Neil Christie writes:

Because of our work for Honda, Campaign magazine asked me to write a few words for a piece about the decline of car advertising. “Battered by a drawn-out drop in demand and reputation-obliterating scandals, the car industry has understandably lost its swagger,” they said. John Townshend of Now wrote the main piece in the article, which appears in this week’s issue. Here’s my small sidebar:

Creative advertising as we knew it in the 20^th century arguably originated with the classic DDB campaign for Volkswagen that began in the 1950s. It was witty, knowing, understated and highly effective. It raised our expectations for what car advertising could be and set a standard to which many sophisticated marketers aspired for the next fifty years.

In recent years, the European car industry has been through some challenging times. Declining sales, decreased budgets and increasingly centralised control have conspired to produce increasingly bland and conservative marketing. Even the VW badge has been tarnished by emissions scandals.

Crap, generic car campaigns have always been with us. But there used to be more of the glorious exceptions that captured the public’s imagination, built brands and sold cars: ‘The ultimate driving machine’, ‘Vorsprung durch technik’, “If only everything in life was as reliable’ and even, yes, ‘Papa? Nicole.’

New car sales have recently started to return to the levels reached prior to the financial crisis of 2008. The factors behind this recovery are economic – no-one’s claiming it’s due to brilliant marketing. It remains to be seen whether healthier sales will encourage a renaissance for marketing excellence.

How can advertising produce more creative, more ambitious, and more daring work in the face of industry pressures and change? That was the topics of yesterday’s Guardian-hosted web chat, which Rob Meldrum, our Director of Experience Architecture, took part in alongside six other panelists. Covering everything from the challenges holding back marketers to different approaches to “process,” the group chatted about a range of themes and discussed how advertisers might begin to bring about change.

Some highlights from Rob’s contributions to the chat:

On how we can get to more creative marketing:

We are all on a quest for more creative, ambitious marketing but there are two things we, as an industry, need to embrace if we want to succeed:

1. Change. (It is necessary)
Try new things with different types of people in different ways.

2. Failure. (It is certain)
It’ll go wrong at least some of the time. But we need to try, fail, and learn from it.

On the role of data:

Data should play more of a role than it does currently. Obviously the term ‘data’ is very general, but essentially what I’m looking for in data is insight and understanding. Having more of that helps shape the brief and influence the creative. Knowing our audience (how they think, what they do, why they do it) is essential for our work to (possibly) mean something to them. Relying on gut-feel is at best old school, and at worst arrogant – data is what we need.

You can view the whole chat on Guardian Online. Just scroll through the comments beneath the feature introduction.