brand new

Isn't it ironic?

I read an interesting and provocative piece by Mark Holden of PHD in Adweek on what the media agency of the future might look like.  Some stuff that I personally think is likely to happen, some stuff I think that has been predicted since I started working in advertising but has yet to happen and some stuff I fundamentally disagree with.

However, what I really stuck out to me was the inherent irony in the argument about consumer understanding and models of communication.  For years, media companies expertise has really come in dealing with mass audiences.  Over the last few years they've begged for forgiveness and set up numerous philosophies, divisions and structures to deal with one to one or one to many communications.  This has bled all the way through to an unhealthy embrace of neuroscience and the individual's reaction (more often than not in the natural surrounding of an isolated lab) to communication and media. 

Yet, isn't their inherent expertise in the very mass and social nature of media and communication something they should be embracing?  The most pervasive evidence (popularized by Mark Earls) shows that we are first and foremost social animals who do stuff because of what other people do.  Perhaps rather than apologizing for their legacy of using and intuitively understanding mass tools they should be embracing and celebrating this expertise?  Perhaps there's some competitive advantage for a media company who moves away from better understanding media's effect on the individual and instead celebrates expertise in understanding the truly social nature of media and how behavior cascades through populations.

Let's move this forward

There's been lots of talk this week this week about how there was a seismic shift at Cannes this year.  A lot of people are pointing to the fact that it was a piece of film for the internet made by a digital agency that won the film Grand Prix, Obama's web driven campaign won the much coveted Titanium Grand Prix (as well as the integrated prize) and a PR campaign for Tourism Queensland won three Grand Prix (the first campaign ever to achieve this).  It made Ad Age declare that the 'ad age is over'.

Yet when you look at the industry chatter this hasn't been the real conversation. There's been much navel gazing by digital agencies at their poor haul of cyber lions - only 12 of 83 Cyber Lions came from pure digital agencies and the Interactive Agency of the Year was an ad agency not a specialist.  A few seem to be taking some solace in the fact that Cannes is an 'advertising' award when digital can be so much more.

What really scares me about this is we're getting caught in the same debate again about labels and types of output, rather than thinking about how we can create real innovation that solves business problems which is what commercial creativity should be about. Perhaps the closest thing to this from an advertising or digital agency was AKQA's work for Fiat that won an interactive Grand Prix.  That, to me, is the shocking truth of Cannes this year.

It's time we stopped obsessing about labels, accept that advertising has a broader definition than messaging and make stuff that excites people and solves business problems in the most effective way possible.  Sometimes this will be about the craft of communication.  Other times it might be about baking marketing into a product or service.  More often than not I think, it will be both.

One place to start is to look at our structure.  There's been precious little innovation in how agencies are structured or the type of talent they attract which is a recipe for replication rather than progress.  Thankfully, some of the more progressive agencies are trying some new ways of working through the creations of labs focused on marketing R&D.  BBH has had the wonderful BBH Labs for a short period of time, and now W&K London has launched Platform a hothouse for new ideas and a natural progression from WKSide.  Let's all try some new things to move the industry forward.  Labels don't matter but the work does.  And if we embrace the risk of failure and experimentation we so often preach to our clients, then perhaps we'll be seeing some more innovation and fresh problem solving at Cannes next year.

The deathly echo chamber of advertising

Jeff Goodby wrote a much commented upon piece in Ad Age this week.  In it, he attacks the industry for becoming "irrelevant award chasers" and challenges that fame should be the acid test of work.  A lot of people seemed to be agreeing with this but there were some fairly interesting naysayers.  Their arguments ranged from fame being irrelevant currency in a world of fragmented, one-to-one communications (which I think is absolute BS) to a bizarre post from Nigel Hollis of Millward Brown that seemed to suggest that fame was an irrelevant goal for communications if they are to achieve commercial success (I would suggest there's a ton of data that Millward Brown have collected that proves otherwise).

In think this is the most powerful point Jeff made:

"We have become connoisseurs of esoterica. And in the process, we're becoming more about us, and less about changing the world."

It's an uneasy feeling I've had for a while, and one that's been magnified by the narcissistic echo chamber that exists through blogs, twitter, etc.  It seems that we are increasingly obsessed by what our peers think, not what real people think.  By changing the output of our industry, not culture or the world. By ideas that win gongs, not ideas that influence culture in favor of our clients' brands. And I fear that we may deafen ourselves into an untimely demise as long as we keep living in an alternately self-congratulatory and snarky advertising echo chamber.

