The nice people at the Talent Zoo asked me to write a guest col on any topic of interest and relevance - which brought me back to the running recessionary theme. Of note: this was written before GM and Chrysler chopped 2,000 dealers off the holiday card list. Considering that, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, local car advertising accounts for between 20 and 30 percent of total ad revenues - you can see why looking past the recession is more important than ever. Ergo, the following.
Your friend, the college history major, may claim the phrase “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” dates to the Watergate-era Nixon White House. But those of us with a keener eye for the grand sweep of the American journey know better. Ask and we’ll happily recite that the 1970s expression – highly relevant to the recessionary here and now - was first coined by the legendary John “Bluto” Blutarsky (aka John Belushi), just after Dean Wormer kicked Delta Tau Chi off the Faber campus. Revenge was satisfyingly swift, taking just a few moments of film time to attain ramming speed - which brings to mind what we’d all like to see happen to the a few of the bright bulbs behind the current mess. But, sadly, that’s off topic, so instead, let’s just open our textbooks to the page that reads “A Thousand Pink Slip Paper Cuts: Thriving Through the Advertising Recession” and, Lucy, let the ‘splaining begin.
We start with three observations virtually guaranteed to make the question marks in your morning bowl of Alpha-Bits float a little higher. First: like it or not, our shared profession is more than a long link or two from being at the top of the economic recovery food chain. A great many client companies will have to regain cash, commitment and courage before Madison Avenue stops being Sad Ave for agencies and employees alike. Second: among its by-products, the recession is only accelerating existing media consumption trends with highly disruptive consequences for the dynamics and structure of the selling arts. Last and not least: mix an extended period of financial chaos with a heaping helping of transformative yeast and you have to conclude that the advertising industry that comes out of the downturn will be very different from the one that went in.
Whether you take this as good or otherwise depends on whether you think the glass is half full, half fullness-challenged or it’s all just a matter of counting the shards. But that matters not – this change isn’t a matter of choice. It’s already here.
Memo to the creative department: while the envy-inducing wonders of the One Show, Cannes and D&AD may be a testament to ingenuity, they’re also nothing more than snapshots of the past. To parse a murky and indeterminate future you need to, in the words of the novelist John le Carré, “follow the money.” That includes understanding that the traditional advertising economy was built on a tripod of how many people you can reach, how many times you can reach them and then, what it is you have to say. This is an efficiency-based model and, before your eyes totally glaze over, let’s just say it worked until someone threw the damned thing under the media fragmentation express. At which point, of course, it was all reduced to splinters.
The recession has only added salt to the fester, by mandating a hypercompetitive stance among formerly cooperative players – creative agencies, brand planners, production companies, media shops – all of whom are fighting for attention in a time when some random Tweeting consumer might have something much more interesting to say in 140-characters than everything you sweated bullets to feature in your million dollar print campaign. No wonder there’s blood dripping from the executive suites down to the mailrooms of shops everywhere. In a time of “do more with less,” less could all too easily be your account, your agency, your future, your job.
Or, it could be just the opportunity you were looking for.
Attention upwardly-striving agencies: this is the moment where the mediocre can get good, the good can get great and they great had better remember that where you sit tomorrow has everything to do with where you stand today. Ask yourself if you’re legitimately positioned for what so predictably lies ahead. Do you have the strategic horsepower? The access to the critical skill sets needed to fully execute in 360 - maybe 720 - degrees? Is your work good enough across all experiential venues to attract interesting new clients and exciting new talent when the cycle inevitably swings north? If not, friend, then you’re in luck because you’re living in an extraordinarily deep and flexible buyers’ market for full time, freelance and project-based help alike.
The same goes for you guys busy swelling the payroll. Today’s snap-quiz focuses on the question of whether you think there’s more value in a) creating ads or b) solving creative problems. Check the second box and you’re going to need an expanding set of multi-dimensional skills that go beyond the deft ability to snag a greasy breakfast burrito off the craft services table. Making no claim to paragon-hood, that’s exactly why I’ve sought out assignments in direct response, social networking, documentary film-making, biotechnology and experiential marketing over the past few years.
