eyes of the consumers. I can assure you that ads that has an excellent strategic back up would not only shine in the award circuit, but would also gain public interest and last much longer than your usual one hit wonders (remember “I never read The Economist”?).

That’s what I really want to do from this moment, doing ads that has those two characteristic, not eye-candy things and for that, I would need support from my account service’s fellows. And I intend to involve them as much as possible.

Once again, this is my point of view; it could differs from yours or theirs, but I honestly believe in that.

And belief is everything.