On a related note, I found this great piece of film where Jeff talks about the brilliant, and nowhere near famous enough, ad man Howard Gossage:

Shirky's Law

Clay Shirky did a fantastic talk this month at TED@State talking about how cellphones, facebook and Twitter can make history.  Well worth a watch, lots of really good stuff.

In the talk he makes a fantastic observation about technology and culture that I want to call Shirky's Law (much like Moore's Law,  etc.). This is what he said about Twitter, etc. and their social value:

“These tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. It isn’t when the shining new tools show up that their uses start permeating society…it’s when everybody is able to take them for granted.”

In other words, technology's social value is inversely proportional to its technological newness/prowess. And I think that's a simple rule we often forget, especially when we are working in the digital space.  We often get blinded by the inherent shiny newness of technology that we forget about it's potential social value. And that sometimes the most powerful tools are ones that already have been created.

UPDATE:  There's a nice example of this in Chris Anderson's piece in this month's Wired:

"The real transformation would come when those regular folks found new ways to use computers, revealing their true potential.

All this was possible because Alan Kay, an engineer at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, understood what Moore's law was doing to the cost of computing. He decided to do what writer George Gilder calls "wasting transistors." Rather than reserve computing power for core information processing, Kay used outrageous amounts of it for frivolous stuff like drawing cartoons on the screen. Those cartoons—icons, windows, pointers, and animations—became the graphical user interface and eventually the Mac. By 1970s IT standards, Kay had "wasted" computing power. But in doing so he made computers simple enough for all of us to use. And then we changed the world by finding applications for them that the technologists had never dreamed of."

More fantastic marketing in the music biz

PSFK had a great article earlier this week on how Mos Def is launching his new record, The Ecstatic. He's making a T shirt that has the cover art on the front, track listing on the back and a URL to download the album on the hang tag.

Another example of how the music industry is doing some of the most innovative marketing out there.  Not only is this arguably more profitable for the artist (better margins and people are in effect buying your marketing), it also turns your fans into media and creates one of those very powerful social object things that Hugh and Mark are so rightly fond of.

Build it and they will come?

Ed over at Influx Insights found some quite startling data from the youtube blog:

"In mid-2007, six hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute. Then it grew to eight hours per minute, then 10, then 13. In January of this year, it became 15 hours of video uploaded every minute, the equivalent of Hollywood releasing over 86,000 new full-length movies into theaters each week. 

Now, 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and it is a testament to the fact that you've made YouTube your online video home."

Given this volume of content generation, is our usual strategy of 'build it and they will come' one that holds water?  Isn't it time we thought better about how we might swim with, rather than against this, tide?  Think more smartly about how we bring online and offline marketing together as one (how do we promote our online content)?  Realize a funny ad might not be funny enough (there might be funnier content in culture outside advertising)?  Think that we need to either make something more magnetic and beautiful (craft) or be quicker and have a more disposable attitude to the stuff we make?  Any way you loom at it, it's quite sobering to see how truly frenetic culture has become.

The geeks will inherit advertising

I was lucky enough to go to the Creativity and Technology conference in NYC this week.  Amazing, inspiring day.  Ad Age asked me to scribble down some thoughts and you can now read them here.

Financial crisis=more awesome stuff for culture

A few days ago Tim Hwang kindly accepted an invitation to come in and talk at Modernista!  Tim is an incredibly smart thinker about the internet and one of the founders of ROFLCon.

He made a lot of great observations, some of which you can read on Tim's blog.  But he made one observation that struck me as incredibly simple and powerful, one I should of probably have noticed already.  Contrary to intuition, the crashing global economy is likely to lead to more bizarre, interesting awesome stuff popping up on the web.  Here's Tim's rough, and arguably conservative, calculation:

even taking the overly harsh assumption that only one percent of those unemployed since the recession began both have a computer connected to the internet and are want to produce content in some form (33,000), and only spend one extra hour a day for a month on it (~30 hours) — we’re talking about a torrent of close to a million man hours of production (990,000) barfing up content online.

So, we're likely to see more funny cats and the next rickroll.  Or, put more broadly, a more vibrant, fertile web culture.  This in turn is likely to lead to more strange stuff entering pop culture because as Tim rightly pointed out the internet seems to be the beta development lab for pop culture - think about how stuff white people like transformed itself from a niche blog to a bestselling book, or middle America being rickrolled during the Macy Day's Parade.

