Scamp asks the $6m question:
Most above-the-line creatives claim that most digital creative work is poor, and they will be able to do it much better, when they’re asked to. However, my question to above-the-line people is… do you actually want to?
Did you come into this business to sell, by any channel necessary?
Or did you come into it to make ‘films’, and quite frankly you’d rather someone else took care of the banners, just like they take care of the DM?
Head over to his blog and vote now!
EDIT: just to clarify, this poll is ONLY for people who aren’t already in some way digital. As Scamp rightly points out in the comments it’s not a poll for us digital types – I haven’t voted and neither should you if you’re already in the biz.
Be really interesting to see how it pans out…
I see so many creatives who are breastfed with TVCs and Print, and just dont see the point of going digital even though they may be like 25 years old… and when they are asked to go digital, they get afraid and pretend its not about “ideas”…
Iain, I do hope you’re not trying to rig the poll in some way!?!
Could I ask people to vote only if you are NOT already doing digital?
I’m interested in measuring the appeal that digital has for people who aren’t currently doing any.
Whereas its appeal to an existing practitioner seems like a different question. Maybe one for another time…
Hi Iain,
In my experience most ATL agencies, and even a large number of supposedly digital creative agencies spend most of their time trying to do ATL stuff and jam it into an online ad format.
In the last 2 years, I’ve had countless incidents from a large variety of creative agencies who have sent me creative files of up to 5MB, who didn’t even have the common sense to take their heads out of their a$$es and think “Wait a minute… won’t this take a really long time to load on a webpage?”. Sadly by that point, the client had already paid upwards of £100k for a sweet of creative which is far too large for online and insists that we use it anyway. Then I get the unfortunate satisfaction of having to tell them that their ads are generating really poor interaction rates for the simple fact that a lot of people never see them in the first place… the luckiest of which might spot the ‘loading’ sign in the ad format just before they move on to another web page.
Making good creative must be an unbelievably hard job, and not one I’d ever really like to take on myself. But before people even start to think about what they’re going to do – it would be nice if they had some common sense about the technical side of online ads.
In the last week I was sent a 150mb file for a 2 minute video clip which the creative agency wanted me to seed online. I sent it back and told them to stop wasting the clients’ money producing broadcast quality video which no publisher online would be daft enough to seed until heavily compressed.
Cheers
My background is in account planning. Having looked into what digital people do I think that advertising is just as interesting as it was before but in a different way (more hands-on / need to know more about the worlds of marketing, media and advertising in general / work closer with a broader range of people).
Also, another thing, although advertising is focusing more and more on technology / ‘brand utility’ etc .. traditional creative advertising is still going to be very much around. Think Cadbury’s Gorilla. Also, brands like Guinness are very much about creative / emotional advertising (anti-utilitarian etc almost ..). Yes traditional creative people will have to work more with digitial people (and that is good) just as digittal people will have to work more with traditional creative people (otherwise their advertising will be all gadgets / gizmos and no real entertainment / fun / emotional attachment – and it would be a mistake to think that audiences in the future won’t want these.
Dunno. I’m guessing we’ll all be watchin TV on laptops soon, so it won’t even matter. One big fat mush.
My background is in account planning. Having looked into what digital people do I think that advertising is just as interesting as it was before but in a different way (more hands-on / need to know more about the worlds of marketing, media and advertising in general / work closer with a broader range of people).