Ryan Reynolds is making advertising history.
His latest appearance on LinkedIn is yet another chapter in that book.
In an interview announcing it (see below), Ryan says that his mission is to:
âBring some of the swagger back to advertising that it had decades ago.â
A notion that I think many of us who have been in the business for more than a decade applaud.
Ryan then goes on to talk about how our obsession with data has âsucked the fun out of the industry.â
Ryan preaches that âads should be funâ and blames having too much money and too much time as the reason why itâs not.
And why his agency, Maximum Effort, created a concept called âfast-vertisng.â
Ryan defines âfast-vertisingâ as advertising that creates ads at the speed of culture.â Thatâs how everyone else is creating content. So why shouldnât brands do it the same way?
I donât disagree with anything Ryan says.
But, as your trusted LinkedIn advertising historian, I consider it my duty to point out that while Ryan is certainly making advertising history, he is not creating it.
Everything Ryan says, from his criticism of the industryâs bloat to the solution of fast-vertising, has already been said and done in the 1960s by a man named Howard Gossage.
If Ryan doesnât know who Gossage is, he should.
He would looove him.
Like Ryan, Howard was an ad guy who hated the bloat of advertising.
Like Ryan, he created some of the most outrageous (and effective) advertising of all time.
And like Ryan, he could achieve more with a single ad than others could achieve with entire campaigns.
Gossage called it âThe AdPlatform Technique,â and he described it as follows:
âWe do one ad at a time. Thatâs the way we do it. We do one advertisement and then wait to see what happens, and then we do another advertisement.
Oh, sometimes we get way ahead and do three. But when we do, we often have to change the third one before it runs.
Because if you put out an advertisement that creates activity, or response, or involves the audience, you will find that something has happened that changes the character of the succeeding ads.â
It may not have moved as fast as Ryanâs Fast-vertising, but itâs wonderfully similar.
Once again proving that there are no new ideas, only better ones.
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