Advertising must look outward in times of change

Recent advertising aesthetics have been focusing on the wrong kind of attention, argues Orlando Wood, with profound implications for the effectiveness of creative campaigns.

Most advertising conferences feature tightly choreographed presentations in which the speaker toes a line, gives little away, and seeks to evidence a linear success story.

Not Orlando Wood, the mercurial presence who serves as research agency System1’s chief innovation officer. At EffWorks (October 2021), he treated the audience to paintings by Albrecht Dürer, Hieronymus Bosch, Giorgio de Chirico, Picasso, El Lissitsky, and invited it to “look out”.

He hadn’t just chosen the famous ones. Wood’s interest centres on the periods of intense creativity witnessed in the Renaissance, when the invention of the printing press sped up the rate of textual...

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands