Are our start ups a let down?
Image courtesy of Fiat Luxe
The start up plays an almost mythical role in the world of advertising. Start ups are not simply an outlet for the professional and material ambitions of the best in the business, they are absolutely essential to the health and vitality of the industry. If advertising has managed to adapt to the changing business, consumer and communications landscape over the past century it has been largely because of its start-ups.
The concentration of talent and ambition in new agencies, coupled with their lack of moribund processes and crippling overheads means that they are able to
anticipate and quite often precipitate the changes that drive the business forward. Changes both to the process of creating advertising and the product itself, whether the media used or the selling techniques employed.
After all it was start up agencies like Collett Dickenson Pearce that in the 1960s first got their heads around how to use the fledgling medium of commercial television. While successive start ups from Saatchi & Saatchi in the 1970’s to Bartle Bogle Hegarty in the 1980’s and Mother in the 1990’s all used their success to lead the advertising business in new directions. And in doing so frustrated those that repeatedly predicted advertising’s demise.
Of course, while the attractiveness of younger, more agile agencies takes its toll on more established shops and every generation sees many of these fall by the wayside, unable to compete with the new offerings, many others survive and prosper. And they do so precisely because their deep pockets and generous owners buy back the talent, energy and new practices that the start ups have pioneered. And so the young turks return to the fold and in doing so change the agencies they originally left with far greater success than if they had stayed on.
Recently, however, something has gone wrong. In the last decade there has been no let up in the number of new advertising agencies, yet those born in this period have conspicuously failed to maintain the pace of change upon which the survival of the business is so dependent. This has been cataclysmic in London which, starved of start ups with new ideas, has become a shadow of its former, world conquering, self. If you had said to your average adman in the 1990s that the agencies that we would most respect a decade later, would be almost exclusively American they would have laughed into their cinnamon lattes. Not since the 1950s has London adland doffed its cap to the US with such awe struck admiration.
For far too long the hallmarks of the start up - fearless audacity, challenging thinking and world beating creativity - have been rare qualities in the UK’s young agencies. And this has to change if London is to restore its fortunes as a centre of advertising excellence.
Maybe the latest crop of start ups will be different. 2008 has begun with a flurry of agency births, the most notable being Adam + Eve and AnalogFolk, both breakaways from large network agencies. Refreshingly they do seem to promise new thinking and new ways of working, and interestingly both have been quick to bring in talent from outside orthodox advertising agencies, all of which bodes well.
We have to hope that this year’s start ups can deliver real change where their immediate predecessors have not. Because if you want to point your finger at anyone for the advertising industry’s failure to adapt don’t do so at the established agencies - this was never their role - point it at the last decade’s start ups that have delivered so much cash to their founders but so little progress to the business.
This post originally appeared as a column in New Media Age.
Fast Strategy
Image courtesy of Combined Media.
This is a little piece I did to publicise the The days of the stereotypical strategist are over. The business world has little time for the desperately bright, painfully academic, socially inept and ponderous planner. Because, as speed to market and speed of response become powerful competitive advantages, the business world has little time for strategy that gets in the way or slows things down. The perfect strategy delivered to market shortly after the competition has taken you to the cleaners is of no use to man or beast. Indeed, in our time squeezed environment it is tough to make the case for strategy at all. In many agencies we are witnessing the emergence of a ‘ready, fire, aim’ culture. Account people are drawn to this trigger happiness because of their preference for heat over light while creative directors love it because they can give their talent the maximum amount of time possible to bark up any number of wrong trees. And us strategists? Well we simply throw up our arms in despair. And the problem lies in part with the exalted position we have given strategy within our industry. We regard planners and strategists as tortured geniuses as they wrestle with the thorny issue of differentiating parity products in the yellow fats market and we wait for the white smoke to issue from the Vatican chimney to show that their work is done. Great strategy is utterly desirable but in the heat of the battle, utterly dispensable. The truth is that strategy is needed now more than ever – to simplify, guide and inspire. But if we are to combat the obsession with firing before taking aim we have to deliver great thinking faster, rather than asking people to wait while we deliberate. Of course there is nothing clever about strategy, it is simply about having a plan. And a good plan need not take an age to develop, it simply requires a bit of inspiration and to safe guard a little time in the process. And that’s the idea behind Fast Strategy. Fast strategy is about delivering powerful thinking quickly, whether in days, hours or minutes, so that strategy remains in the picture and we can at least aim our activity before squeezing the trigger. Every great strategist has tricks of the trade that help them to deliver great thinking fast and this year’s IPA Strategy Group conference will throw the spotlight on some of these approaches. Not only will showcase the strategic shortcuts of 50 leading practitioners but we will also witness fast strategy in the flesh as three communications legends compete in real time to crack a live client problem. Some will say that Fast Strategy dumbs down the contribution of strategists to the discipline of solving business problems. I suspect they will tend to be those desperately bright, painfully academic, social inept and ponderous planners whose time has passed. Image courtesy of I owe my career in advertising to an ad.
Not to an ad that inspired me but one that I responded to. It was placed by a long gone and deservedly forgotten direct marketing agency trying to find graduate recruits many months after the above the line shops had employed all the good ones. The ad read ‘By the year 2000 90% of marketing will be direct marketing’ and I was sold.
This was late 1989, storm clouds were gathering over the economy and the chronically unsustainable boom of the eighties. A recession was in the offing and most sectors were soiling their underwear, not least advertising that had enjoyed a decade of success and excess. All that hedonism was beginning to cause a headache and the ad business feared the worst. Not so my new found home of direct marketing. All across the land of lick and stick direct marketers were in buoyant mood and trying hard to hide their glee at the impending economic crisis. They were convinced that tougher times would favour a discipline that worshiped at the altar of accountability. Surely, they felt, a recession would deliver the coup de grace for the dinosaurs of advertising and their habit of spending vast sums of Client money on work that no-one seemed to feel obliged to correlate with business success. The philosophy of direct would be vindicated once and for all and, come the good times, healthier budgets would fall at the feet of the masters of Mailsort. Well the shit did hit the fan and many advertising agencies had to send back the Porsches and send out the P45s as Clients cut their budgets and agency fees. However, in the recession of the early 1990’s more direct agencies went out of business and proportionally more direct people lost their jobs than in adland. By the year 2000 even the most generous calculations attribute no more than a third of marketing expenditure to the different facets of direct. And in the aftermath the arrogance of direct all but disappeared as its practitioners got down to building the new discipline of relationship marketing, quietly and without the hubris of the past. The failure of direct in its plan for global marketing domination wasn’t because Clients walked away from cost per response, far from it. Businesses have always valued the ability of direct and now digital to show them what they get for their money, pound by pound. However, in my experience they also believe that there is more to life than return on investment. In leaner years advertising triumphs because it offers a little optimism, to the customer of course but also to organisations that are feeling the pinch. It is precisely at times like these that the power of a big emotional idea, expressed in the most potent way can help galvanise a brand, its people and its customers, delivering pride, purpose and preference for the companies that do it well. Visionary businesspeople have always understood this and usually come out of a recession in far better shape than the penny pinchers. So digital friends, when you think about the current economic climate be careful what you wish for. Of course the Internet Advertising Bureau is crowing about the “perfomance and measurability” of digital and is enthusiastic that tougher times may allow digital to “gain over other formats”. However, I can’t help thinking of the way the direct marketing industry greeted the news of recession a shade under twenty years ago. An economic downturn will be bad news for the advertising agencies but can you really assume it means good news for you? This post originally appeared in the 28th February edition of New Media Age This is my first NMA column for the year and its about measuring the effectiveness of digital campaigns. Obviously there is quite a tongue in cheek theme about bringing the digital geeks and the research geeks together but the serious points are about looking beyond intermediate metrics, the folly of accountability and need for greater ambition in digital campaigns.
As ever, enjoy.
It goes without saying that two of the words digital people seem to loathe the most are ‘advertising’ and ‘research’. Advertising because digital-kind believes itself to be above such a grubby and discredited approach to selling things. And research because this hardly suits the buccaneering spirit of the digital frontier where gut feel and instinct get results. So it was no great surprise that at a recent conference on advertising research run by the eminent people at the World Advertising Research Centre there wasn’t a single soul from the digital fraternity on the delegate list. Now, the truth is that attending a conference like that wouldn’t have even begun to flicker across the minds of most people in the London digerati. I mean, who in their right mind would swap a slap up lunch at Shoreditch House for listening to a bunch of boring research people droning on about how you evaluate engagement online? However, this sort of disinterest is symptomatic of the chasm that exists between the digital world and the research community. Which is a shame because you could be so good for each other. Sure, many research people carry the pallid complexion of those that spend too long sitting ruminating in dank basements, emerging blinking into the light merely to collect data or submit a paper for peer review. Sure, they tend to wear suits that were mildly fashionable in the years preceding decimalisation. And sure, they have a curious way with Powerpoint that involves cramming so many words onto a slide than you’d have difficulty reading them with the Hubble Telescope. But they might, just might, have the answers that you are looking for, or at the very least a way to help you to find them. And of course number one on the list of questions that need answering is how to prove the effectiveness of digital campaigns and specifically the value of engagement. Not with terminally intermediate metrics like click-through, pass-on rates, average dwell time and the like. Nor the entirely reprehensible habit of multiplying visits by length of visit, finding out the cost of buying that ‘engagement’ with conventional media and calling the result of this sordid little calculation ‘Return on Investment’. But real attempts to prove the commercial value of immersing people in a brand’s world and having them interact with this world and share it with others. Not to mention the means by which to model the sales effect of digital activity and prove its contribution to the client’s bottom line. Now you may feel that you are happy with your click--throughs, pass-on rates and average dwell times. After all aren’t they proof of digital’s accountability? And isn’t that what clients are looking for? Well in my book accountability is rather over-rated. What clients really want is an effect – a real sense that the marketing activity they undertake is selling goods and services. Not shifting a few here and there but manifestly affecting the momentum of their business. Advertising agencies have always understood this and not only have they historically valued bigger and longer term effects over short term movements in the metrics but they have set out to get them, and develop the research tools and models to prove that they have been delivered. If digital wants to move beyond mere accountability and prove that it can deliver the real results clients are looking for, it must engage properly with the research community. Digital folk, it is time to discover that the boring people sometimes have interesting things to say. I recently had the pleasure of judging two sets of industry accolades.
The first was the Account Planning Group’s Creative Strategy awards and the second, New Media Age's Interactive Marketing and Advertising Awards, at which I was the above the line cuckoo in the digital nest.