So, it seems financial volatility is going to trigger some cultural volatility.  I wonder if this happened in past recessions (going to look into that) but even if it did I doubt it will have been with the pace or pervasiveness of what we're about to see.  (Worth noting, that there's evidence of the Argentinean crash triggering the emergence of a strong DIY/maker culture.)

Two planners in a room

For the next 24 hours, you can watch Paul Colman and Graeme Douglas write their APG paper in 24 hours. It's a bit like watching a lo-fi Big Brother but it's mildly addictive (perhaps because I'm hoping it morphs in to subservient planner), and more importantly, while the result of a crazy workload, it feels more than a gimmick.

The core insight in the paper they're writing (and I quote from their site) "is that its often when the pressure is highest and the risk greatest that the biggest rewards can be achieved, and its plannings job to manage and maximise these opportunities".  So, it feels like the action of writing the paper is an experiment and demonstration of this.  Anyway, you can watch away at two planners in a room.

Giving ads a bad name

Many years ago Charles Inge made a very pertinent observation about the importance of quality control of the work when you are the CD of at a large agency:

"Because we are so big, we have a duty to do good ads. An agency this size gets into people's living-rooms so much that we have to do good work. Every good ad is good for our business, and every bad ad is a chip off the block of advertising."

I desperately try not to simply point at ads I think are bad but I think the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on this are going to take more than a chip off the industry.

One Show interactive

I was lucky enough to spend Friday night at the One Show Interactive awards (yet to be announced on their site but nominations are here).  Lots of great work despite not being the best year, and Modernista! was lucky enough to pick up a gold for the agency site.  

Goodby Silverstein deservedly won Agency of the Year for great, beautifully executed work across a whole host of clients and Best in Show was for AKQA's fantastic ecodrive idea for Fiat.

Three campaigns however have stuck with me since the awards.  The first is for Axion banner concerts. Interesting idea for a youth bank, but really impressive for its innovative use of the most traditional, and often dull, online space, fixed banners.  You can read about the making of the campaign here.

Second, was R/GA's brilliant utility for basketballers from Nike where you can join and organize games via a Facebook app.

Finally there was the brilliantly evil and simple idea for the highly evil and violent video game, Condemned 2. Quite simply, it's a game so vicious, you need to do something to offset the evil.  

The future of marketing

TalentZoo has just posted a short piece I wrote on the future of marketing.  You can read it here.

We can learn from music

Clearly the music business is in a state of massive change at the moment.  There's a lot of pain, but in the midst of this there's some interesting (and successful) innovation going on.  And I think it can point the way for those of us working in the advertising industry.  In fact, when you think about it the issue that both industries face are not dissimilar - changing distribution models, the inability to buy attention, etc.

I wanted to point to a couple of things.  The first is a Trent Reznor interview from last week with Kevin Rose of Digg.  Well worth a watch, as I think Nine Inch Nails have been behind some of the more interesting marketing ideas of the last few years (for example the Year Zero ARG).

The second is a new initiative launched by Smashing Pumpkins.  They have just announced they are launching a subscription service for their new album where fans will be able to track the progress of the recording of the new album through videos, photos, etc.  Billy Corgan said this about the idea: 

"The goal is to create a working model that is not profit motivated but rather information and access motivated. In exchange for a fixed resource base fans will be let inside in an unprecedented way to the creative process of preparing to make the next (Smashing Pumpkins) album while also inspiring an interactive dialogue that will help shape the work."

This is a great example of getting fans to participate, but I think also is of note because it makes the process itself of interest and more interesting.  Be interesting to see what happens.

And while we're on the topic of fan culture, go and head over to Bud Caddell's blog where he's been writing some great stuff over the last week on fan culture.

Annual Planner Survey

Heather LeFevre is organizing the 5th annual planner survey.

The more people who contribute the better the survey will be so please take some time to answer the survey here (should only take ten minutes) and sign up for results here.

Swimming with the tide

One of the things that's really important to grasp if we accept we are a herd species, is that we're more likely to be successful if we swim with, rather than against, the social tide.  

I'm not sure if this has anything to do with Mark, but there is a new initiative in the UK to reduce binge drinking by moving the frame of debate from disease and sickness to one of calories and weight control. The new campaign is designed to show the amount of calories 'hidden' in drink eg 5 pints of lager a week is equivalent over a year to eating 221 donuts.  Feels like an approach that may have success (a little like the anti-smoking work for young women that looked at smoking's impact on exterior beauty) as it makes the issue part of an everyday conversation rather than something people feel simply doesn't apply to them ("but I'm not like them, it won't happen to me".)