I have a confession to make: I am an advertising columnist who is increasingly confused by how the industry operates and what it produces.

Let’s start with the recent spate of AI ads from brands such as Toys R Us and Coke. If I think they’re a creepy, lazy misuse of the planet’s dwindling carbon resources, am I a Luddite who needs to get out of the way of an inevitable future? Are they just the foothills of an upcoming mountain, or will there be a backlash to their artificiality?

Then there are the ‘fake reality’ ads, such as the North Face jacket on Big Ben, seemingly created just to go viral on social media. Are they inspirational genius? Depressing subterfuge? A flash in the pan? If they’re entirely CGI, should they be more imaginative, or is the possibility that they’re real an essential part of their appeal? Should they have to explain that they’re fake? If so, why?

Is it OK to like a Burger King poster if it features a woman who has recently given birth devouring a Whopper? If I don’t think people will understand it without a more elaborate explanation, am I just a bitter misogynist who doesn’t understand how women feel after giving birth?

Is the Jaguar rebrand great, awful, or not even worth discussing? Is it great because it’s awful, acting as a kind of marketing clickbait? Was it awful on purpose? Does the fact that I’m not in the target market make my opinion irrelevant?

Should Levi’s have remade their iconic Launderette ad with Beyoncé? Was it sadly lazy, or a brilliant reinvention of one of the best ads of the 80s? Does it objectify Beyoncé? How many Beyoncé fans are old enough to remember the original?

Does the mere existence of conversation mean it ‘worked’? I mean, it was clearly noticed, but was it just because it was a quiet day on LinkedIn?

Was John Lewis’ Christmas ad a charming Narnia-inspired emotional rollercoaster? Or was it utterly incomprehensible? And did either of the above evaluations make it more or less effective than the ones that used to make sense? Hang on … did the bulldog on the trampoline actually make sense?

And on top of all of the above, those of you who frequent LinkedIn will surely have noticed some posts by a company called System1, which claim to measure the supposed quality of the above (and many more besides) beyond argument.

But they’re pretty vague about their methodology, they seem to champion ads that appear to be crap, and their ‘emotion’ graphs don’t make sense (who are all these people who seem to be ‘disgusted’ by the new John Lewis ad? If one of the ‘positive’ comments for a Jaffa Cake poster was ‘I love Jaffa Cakes’, why is anyone taking System1 seriously?).

To add further confusion, this whirling maelstrom of thoughts, feelings and opinions is further stirred by the advertising community on the aforementioned LinkedIn.

If one of the ‘positive’ comments for a Jaffa Cake poster was ‘I love Jaffa Cakes’, why is anyone taking System1 seriously?

(Apologies if you never go on there, but I just want to take a moment to say that I very much think it’s worth checking out. There are some excellent people offering some excellent takes on the state of the industry, as well as on individual ads, and the great work of the past. Yes, I know it’s also full of some quite dubious viewpoints, but you’re smart enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, aren’t you?)

I wonder if the industry is in a particularly mixed-up place right now. Between the huge range of media, the exploratory use of nascent technology, the merging of holding companies, the fear that AI is coming for our jobs, the blurring of lines between in-house and agency work, the awards that went from zero purpose to lots of purpose and are now swinging back the other way, and the impossibility of knowing whether or not an ad is truly effective, it’s hard to get a grip on this thing that pays our mortgages.

Let me give you one particular example of uncertainty that always crops up: no matter how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ the ad, someone is bound to comment, ‘Well, we’re all talking about it, so that means it must have worked.’ And that alone is enough to send me into a tailspin.

Does the mere existence of conversation mean it ‘worked’? I mean, it was clearly noticed, but was it just because it was a quiet day on LinkedIn? I have read that 87% of ads are never noticed, so yes – being noticed at all is something of a victory, but is being noticed for being crap a good thing? Are all the crap-but-noticed ads better than the beautifully crafted-but-unnoticed ads? Were the crap ones just cheap clickbait? Should we, as an industry, be proud of producing that kind of thing?

You see? One comment, much confusion.

You might suggest that advertising has always been impossible to pin down. Indeed, it was over 100 years ago that Lord Leverhulme supposedly said, “Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” So, is the endless flux a feature rather than a bug?

Despite the efforts of System1 to bring certainty to the subjective, we should probably just go with the flow and concede that ads will always be maddeningly, fascinatingly, wonderfully imprecise. If we wanted certainty we should have gone into accountancy. If we wanted rules we should have become teachers. If we wanted to avoid complexity we should have become bus conductors.

Let’s leave the last word to another old man of the past. Back in the 60s, Bill Bernbach said, “Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.” Despite my confusion, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Based in Los Angeles, Ben Kay is a creative director and copywriter, and advertising columnist for CR; ben-kay.com; Top image: Shutterstock