Now, we all have our own view of awards and their importance or otherwise to the business we work in. However, I never fail to find them hugely instructive as a barometer for the way an industry is developing and the ebb and flow of ideas and practices. For instance, despite all the talk of digital shops getting planning and planners getting digital there is very little cross over between the entries at these two events. The APG still draws the majority of its entries (with one or two very notable exceptions) from advertising agencies and the IMAA from digital and media agencies. I want, however, to expand on another and far more subtle difference with broader learning for the world of digital planning and creativity. The fact is that I didn’t cry once while judging the IMAA. Over the week of shortlisting and day of judging I laughed, played, engaged, gapped in awe and doffed my technological cap. But not once did the tears well up in my eyes or the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Not so the APG awards. On more than one occasion I had to fight back my tears and swallow the lump in my throat in order to get on with the serious business of dolling out gongs. Most notable in the waterworks department was the Nike Air Max campaign that honours moments of devastating sporting failure to the strains of a dying Johnny Cash singing his rendition of ‘hurt’. It gets me every time. However, this isn’t just a plea for more emotional digital work, although I think this development is inevitable as the discipline’s creative confidence and competence increases and the emotional bandwidth of the tools available increases. After all that is what happened in traditional advertising once the novelty of a brand going on TV ceased to be reason enough to go and buy it. This is actually a plea to refine our definition of interactivity. As an industry we have a very one dimensional view of what constitutes an interaction between people and a brand and it almost always involves pushing some kind of button, whether on a remote control or a mouse. It’s a very physical thing. This utterly disregards the fact that the most powerful form of interaction a brand can solicit is exactly the reaction the Nike work creates – emotion. This is a response you can’t measure with clicks or dwell time but in raised pulses, dilated pupils and the crackling sound of synapses firing. That’s why we love Gorilla, Balls, Evolution and the other real stars of today’s interactive advertising landscape – they generate powerful emotional responses. And the more we learn about the way campaigns work the more we understand that emotional persuasion trumps rational persuasion every time. So why is the simplest form of human interactivity somehow seen as illegitimate in the armoury of the interactive marketer? Why can’t the technology that we all delight in be used to bring emotion to the brand relationship not just the relationship between users? And why is novelty prized so highly over other, more subtly powerful forms of persuasion? It is high time that we recognised that emotion is the highest form of interaction and prepared for the judging the next digital awards by stocking up on the Kleenex. A version of this article originallya appeared in New Media Age. This my most recent column for New Media Age . In it I expand on the idea, that you will also find in the Battle of Big Thinking speech, that brand ideas now too big for advertising. Big brand ideas are currently big news in marketing land. I mean really big brand ideas, not short-lived creative ideas that sparkle momentarily and then fizzle away as fast as they arrived. Nor one-dimensional advertising ideas that offer tactical responses to specific business issues. But whopping great ‘are you pleased to see me or is that a canoe in your pocket?’ brand ideas. At their best these feel like the driving philosophy of the business rather than just the strategy for marketing communications. That’s how the Campaign for Real Beauty seems to me, as if it were the reason that Dove exists in the first place. The same goes for Honda’s Power of Dreams, Land Rover’s ‘Go Beyond’ idea, Vodafone’s belief in the power of now and Persil’s, much maligned, Dirt is Good philosophy. And of course every Tom, Dick and Tarquin in the agency world thinks that they can muster a half decent idea when the opportunity arises. Well if this were the case I’d be able to quote rather more examples than this. Really big brand ideas are actually rather thin on the ground. However, it is not the global shortage of quality ideas that concerns me most. It is the role that advertising plays in serving those ideas. In short, while a brand idea can never be too big, it may well be too big for advertising. Advertising has always liked to see itself as the window onto the brand’s world. That’s what we mean by brand advertising – here is the whole of the brand in forty seconds. And that is why advertising is usually seen as the lead discipline - it’s the one that most succinctly sums up what the brand is all about. That was fine when ideas were modest and adcentric, but really potent brand thoughts are often short-changed when forced into the format of an ad. More than this, the desire to communicate the entire brand experience can compromise advertising’s ambition to sell. This is the enduring criticism of the ‘Dirt is Good’ campaign -that the idea is far bigger than can be dramatised in an ad and attempts to do so have not converted into sales. Maybe it is time to free advertising from the need to represent the entirety of the brand idea and recognise that other disciplines are capable of doing this in a richer and more rewarding way. In particular it is time to recognise that for many brands it is their online experience that should be delivering the big brand idea in all its technicolour glory. After all advertising, whether analogue or digital, is always sharper when it has latched onto a specific business problem rather than wafting around conjuring up beautiful brand worlds. Of course the bad news for advertising agencies is the decline of the set piece ‘brand ad’ as the discipline gets back to the job of selling. Seeing advertising recast as the new below-the-line discipline is unlikely to be popular in Soho However, the good news for advertising agencies is that few of the brand’s other business partners are capable of framing the big idea in the first place. And this remains the most serious challenge for stand-alone digital agencies in the era of the big brand idea. Digital may be one of the very few marketing disciplines that can cope with the enormous bandwidth of today’s ideas, but unless those agencies have the intellectual and creative firepower to conceive of the idea in the first place they will struggle to usurp the traditional advertising agency as the primary brand partner. A mentor of mine once told me that there are only two types of planners in the world - nice planners and nasty planners.
