It’s a thoughtful (yet slightly empassioned) piece on the evolution of advertising. For a taster:
This, we are told, is integration. For the web guy, who was recruited with the promise of a seat at the Bernbachian table, it feels more like integration at gunpoint. Instead of spending his time shoving a square-peg concept into a round-hole medium, web guy should look to his own patron saint, Marshall McLuhan.
He uses better words that what I would. But I think we’re on the same team ;-)
This is all going to seem a little strange. Why on earth would anyone want to remix a presentation in such a fashion?
Well it’s a funny story you see. I was mucking around with some basic VJing software. It’s a thing called Quartonian that can take a folder full of images and do crazy stuff with them (using Quartz Composer on the Mac if you’re geekily inclined).
Anyway I tried it out with some holiday snaps and it was a bit odd. The images were all a bit too, well, holiday like. I wanted some pictures that had a more thought out narrative. So I thought why not stick a presentation through the VJing software? I didn’t want to use a client presentation so this is what came to hand.
Oh my good lord I can see myself having some fun with This. Slipping in transformation like this 1/2 way through a boring creds presentation into an acid inspired 3d alternate reality…
[If you want to do such a thing, and why wouldn’t you? It’s really very simple – just export your presentation out of Keynote or Powerpoint as a series of JPEGs, then point Quartonian at the folder – you’re away! I turned it back into video using Snapz Pro to screen capture the output]
I was watching TV last night and an ad came on for continuing education. It’s one with fingers walking around the place. The ad was OK. I didn’t really pay much attention. But at the end of the ad the call to action was – “search for EMA online”. Not visit direct.gov.uk/ema or what you’d normally get, but just search for EMA online.
So I tried it. And it worked.
On Google both top natural search listing and the sponsored link would have taken me to the right place. On Live search and Yahoo.com the right link was the sponsored top link as well as being number 2 in natural search (not perfect, but good enough).
Then a couple of minutes later I stumbled on this article (via: BoingBoing) about how in Japanese advertising the use of search terms in posters is really kicking off. I quite like how they’re integrating a search box with a suggested search term into their ads.
It does seem like a potentially smart way to go now that most of the short and memorable domain names with any meaning have been scooped up. But making sure you’ve got the right people looking after your search engine optimisiation / marketing stuff is EVEN more important than it was yesterday.
[I’ve written this post once already. I got to the end of it just as someone phoned me up. I picked up the phone. Fumbled it. And dropped it on my laptop which duly crashed in a spectacular fashion. The second revision is slightly shorter and hopefully more to the point…]
I watched a great documentary on BBC4 on Sunday called The Rise and Fall of the Ad Man. Presented by Peter York it featured a lot of the great ‘ad men’ of the past, and some of the present. There were loads of interesting points worth noting. But I’ve forgotten most of them now (for the next few days you can still catch the whole thing on BBC iPlayer).
The thing that stuck with me mainly was its celebration of the glory days of advertising and specifically the rise of the hot creative shops of the 60s. CDP (Collett Dickenson Pearce) was the poster child of the show and it’s success seemed to be attributed to a few things:
The time was right. The swinging 60s. Post-war gloom moving into a period of rapid cultural innovation.
The existence of a bunch of TV natives. People who had grown up with TV, who knew how to write for it, and to make it work for them.
A media environment where you could create a phenomenon overnight by putting something on the only commercial TV channel and hitting 20m people in one go.
Clients needed help.
The creation of a place where cool creative people just wanted to hang out.
[Forgive me if any of this is woefully incorrect I wasn’t alive at the time and I’m basing all of this on something I saw on the Telly, which is never a good place to start]
Is ‘now’ the time right for something new?
It feels a bit like the time is right for some kind of big shift again. And judging by the fact that there’s about 5 new agencies starting every week it would appear that others do too. Most of these new shops are claiming to be some kind of new new thing.
