The Middle Renaissance of Advertising

This is a little answer from Quora that I need to think about a bit more. there's something in it, I think.

Pulling a few common threads together. The future of advertising? contextual, personalised, locational. I also think agency people (even the young dudes) will want to make 'art' or at least legacies for their generation (and Groupon promotions ain't that). So I there's a bit of a renaissance model going on. Early renaissance was defined by naive wonder (the internet). High renaissance is defined by scale, energy and high art. I think we're in the middle right now, which is about intellectual idealisation (ie personalisation, localisation, contextualisation). And I think there's an aspiration in the industry to start to do the really big, meaningful stuff. Hey - there's a presentation in that!

Cannes, or Venice?

Watching the Monocle podcasts today about the Venice Architecture Biennale, I was struck by a definition of architecture as "not just about buildings but what we think about buildings or how we talk about buildings".

This seems to suggest a broader cultural definition of 'advertising'.

Then I saw the pointlessness of 'old fashioned' advertising imploring us not to dump our free copies of Metro newspapers. Surely the 'advertising' response should have been to exmine how these freesheets have created this behaviour in the first place, and see how the business process could be re-engineered?

So, to that end, would the advertising world be better served by a Biennale, exploring the meanings and definitions of the industry, rather than the good 'old fashioned' Cannes festival?

Sent by BlackBerry

Positioning for an economic downturn? Or, of baby birds and octopi.

So it's pretty clear the industry is in for a bit of a rough spell. There usual summer lull in new business and softening budgets may not come back in the autumn. The IPA has been talking for a while now about the importance of brands advertising during a recession to strengthen your market position when it's hard for your competitors to respond.

But, how do agencies position themselves for this downturn?

Networks have greater flex than smaller agencies. They can move people around the network, compensate for downturns in one market through network revenues, and downsize more easily. I was in a network during and after the last recession, so I can remember how they consolidate and adapt.

Smaller, independent agencies have less elasticity of resources and cashflow. Less 'fat'. The danger is they strip out a lot of the cost which makes them less able to add value and slower to respond to an upturn (and therefore vulnerable to sale).

I suppose my answer is that smaller agencies have to try and sell an integrated offer based on a value (not low cost) basis. They can save the client money by not having to maintain a lot of separate contracts with different agencies (a network to a client must look like a nest with loads of constantly demanding baby birds competing for scraps of worms from the parent). Integration can mean keeping the brains trust together and coordinating an integrated structure (and therefore campaign design) around the clients' business. More like an octopus, then.

And I wonder how many agencies have been bold enough to start talking about the R word in their creds yet?

Technorati Tags: economics,positioning,downturn,integrated,advertising,recession

Reach and Frequency, be damned

I used to work with Microsoft and sometimes joked that they didn't actually need to advertise at all. They just needed to do lots and lots of focus groups with the media budget. They could talk to the same number of people, it might cost a bit more but the behavioural shifts would win me an Effie before you could say boo.

Anyway, that's one alternative media strategy.

Another is to stick your ads on YouTube and hope that vast droves come and watch.



This is a little video of some peoples' stick puppets singing a song about Harry Potter. Juan Cabral is nowhere to be found. Just look at the number of views. 37 million and counting.

Why? Perhaps because the subject matter is close to the hearts of the audience. Perhaps because its not branded. Perhaps because its genuine and not slick. Brands take note. If you stick stuff on YouTube to get the audience hyped before the ad airs, make sure it's more interesting than a sock puppet in someone's bedroom.

Are Penguin the new Innocent?

OK I must be the last one in the world to put all the pieces together.

We've all been blogging and writing presentations and brand models that unpack, deconstruct and reassemble Innocent in the minutest detail.

But I think there's a new kid on the block. One that doesn't have a planning guru (that I know of) at the helm, but a brand that really gets the new world of marketing.

And it's Penguin.

I've just received the Clay Shirky book to review and blog - (thanks Rachelc for the image) and in so doing, the distributed web presence created by this marketing tactic becomes a living case study for the book's main tenets.


