It has become a truism of modern marketing that the young are maddeningly ad-savvy. They have the uncanny knack of spotting a soft-sell at 50 paces. And so, in the hyper-swish offices of New York's Tribeca and London's Soho, the ad execs have been sweatily attempting to rustle up a new approach.
One idea in particular has repeatedly been run up the flagpole and the account chiefs have duly saluted. Why not use flyers, some young sharp has reasoned, why not appropriate the DIY propaganda tools of the club culture and the underground youth markets?
In the past year, we've seen leading beer companies, international fashion houses and Levi's jeans adapt the flyer to their own purposes. They know it makes sense: there is a palpable contempt among young people for traditional marketing forms, a discontent fired by over-exposure and endless repetition. The old punk-ethic flyer, then, has gone mainstream.
When an idea, or a device, goes overground like this, you know that its success has bordered on the phenomenal. For the past 10 years or so, flyers have been the tom-tom drums of the club culture, the great youth cult of the age, and perhaps the key tool in selling a whole lifestyle choice to a couple of generations.
Wander anywhere in the country, into pubs and caffs and record shops, pound the city centre streets, and you'll encounter a vast confetti of flyers, a veritable blizzard of homespun info-bytes. The hand-out bill is an idea of such sweet simplicity and its personalised distribution networks boast a huge advantage: audience selection takes on an immediacy, you can easily eye the likely punters.
Flyers have proved doubly useful in that, along with being a cheap and cheerful promotional aid, they have also provided a forum for young and innovative designers. The era of the hacked-together, black-and-white photocopy has long since passed and what was once ephemeral eye candy has morphed into a serious design proposition. Classic flyers are now reproduced in handsome coffee table books (High-flyers from the UK's Booth Clibborns press being a notable example) and a feted exhibition of Irish work was mounted at Dublin's Front Lounge two years ago.
There has been a rapid series of paradigm shifts in quality since the early days, with desktop publishing and scanner technology proving crucial. Flyering is a cottage industry which moves at a pretty swift clip - one designer turns a new trick, the ante is upped and others quickly cotton on.
"Technology has certainly made things a lot easier and cheaper," says John Foley of Cork-based Bite! design. "Anyone can get their hands on an Apple Mac now and can run off a pretty sophisticated piece of work." Bite! has produced a wide range of highly distinctive flyers for clubs such as Mor Disco and Yo Latino for the Simply Delicious promoters. While the company is snowed under with more general design commissions these days, Foley likes to keep his hand in.
"In a way, flyers are my laboratory," he says. "Something that I mightn't try on a corporate design, I'll try on a flyer. Designing the flyers is when I get to do my mad professor bit, working through the night on something, taking risks . . ."
The secret of good flyer design, he says, lies with the brief. "I think a flyer works best when the idea comes straight from the promoter. I've been lucky to work with Simply Delicious, who are never short of ideas. It's no different to any design job - if you don't have a good brief, it'll flounder."
Keen observers of flyer design will be au fait with the creeping sophistication that now distinguishes the Irish work. The form is increasingly self-referential here, with designers using serial motifs and trademark flourishes. Another of the country's most respected flyer gurus, Aiden Grennelle of the B'Zerk For Holly team in Dublin, says that the talent around now is remarkable.
"There are so many designers coming through all the time and the standard of the work that's emerging is extremely high," he says. ". . . There's a hell of a lot of really innovative work out there."
So much so, in fact, that the aforementioned Front Lounge exhibition is currently being updated and will tour the country before the year's end.
Jimmy Costelloe, of Dublin promoters Strictly Fish and one of the exhibition organisers, believes that Irish flyer design is conspicuously useful by international standards.
"Irish clubs have never been able to rely on selling big-name DJs, which has been the situation in the UK, so the flyers here have had to do more work," he says.
There is a lineage in the history of flyers that suggests current design codes will continue to crossover, spinning out ripples of influence through the mainstream. In the mid-1960s, for example, a San Francisco-based hippy collective, The Family Dog, produced a series of hand-painted, lithographed handbills to promote some psychedelic events. Their style (bulbous typography, gaudy colours) was hugely influential, and was subsequently used to sell clothes, movies and more. In the 1970s, the UK punk designer Jamie Reid produced seminal work with his newspaper cut-up and paint-splash collages for the Sex Pistols. Again, his influence reached far and wide.
Pop culture's history shows that good design filters though, and that the radical and the offbeat can quickly become the norm. So if you want to know what the future looks like, you just might spot its images deep in a bunch of throwaway flyers.