But if you’re coming out of an agency, trying to hire people who work in other agencies (media, digital, design, whatever), the danger is that you’re going to end up with just another variant of an agency. Sure, it might have better laptops, the structure may have mutated and the working culture might be tweaked slightly. But most of these new agencies seem to be built on well understood principles with well understood types of people working for them. This might give you a temporary moment of interestingness and competitive advantage. But it’ll only take a minor manoeuvre for someone else to catch up.
So assuming that the time is right (and it might not be), what would you do to create a brand new agency, like what they did in the 60s?
Hire Digital Natives?
I’m making the assumption here that digital natives are to today what TV natives were to the 60s.
So hire some digital natives. People like me who think that digital is ‘a thing’ are old-school. We might be able to help get you through the next few years, but unless we become less in awe of a bunch of computery things we could end up making ourselves obsolete.
But right here, right now, I think we’ve got our Hovis opportunity (Hovis make bread, they also got a seminal Ridley Scott ad during the 70s). There’s still a moment when we can do the big huge magical thing before all this digital stuff just becomes ordinary, everyday and expected.
I’ll get back to the hiring thing in a bit.
The Media Environment
Once you’ve got people you’ll need to create a guiding principle that celebrated the media environment that we’re dealing with. Embrace fragmentation and change. Realise that big lumpy unpredictable niches are about as good as its going to get. Or that narrow:deep audiences can become wide:deep audiences very quickly and with tiny media costs.
I’m not sure exactly what that principle is, but it’s the equivalent of knowing that a break in Coronation Street is your playground – then making the right stuff. (Hell if I knew the answer to this I’d be a very valuable and important man).
I loved this from the programme:
I doubt that this would be said by many people nowadays (especially not in the online space).
Clients Needing Help
The show documented the huge improvements that have been made to the marketing function within client organisations. Leading to a suggestion that in lots of places the marketing function is so sophisticated that they’re constantly butting heads with the agency – I can’t believe this could be true ;-).
In the ‘glory days’ it seemed like the agencies who were producing great work were almost unquestionable.
If you’re trying to launch a killer agency right now. Where do you think clients need most help? Where can you command a position of unquestioned god-like genius? On my list marketing and advertising wouldn’t be at the top.
Creating the Place
And now for the big one: creating the place where the cool guys come to hang out and do whatever it is they do.
I don’t think this is about environment it’s about a culture of possibilities and the other people they’re going to have as company/inspiration. And paying people properly – if you want to attract the best people you’re going to have to shell out. As someone in the BBC4 show quoted, CDP knew that if they paid peanuts they’d get monkeys.
In the 60s it was the best artists, writers, film-makers and suchlike who were the people you wanted in your gang. But who are the people you’d want nowadays? Here’s my list:
Entrepreneurs: You’ll be wanting the new Sergey and Larry. Of course. We all would. It’s about finding the people who just want to get stuff done quickly. People that make things happen. And who have a passion for things that they’re making / selling. There’s a big difference between business people and entrepreneurs. At least in my humble experience.
Geeks / Inventors / Designers: I’ll probably get shot for bunching these people together. But for these purposes I am putting them together. It’s the people who conceive of brilliant things. The ones who invent the widget. Or the new way of making something more usable, or more beautiful, or work faster or better. But specifically it’s about finding the ones who don’t have self-imposed limits. The ones who believe that anything is possible.
Super producers: Oh yeah. The people who know how to get things done. The people with the address book you’d kill for. Give them a thing to make or a bridge to build and they’ll know the people to make it happen. And have them on team in a couple of days. I think there’s about 26 of these people in the world (at last count).
Online content creators: People who make things. People who can’t help making things. The ones who are just be out there making videos, or music, or poems, or doodles. People who understand how to create a moment. A piece of online cultural history.
Cyber anthropologists: I didn’t really know what to call these people. They’re the people who have an ungodly fascination with what’s going on ‘out there’ the ones who are living real online lives, and watching and interrogating other people too. So they wouldn’t just be commenting on online dating, they’d be out there getting hooked up. And I’d be particularly looking for the ones who are trying to understand what it all means from a psychological and sociological point of view.