But it's all the other stuff, separate but coherent that makes it pure planning gold. They just do all the stuff we spend our lives trying to persuade 'brand' marketers to do.

I think all my digital strategies are going to look a little bit like this in future.

Branded content and the consumer experience

Tomorrow evening I'm doing a little talk to branded content producers here. It's free to come, but you just have to register. Here's the script, but I promise there'll be pictures.

I’m a consumer planner – which means I sell guns and drugs to minors. Or that's what I tell my mum.

Really though, I’m supposed to know everything there is to know about a brand’s consumers and turn that insight into the basis of a great creative idea.

In other words, I should just know how you should sell guns and drugs to minors, rather than actually do it myself.

So I’d like to talk about the consumer perspective a little bit, and how it’s often at odds with that of the brand.

Let’s start with the brand managers’ view of the world.

They liken themselves to media owners – they pay for someone’s time and attention and fill that time and attention with content. Traditionally that content has been advertising.

I think traditional brands operate in an Attention Economy.

What is that, then?

Wikipedia defines it like this: Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity

And … "Attention economics today is primarily concerned with the problem of getting consumers to consume advertising. Traditional media advertisers followed a model that suggested consumers went through a linear process they called AIDA - Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Attention is therefore a crucial and the first stage in the process of converting non-consumers. Since the cost to transmit advertising to consumers is now sufficiently low that more ads can be transmitted to a consumer than the consumer can process, the consumer's attention becomes the scarce resource to be allocated”.

There are advertising memes floating around regarding the attention economy, that consumers sell the right of brands to invade their privacy, based on how ‘important’ they are as consumers, and the amount of time they’re willing to give up to advertisers. How many of you would you be prepared to do that?

Here are some stats about the attention economy.

James Gleick says that each generation of consumers has 8000 times the amount of information available to them than the previous generation.

The Henley Centre says that 63% of us don’t have enough time to get things done in their daily lives – yet consumers in Western Europe are expected to see and somehow process 3500 ads a day.

The ad agency Leo Burnett have a study that people are only likely to engage with 3 of those 3500 messages a day.

So brands are obsessed with cutting through the clutter – and think that by re-forming content (ads) into new emerging media opportunities – like Advertiser Funded Programming – that they will be able to bypass the traditional channels and get their brand in front of people in new and exciting ways.

Audi set up the Audi TV channel to avoid clutter, and create advocacy (and presumably repeat purchase) among brand obsessives. It cost them £8m a year to run.

Land Rover do a similar thing on internet TV to the tune of £400,000 a year.

BBH, Audi’s ad agency, say that “Success won’t be defined by viewing figures or the number of sales generated, it will come down to how effectively the channel impacts on consumers’ perceptions of the Audi brand." But, just as a theoretical exercise, for a positive return on investment, Audi have to be sure to sell about 2100 extra cars because of Audi TV. I don’t know what their viewing figures are like but 2100 cars is about 4% of their total sales. Hmmm.

Here’s another stat from the attention economy. 92% of all email traffic is spam and open rates are plummeting. So, before you design another email campaign for your brand, think: does anyone care?

And another: only 1 in 10 people believe the ads on ITV are truthful

Another – and a media observation this time, so I defer to Jo to confirm or otherwise. But I was told recently by a media agency that we’ve reached a tipping point – the majority of terrestrial TV ads are now no longer seen, because of filters – such as timeshifting, view-on-demand, and ad-zapping on PVRs.

The advertising industry is at a crossroads of consumer confidence and trust

So I have a theory that branded content isn’t the new delivery mechanism of choice for media-savvy brand marketers, it’s just another form of invidious spam. It’s Ad-Voided by the consumer.

The consumer’s economy isn’t one of selling their attention to advertisers.

Here’s a ‘day-in-the-life’ of a medium web-savvy housewife, which I found on the web. The schedule, not the wife, that is. It’s from the US but I think it still holds true.