You see, while we may have left a comfortable and uncomplicated world behind, thriving under emergent advertising conditions starts with the three simple words seen on the Faber founder’s statue as Animal House begins: “Knowledge is good.”
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
GNN: Could a Google News Network save journalism?
There are times when you take a deep bite of the apple and notice something that makes you want to spit it out. At other times - especially recommended while chewing on the thought of an “L-shaped” recovery and the economic equivalent of permanent flat-lining – you might decide to swallow whatever it is on the theory that worms are, after all, a valuable source of life-sustaining protein.
Apropos of which: this weekend I noticed a Facebook posting from Nathan Ballard, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s brilliant communications director. His point: we need to start talking about new ways to keep journalists on the job instead of “old models for employing publishers.” My first reaction was to reflect on the fact that the de-professionalization of the media – deep hugs to Web 2.0 for reinventing the amateur hour – is both proximate cause and the ultimate consequence of the collapse of traditional media business models and all those journalistic jobs.
My second thought, perhaps the proverbial protein source in the granular fruit, was that Nathan was on the verge of intuiting the emergence of something strange, highly provocative and, at the same time, prospectively inevitable. To wit: the advent of GNN – the Google News Network – as the inevitable game changing face on the news distribution block.
When you think about it, the logic of Google diving into this kind of enterprise is almost perfect. Start with the fact that media companies are really nothing more than pipelines designed to suck in advertising dollars and spit out content. Clearly, nobody on the planet, Rupert Murdoch included, beats Google on that score.
Then, consider the impact of media fragmentation on the financial realities, structure and dynamics of the news business. While the print venues are currently dealing with the lion's share of the carnage, there’s mounting evidence that broadcast outlets will increasingly find themselves dealing with shrinking audiences and ad revenues in tandem with the explosive growth in viewing, listening and reading options. When that happens, and as the fiscal dominos dutifully obey the laws of gravity, we can expect to see growing numbers of broadcast journalism’s best, brightest and most expensive join their print colleagues in an involuntarily newsroom exodus. This is a tragedy with deep societal as well as human dimensions since there’s a steep cost to a lower quality news product, regardless of medium.
All of which leads, like a bright scarlet letter, to a single question: who in the wide world is not only equipped to support the kind of information gathering we traditionally associate with high quality institutional media, but able to do so in a Web 2.0 or even 3.0 context? By the way, “support” isn't limited to keeping reporters gainfully employed. It also includes maintaining the pricey infrastructure that allows for those oh-so-minor trivialities like fact checking, source confirmation and the other useful trappings of journalistic credibility.
My answer is obvious: Google is not only the world’s biggest knowledge distributor and hugely deep pocketed (still), but company has proven itself more than adept at cherry picking talent, building out new skill sets and, generally, assuming a commanding role in every sandbox it plays in. That doesn’t mean that a prototypical GNN will publish its own version of morning coffee’s perfect companion - as a marketing exec at one of the local rags once remarked, “at the price we charge for daily delivery, we should be calling it a gift with purchase, not a newspaper.” But it requires no stretch of credibility to think that somewhere, someone at Google, is looking at Amazon’s Kindle and similar print-simulating technology with bright and lustful eyes.
Equally important, because Google brings both audience mass and class – especially important as the rules of media engagement change – the company is uniquely positioned to saw through the Gordian knot of news economics. The clear implication is that they can make it pay from day one. And, in the process, conceivably provide what Nathan was looking for with his Facebook posting – a new way to keep good reporters, reporting and avid news consumers, consuming.
Of course, unless Carol Bartz and the new team at Yahoo seizes the opportunity first as a way to make non-Microsoft magic. Because, if GNN isn’t the first to make this leap, there’s no reason that YNN should hold back.
