I moved to Melbourne four weeks ago and already I see a lot of differences between the two countries in the advertising and PR industry.
The work culture is really different. Spain is a country with a poor efficiency ratio as compared to other industrialized countries. We get home much later in the evening due to the reason that companies usually provides 2 hour lunch breaks. This is changing in recent years due to free opening hours for the shops, but we still lose a lot of time. We get to have a lot of public holidays, at least eight days a year, but I guess all this has a lot to do with cultural differences.
If we talk about the advertising and PR industry, Spain is a really creative country however it is struggling on getting all this creativity shown, as we are in a huge economic crisis and clients are not willing to take risks. We could be doing a lot of attractive and spectacular actions that impulse users to buy and consume more, but instead, clients are cutting off their budgets and spending less money on publicity.
And so the question is, is this the correct thing for them to do? My answer would be no. In lieu of making new things and getting the final consumer curious, clients are doing the exact same thing they were doing ten years ago, causing lower consumption and increasing the crisis.
From my point of view, we advertisers and public relations professionals have to convince the client of investing more in publicity, as is a fact, that the more you invest in publicity, the greatest, striking and creative things you could do. Our final goal is to capture our user’s attention and make him consume afterwards. That way the final customer would consume more and more each day making the economy grow.