Morning:

Check e-mail on Hotmail

Searches on Google

Spend time responding to and e-mailing friends + family

Checks out links from friends (recommendations)

Browses real estate sites (it's a hobby)

Afternoon

Checks e-mail

Searches on Google

Watches a video on YouTube

Browses Ebay

Browses travel deals on Expedia

Checks Facebook

Browses Craigslist

Late Afternoon

Plays with kids on Webkinz, Noggin etc.

Checks e-mail

Searches on Google

Browses real-estate sites

Evening

Checks e-mail

Checks status on Facebook

Watches TV on DVR

Not one banner is clicked, or pop-up reacted to. People are using applications not branded content.

So I have a theory that the consumer’s economy is an Application Economy.

In an application economy, there are 3 key rules.

And my argument this evening is that by applying these 3 rules to Branded Content projects, you can create truly meaningful, original, and relevant solutions.

1. Stuff has to be USEFUL

2. Stuff has to be INTERESTING (and sometimes that means it shouldn’t try to have the brand all over it)

3. Stuff has to be UBIQUITOUS

1. USEFULNESS

As Darmano.typepad.com puts it: “Any experience is useful when it's meaningful and serves a purpose. Currently much of marketing still breaks down into self-serving gimmicks and interruptions that offer little value.”

Here’s a nice quote on the same theme: "For the same budget and energy as we expend on current forms of advertising, we could be making something more tangible, useful and reusable that plays a more integral part in the consumer's life.” Benjamin Palmer, Barbarian Productions (US)

So Usefulness means “Brand[-ed communications] being genuinely useful to their customers, employees, suppliers and the people they touch” Jonny Vulkan, Anomaly.

Rule 1 is Usefulness, and understanding what the brand’s consumers would find truly useful, not junky or poor quality.

2. INTERESTINGNESS

The challenge laid down by the Henley Centre, from the consumer perspective, is that consumers don’t put those 3500 ads in a box marked ‘advertising’.

Ads are competing against culture – movies, theatre, music and so on, and they’re competing with other things that demand our attention, like our work email and powerpoint.

So ads - branded content - has to be ‘worth’ people’s time and attention; worth reading, watching or interacting with. It has to be more interesting than the TV that surrounds it.

The problem is that brand marketers and their agencies see something interesting, like this and they think wow, that would be cool to recreate, but in a branded context, and then they have to film it and stick it on YouTube and behind the Red Button and do a microsite.

But being interesting might mean shutting up - being less branded, being intruiging, and letting the consumer work things out for themselves.

So, my 2^nd Rule is to make things Interesting, and to really understand, better than anyone else, what interesting means to the consumer in relation to the brand and the proposed form of content.

3. UBIQUITOUS

We live in a hugely fragmented media world. We’re consuming more media, but less of each, than ever before.

So advertisers have many more consumer touchpoints available to them, and the temptation is to fill those touchpoints, and with integrated or ‘matching luggage’ ads across all those touchpoints

This is like pushing messages at people in the vague hope that they’ll stick.

The consumer experience is one of pull, not push. That consumers will assemble their preferred view of a brand based on the experiences they want of it, that they find interesting and useful. They will seek out the building blocks – what Jeremy Bullmore called in the 1960’s the ‘sticks and straws of experience’ – they want, not the ones the advertiser wants.

The agency – and content producers’ – challenge is to divide up everything they want to say and distribute it in independent, bite sized nuggets across the available touchpoints. The media agency Naked call this transmedia planning.

The art of this approach lies in being able to let the consumer create a meaningful story, over a sustained period of time. This requires skills of narrative and storytelling – of plotting out consumer experiences and how to keep them gripped to your message. I think content producers will be better skilled than many ad agencies in this sort of area – in terms of plotline and serialisation. For instance When Shell wanted to create a 9 minute TV ad, their agency, JWT turned to film directors and producers to create an extended narrative that could be run in different timelengths and formats across a variety of screen based media.

And this narrative ability isn’t exclusive to film based media – BMW successfully ported their Films branded content campaign to iPods via audiobooks.