Apropos of which: this weekend I noticed a Facebook posting from Nathan Ballard, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s brilliant communications director. His point: we need to start talking about new ways to keep journalists on the job instead of “old models for employing publishers.” My first reaction was to reflect on the fact that the de-professionalization of the media – deep hugs to Web 2.0 for reinventing the amateur hour – is both proximate cause and the ultimate consequence of the collapse of traditional media business models and all those journalistic jobs.
My second thought, perhaps the proverbial protein source in the granular fruit, was that Nathan was on the verge of intuiting the emergence of something strange, highly provocative and, at the same time, prospectively inevitable. To wit: the advent of GNN – the Google News Network – as the inevitable game changing face on the news distribution block.
When you think about it, the logic of Google diving into this kind of enterprise is almost perfect. Start with the fact that media companies are really nothing more than pipelines designed to suck in advertising dollars and spit out content. Clearly, nobody on the planet, Rupert Murdoch included, beats Google on that score.
Then, consider the impact of media fragmentation on the financial realities, structure and dynamics of the news business. While the print venues are currently dealing with the lion's share of the carnage, there’s mounting evidence that broadcast outlets will increasingly find themselves dealing with shrinking audiences and ad revenues in tandem with the explosive growth in viewing, listening and reading options. When that happens, and as the fiscal dominos dutifully obey the laws of gravity, we can expect to see growing numbers of broadcast journalism’s best, brightest and most expensive join their print colleagues in an involuntarily newsroom exodus. This is a tragedy with deep societal as well as human dimensions since there’s a steep cost to a lower quality news product, regardless of medium.
All of which leads, like a bright scarlet letter, to a single question: who in the wide world is not only equipped to support the kind of information gathering we traditionally associate with high quality institutional media, but able to do so in a Web 2.0 or even 3.0 context? By the way, “support” isn't limited to keeping reporters gainfully employed. It also includes maintaining the pricey infrastructure that allows for those oh-so-minor trivialities like fact checking, source confirmation and the other useful trappings of journalistic credibility.
My answer is obvious: Google is not only the world’s biggest knowledge distributor and hugely deep pocketed (still), but company has proven itself more than adept at cherry picking talent, building out new skill sets and, generally, assuming a commanding role in every sandbox it plays in. That doesn’t mean that a prototypical GNN will publish its own version of morning coffee’s perfect companion - as a marketing exec at one of the local rags once remarked, “at the price we charge for daily delivery, we should be calling it a gift with purchase, not a newspaper.” But it requires no stretch of credibility to think that somewhere, someone at Google, is looking at Amazon’s Kindle and similar print-simulating technology with bright and lustful eyes.
Equally important, because Google brings both audience mass and class – especially important as the rules of media engagement change – the company is uniquely positioned to saw through the Gordian knot of news economics. The clear implication is that they can make it pay from day one. And, in the process, conceivably provide what Nathan was looking for with his Facebook posting – a new way to keep good reporters, reporting and avid news consumers, consuming.
Of course, unless Carol Bartz and the new team at Yahoo seizes the opportunity first as a way to make non-Microsoft magic. Because, if GNN isn’t the first to make this leap, there’s no reason that YNN should hold back.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Breaking My Own Rules. Shamelessly.
Carlos Pena is an advertising thinker and adventurer, a creatively driven art director, the possessor of very big heart, and the reason why I’m going to break BrainBlog rule #1 and talk about some work I’ve been personally associated with in this space. Ergo: blame him, not me.
Okay, so it’s hardly a betrayal of Faustian proportions to promote your stuff in the blogosphere. But I was raised by a good Jewish mother whose good Jewish mother, my grandmother, taught her, hence me, the logical tautology, “if you’re a nice boy, you shouldn't brag. After all, what would your grandmother say to your mother?”
Oy. In this case, resistance is futile.
