brand new

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.