So my 3^rd Rule is Ubiquity – creating a story for the brand that unfolds over time and across different media, on the consumer’s terms, that harnesses the skills of programme and film makers.

Summing up then

I think the brand’s view of the world is usually one of competing for paid-for attention through new channels like branded content, AFP and sponsorship idents, but is often at odds with the consumers’ desire for branded content which is 1. useful, 2. interesting (that is, worth it), and 3. unfolds over time.

As the research and analyst company Forrester put it – “Marketers need to partner with agencies [and content producers] that listen instead of shout. It's about shifting from making messages to nurturing consumer connections; from delivering push to creating pull interactions; and from orchestrating campaigns to facilitating [stories]”

So when we’re presented with a brand challenge how would these rules apply, or work from your perspective?

Predictions 2008

Time for some more then. A proper top ten this time, too.

I'm going to be doing the rounds with a little presentation about some thoughts that might affect the planning and comms landscape in 2008 so I'm going to keep this pithy for now. I'll try and link to a powerpoint shortly.

1. Branded Utility - OK before the yawns set in I think 2008 will be the year that brnaded utility goes mainstream as an agency offer. Agencies will need to understand the role products play in people's lives and what people find useful better than they do now, and brands will need to obsess about thier areas of expertise.
2. Soundvertising. Soundtracks for brand experiences, wherever you are.
3. Crowd-creation. the solus act of consumer creation opens up to the participation of crowds. Especially as digital and physical brand experiences try to join up better.
4. We are all linked to celebrity. The degrees of seperation (or linkage) plummet over social networks and we're all giddy with celebrity (aren't we?) so why don't brands start to link us to the famous?
5. Unpimp. I think the VW spot points to a bigger trend - as we move into a more austere and uncertain time, things will get simpler, clear, less ambiguous. Unpimped.
6. Avatising. I don't know if the word works, but rather than come across brands in the places that our avatars roam, I think agencies will start to find ways to put your avatars in their (screen-based) ads.
7. You're not my friend. Brands have the potential to know an awful lot about us - from our LinkedIn and Facebook and MySpace profiles and blogs and everything. I think we might see someone create a way to harvest this data for marketing. And for people to create smart wyas of 'ad-voiding' these freaky advances.
8. Transparent is the new green. Fairly obvious I think - but green marketing isn't enough. Compaines need to be convincing and transparent in their social and environmental policies - as do their agencies. We'll need to offer carbon neutral campaigns, as well as be transparent ourselves.
9. A new line. I hate the snobbery of ATL/BTL (and have worked both sides so can take that position, I think). But a new line is emerging: screen vs off-screen. To win in a screen-based world, we'll see an agency appear in 2008 that truly gets technology, direct marketing and film.
10. Playfulness. Play and fun is hugely underestimated by agencies and brands. I'm talking about more ludic, meaningful and interesting experiences than interactive banners and the odd microsite. Elements of playfulness will be built fundamentally into campaign design.

So, there we go, do you think I'm way off beam, or about right?

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Kwanzaa.

Thin Planning

I was judging some awards yesterday and it really struck me how many entries seemed to be pictures of a problem that someone (probably a client) had identified. Taken in the round, there seem to be relatively few agencies trying to get under the skin of the problem, of the consumer and make a creative leap. Instead they're relying on a bit of data planning or segmentation to mechanise their way to a solution. Of course, this means planning has to be too thinly spread across the industry. Most agencies have a planner, but it has to be a token gesture, on this evidence. I beleive Nike once specified thier agencies sent a planner and a designer to briefings - the 'creative team'. Perhaps the industry needs to realise that it needs planners at breadth and depth if it's going to make work more interesting (and award winning), and thereby make the industry look better, and prevent the brain drain to other sectors like banking.