Uber bloggers: Of course I’m just sucking up to bloggers here so that they all link to this post and say nice things ;-) But seriously if you’re a certain type of blogger you know certain types of things that not many other people do. You understand how content and conversation work together. You understand how things get transmitted around the blogosphere. In short you understand some very important things about today’s media landscape.
As I went through this list I sort of sense checked it by seeing if I could put names next to all of these roles. And I could. So they’re not fantasy people. They really do exist.
Then once you’ve got a great place to work and assembled that rag-tag bunch of mistfits you’ll need some hardcore project managers and business people to be able to sell the shit out of the nonsense they’ll come up with.
I forgot. It might be expensive. And it might not work. But if it wasn’t it wouldn’t be worth bothering.
Anything or anyone else you’d chuck in for good measure?
It’s so killer it’s not even funny. They’ve got a load of top drawer interactive music machines that you can play with over the internet. And the way they’ve done the queueing and stuff is really nice.
I’m not 100% sold on the old skool interface look, but it doesn’t get in the way so I don’t care too much.
I just had a go on the choir and it was fun. And now they’re going to send me a film of my ‘performance’. How nice.
This is the kind of shit that gets me really excited. I love stuff that still feels like magic. It makes me all hot and bothered with the thought of possibilities and the things that can happen next. And that’s a good thing.
As I was reading it, I found myself going: “Oooooooh, how could they be so bold”. And my scandal alarm started beeping.
Then I read the comments and this jumped out at me:
You brits are funny. you take the business of advertising so seriously.
So I decided that ‘Yank’ was right, I shouldn’t give a toss really.
It’s a bloody advert that looks and feels like a really great YouTube clip that turns out to be something that’s a bit like something that was an ad for something else that someone found on YouTube.
Then I started thinking about the poor bloke who made the original ad. I bet he’s sitting down the pub delivering a monologue to a deaf pint about how he could have been a contender. But at least his reel has got something on it that he can claim as the inspiration for something that’s loads better than the thing he made, and he can say – “see my idea was brilliant, I just didn’t have the right budget, the right client, yada yada yada”. Thankfully no-one changed it into a drumming Walrus or something, then his claim to fame would have been almost impossible to make.
So I stopped feeling sorry for the original gorilla creator. Christ, he’ll probably get interviewed on some advertising blog about it one day. And who could ask for more than that!
Then I started feeling sorry for the original guy in the gorilla suit. He’s the unsung hero of the whole thing. For him it was just a case of the wrong gorilla guy being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Anyway I’m trying not to care about it. There’s a global ideas-squeeze on, and I’ve not got time to be worrying about such things. There’s an internet full of things to be looked at and re-processed and re-appropriated.
Have an efficient filing system for your rejected work, because a lot of briefs come up time and time again (this product is simple to use, this product is inexpensive, or in the case of Cadbury’s – this product will make you happy).
And have an efficient storage area for funny photos, YouTube clips, news articles – things that one day you may be able to make into an ad. Because as someone once said, “the worst time to be looking for an idea is when you actually need one.”
However, I’d just like to add that you have to be careful that you don’t cling onto your rejected ideas too much or you’ll end up being a brain crack addict. Honestly you will.
In spite of the heinous typo I love this sign (from a little newsagents just off Brick Lane).
I haven’t seen anything that encapsulates quite so wonderfully the problem with a lot of the online advertising that is floating around aimlessly in cyber-space. There’s so many things (good and bad) that no-one has ever seen (or will ever see).
Some obvious causes of invisible web marketing properties:
It’s just not plugged in to the rest of the web properly.
Or it’s not interesting or talk-able enough.
Or sometimes it’s just plain rubbish and no-one wants to see it.
The answer: Advertise your ad(d)s – and it’s only a quid!
This ad for Geometry Wars I liked. It’s almost another kind of entertaining demo, sort of:
It makes me smile and chuckle.
They’ve also got some bonkers online advertising which I can’t actually find right now. And the website is also pretty odd. In a kind of retro-kitch-gaming way: http://www.geometrywarsgalaxies.com – it’s far from being a good site, but it does a nice job of continuing the lo-fi old school vibe (I like the 3 types of navigation you can pick too).