He maintained that by far the best kind were the nasty planners. Image courtesy of thepres6
By nasty he didn’t mean that they committed acts of unspeakable cruelty to puppies or beat the living daylights out of old ladies for kicks. He meant that really good planners should be appropriately surly and uncompromising when the need arises, especially in fighting for better advertising. In other words nasty planners get in the way when the work is not right. This is because the planner’s ultimate job is to ensure that the work works. This may seem obvious to you but it’s not necessarily getting through to planner-kind judging from the comments on a post I recently wrote for my website. A remarkable number of planners seemed utterly appalled that I had tarnished them with the primary responsibility for effectiveness. Indeed I genuinely think that many planners now feel that their job is, to use a ghastly phrase beloved of the headhunting community, ‘the third member of the creative team’. They believe that they exist in order to contribute to the creative quality of the work not its efficacy. At the same time many of our media agency partners feel that creative agencies have planners simply to justify their recommendations to sceptical clients, that we have become little more than proof poodles. The moment that we lose sight of our basic role to ensure effectiveness is the moment we concede that planners have no separate and defined role within the agency and we all descend into a homogeneous mush of creative generalism. If that’s the case then fine but lets abandon the idea of planning and hire more creatives. And don’t imagine that this is just about creating clear blue water between planners and creative teams it is just as much about maintaining a professional distance between planning and account handling. In particular ensuring that the agency’s own self interest and the day to day harmony of the client relationship don’t get in the way of the work delivering a result either. After all an effectiveness culture is not one in which the agency makes the work, crosses their collective fingers and if all goes wins an IPA award. An effectiveness culture is one in which the planning discipline are obsessed with making work successful and actively intervene at every stage of the process to ensure that it is, whether this is palatable or not. In my experience standing up for the right work especially towards the end of the process when everyone else just wants to get the thing out there, takes a bit of backbone. And the right kind of nasty streak. This post was orignially published in the 10th August edition of Campaign magazine. As 'Russell Davies lite' I often get to fill in when the great man is otherwise engaged - weddings, after dinner speeches, visits of foreign dignatories, that kind of thing. And so I did some holiday cover on his Campaign Magazine column recently. The first was a tongue in cheek look at the way social media is helping to build bridges within the marketing community - between disciplines and between practitioners in different countries. There can be few industries outside technology that have taken to the many tools and applications of the social media revolution with the alacrity of advertising. Adland is blogging, twittering, sharing ads on Youtube, closing down MySpace accounts and opening them up in Facebook with an enthusiasm we used to reserve for selling fags and fatty food. And I’m more than a little worried. Not about the usual Chief Executive whinge about how their people find the time to maintain an online life when that’s the only kind of life that their jobs will allow. Nor the planning luminary’s concern that being able to look the answer up on the internet, rather than commissioning reams of insight-free consumer research, is dumbing down the serious intellectual business of repositioning yellow fats. No. What worries me is that all this online fraternisation it is making us like each other too much. And possibly, heaven forefend, respect each other. This simply will not do. Many industries are characterised by camaraderie and respect between colleagues in competitive firms. But advertising is not one of them. To win in this hideously competitive business you have to have the killer instinct, a belief that for you and your agency to succeed others have to fail. Well I don’t know about you but I find it a damn sight harder to stick the knife into another agency’s new business record if I have been Twittering about my bowel movements with their head of planning the night before. Our whole business thrives on the idea that there are only two types of people and agencies in advertising - brilliant and crap. With the inevitable assumption that we are all brilliant and they are all crap. That kind of delusion can only be maintained if you have no idea who anyone is outside your agency and still less like any of them. That’s why British and German generals took such a dim view of the impromptu football matches that took place between the trenches of Northern France. But everyone