A chance discovery

We chanced upon this at Stowe yesterday. It appears that Andy Goldsworthy has written his name in found things from the woods. It was utterly sursprising and charming. Serendipitous. Even if it had been created by a 6th form art student from the school or Andy himself, it possessed great creativity and charm. I think Alan Bennett said once that the beautiful thing about TV was the possibility of discovery. How many ads would do something so humble as place themselves in a media backwater to be stumbled upon by chance? And then be so creatively charming that they make the viewers' day altogether brighter and uplifted? We call ourselves a creative industry - and surprise and delight should be in the domain of creativity, not sales promotion.

Mumblecore

I read an article in the NY Sunday Times about Mumblecore. This is a new film movement (I guess only in America at the moment) that relies on naturalistic, low-budget production and often improvised dialogue. It's apparently a defining genre for today's 20-somethings. So will Hollywood or Madison Ave find it first? Will it translate to the UK? And, maybe interestingly, why on earth would a traditional ad agency be any better at making mumblecore ads than say a 20-something video-literate blogger? Perhaps this is another example of how traditional classifications and definitions of agency specialisation are going to erode. And another question mark over how agencies resource.

Ad free and wierdly beautiful

BoingBoing posts about an outdoor ad ban in Sao Paulo. There's a flickr set too.
The frames for the posters, and their urban setting is more redolent of the US than the Cromwell Road but I find the effect curiously interesting - blue sky or buildings behind are framed by the ironwork.
I confess to usually going on summer vacation to a place where there is a town planning ban on advertising hoardings and it does make for a more pleasant visual landscape.

Art department redux

I vaguely recall Creative Departments were called Art Departments once. In these days where ideas can come from anywhere, even planning, and given we're all creative really, perhaps there really isn't any specialness being called the Creative Dept. Some time ago I wrote about renaissance agencies - truly integrated, visionary, energetic and scalar. Crispin Porter talk about advertising rebranding to the Media Arts. So, surely an Art Dept would be more respectful and descriptive of that department's role in the creative process?

Other Planning Types?

A question really. I've noticed on Planning Eye that we have 75 planners but 2 or 3 folks are urban planners. I think that's quite interesting as their role is probably fairly similar to an ad planner - understanding or predicting a person's behaviour or perceptions when presented with an 'environment'. Maybe closer to digital planning.
I wonder what other industries have planners? Architects? Artists? And what their scope of work looks like? What tools do they use? If you're one, get in touch?
Perhaps it would be cool to have a planners-of-the-world unite wiki or something. Maybe a meta-coffee-morning?

Dear Campaign

Thought I'd send this to Campaign letters in response to their article on DDB integrating its planning department.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love DDB planning. I hope it's not patronising to say that there are at least 2 planners there I'd hire tomorrow if I could. But it does amuse me when Campaign announced the radical reorgaisation of a big blue chip network agency planning department. Obviously, it's nice to see planning at the centre of integration. But there are many smaller, more agile and independent agencies who have been doing interesting things for ages, without the fanfare.

At Chemistry, we have spent 3 years hiring planners with core skills in direct, digital, brand and advertising, and they learn (through training, direction and, frankly, just working together) the skills of the other. The result is a blended, ideas-centric, solution-neutral planning function that punches well above its weight in client reputation surveys.

So, maybe we are entering a new era of integrated planning. Or maybe what I'm really railing at is Campaign's epiphany, or apparent limited interest of what's going on outside the top 10. But I blow a raspberry at the networks who are just now getting it. And welcome the competition of course.

Screen collision

Hearing Kevin Roberts talk last night about his new book, it's interesting that he's trying to own the idea that we're moving to a screen-based media culture - smaller screens, more pervasive screens, etc. Frankly, every half decent planning or media presentation since the inception of the colour mobile phone screen, the ipod and the gameboy have said the same thing. So no props to Kevin for originality then.

However I think there's an impending collision between ad agencies and direct/digital agencies about who is best placed to create content for these screens. Maybe you could factor videogame developers like EA, and even users themselves, into the mix as non-tradtional competition. Do direct agencies have the confidence and skills to create compelling film-based ideas across multiple screen platforms? Do ad agencies understand how intimate and personal these channels are to people? Who will win?