in adland is now doing this social media stuff – chattering away, building relationships, sharing work, and swapping ideas with no respect for traditional agency rivalries or tribal loyalties. To top it all this new spirit of chumminess is bringing people together across disciplines - ad people with direct people, creative people with media people, analogue people with digital people. And believe it or not some are even getting buddy-buddy with foreigners. That kind of carry on is the way revolutions start. I have started writing a regular column on advertising for New Media Age in the UK. In this first article (which appeared on 26th July 2007) I comment on the way immediate and free access to the world's creative product has destroyed the cockyness and self confidence of UK adland by showing us we no longer lead the world in this arena. In part I lay the blame on the sterility of the London agency landscape. As the soothsayers of the digital world are so fond of predicting, the internet will be the death of advertising. But not in the way that they think and much faster than any of them hoped. In fact the internet has already delivered the greatest blow imaginable to our industry. It has shown us in graphic detail that we are no longer masters of the advertising universe. More than this it has revealed that nations we had always assumed were incapable of turning out decent advertising might be rather better at it than us. This has come as somewhat of a shock. As a country we may have lost our ability to actually make stuff, sold all our utilities to the French and can’ t play international sport for toffee but we always thought we led the world in the dark art of creative persuasion. Hell, it was the one thing that we were better at than the Americans. And the blame lies squarely at the door of the internet and You Tube in particular. Just as the fall of the Berlin Wall exposed the East Germans to the shortcomings of their beloved Trabant, the internet has forced us to concede that we are no longer the best in the world at something we had long prided ourselves. For the first time we have free and immediate access to the best advertising on earth. Ads that are recommended, served up and debated by a global advertising community now welded together by its blogs, wiki’s and social networks. And the result is there is no longer a place for our insular complacency to hide. Of course we had half suspected what was going on, as foreigners started to scoop up international advertising awards and consumer affection for what we do collapsed. It’s just that You Tube has rubbed this fall from creative grace in our faces. And what explains our predicament? Well, like the decline of any great industry there are many factors at play. But a significant issue is the sheer sterility of the London advertising scene, once so innovative, self assured and lets face it flamboyant. Not only have we lost most our most interesting agencies from HHCL to Simons Palmer, closed or sucked up into monolithic networks by multiple mergers. But they are not being replaced The dynamo of creativity and energy in our business – the creative hotshop - has all but disappeared. Sure, there have been new ad agencies in the last decade but there has been nothing since the foundation of Mother with the ambition or creative passion to keep the flame of UK creativity alive. It is a dark day indeed when the agencies that are most loved and respected in London, Wieden’s and Fallon, are outposts of US networks. Maybe the hotshop mantle has been passed to the digital agencies that seem to have some of the vision, creativity and swagger that was once the preserve of the ad agencies. Maybe it is to these organisations that we should be looking for our creative renaissance. May be. In the meantime the ad agencies are left to lick their wounds. Without that pesky internet we could have gone on fooling ourselves that we were the global centre of excellence in commercial creativity. We could have continued to pat ourselves on the back and dole out our own self-referential creative awards, safe in our cosy bubble of self-delusion. In destroying the most important ingredient for success in our business, that of un-bridled self-confidence, the internet has already delivered a fatal blow to UK advertising. An article by Tim Hayward in New Media Age (23.03.06) expanding on my ideas about identity rich advertising and googlisation of creativity. An article from the New Zealand Herald (25.03.6) references my stuff on opinionated advertising Be careful what you wish for
Boring people know the most interesting things
Emotion is the greatest form of interaction
Are brand ideas too big for advertising?
No more Mr Nice Guy
Russell Davies is on holiday
Sure, we have always allowed some fraternisation amongst the upper echelons under strictly controlled conditions and providing it doesn’t get back to the lower ranks. Usually over lunches at the IPA or a sweet sherry at the A-list party.
An end to self delusion
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