To wit: a few months back Carlos, president/creative director of the Miami-based agency Pumped, wrote to say that he was starting a pro bono unit with an intriguing focus – launching a house charitable brand to deploy the shop’s brand management, advertising, design and promotional expertise in service of the community. It’s an interesting variant on an idea (I think) first deployed by Cabell Harris at Work Labs and most lately picked up by the enormously creative folks at BBH via a new division called Zag. The core commercial concept is to greatly expand the agency’s creative and revenue opportunities by launching a proprietary beer, proprietary beer bottle opener, proprietary beer goggles or whatever-sounds-like-a-good-proprietary-idea-mate brand.
But Carlos’ notion wasn’t to expand his shop’s creative basket and maybe sell a few nifty baseball caps along the way. Instead, while definitely angling for a conceptual updraft, he wanted to launch a well-calibrated vehicle that could generate funds for worthy charities despite the nagging annoyance of an economy doing a more-than-decent imitation of the post-icebergian Titanic.
The result was a way that people could donate the smallest monetary unit known to mind of US Mint – the penny – and still make a difference. It’s called The Million Penny Project because it seeks to raise money in 1 million penny increments – 10 grand in real coin – and hand that off to places and people in need.
We started by coming up with an idea for a bus shelter poster entirely made of pennies. We then effortlessly jumped to the TV and web possibilities. The central copy line, so blindingly obvious it took weeks to dream up: Make Change. In TV, because it needed a little more build, this became the slightly longer: What’s a penny good for? Making change.
It hit me then, and still strikes me now, as an entirely timely approach, given the times. Equally important for the purposes of this story, it managed to grab the attention of some of San Francisco’s most creative post-production folks, who agreed to lend their own inimitable talents.
The credits:
Directors: Carlos and Peruvian director Kenneth O’Brien shot the spot in Miami. In an exercise of either superhuman patience, or outright masochism, Carlos actually built the penny-picture artwork himself.
Editorial: Bob Frisk, the brilliant senior editor at Phoenix Editorial and Design, his spookily talented assistant editor Matt O’Donnell, plus VFX wizard Phil Spitler. Producer, Lindsay London.
Music: I was thinking a slightly recursive, fugue-like track. David Della Santa dropped my jaw floorward by saying, “how would you feel about a song with lyrics?” We’re now hoping he turns it into a full-length release.
Mix: The admirable Joaby Deal at One Union Recording Studios.
Copy and co-creative direction: see Brainblog Rule #1.
You can see the results above, below, on TheMillionPennyProject.org or at brainchildcreative.com.
Cheers. And, as my grandmother might say, “give."
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Downside Up: The Best Way To Deal With The Recession May Be To Look Past It.
On January 3, 2000, I walked into my then-agency president’s office for the conversation that would end our partnership. The topic on offer was the future of the company we’d co-founded; it required no Web 1.0 divining rod to be utterly certain that the suppurating dotcom bubble was about to burst. Nor was there any mystery about what that would mean for our shop’s resources and revenues: I’d just written an article in US trade staple Adweek, pointing out that the impending collapse would inevitably take a deep and gangrenous bite out of the global industry, replacing giddy dreams of venture capital buying endless Superbowl spots with something more akin to highly toxic, radioactive goo. But aside from the normal sum and substance of down-slope managerial meetings - much bitching about fate, gnashing of teeth, wringing of hands - there was an unbridgeable chasm between the two of us in that room. My colleague’s entire attention was fixed on near-term tactics that might allow the shop to eke out short rations and survive. While I was thoroughly persuaded that times of disruption, chaos and rapid change are ideal conditions for agencies and individuals to step up to the next creative level and thrive.
It’s an argument I’d make again today. In part, because I so violently agree with Obama chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel’s provocative admonition to “never waste a good crisis.” But, also because the differences in the origin and degree of catastrophes then and now are so vastly overwhelmed by the similarities in the opportunities presented.
Writ large: this is a unique time when the mediocre can become good, the good can transition to great and the great are well advised to recall that where you stand tomorrow has everything to do with how smartly you position yourself today.
Talk to legendary US advertising talent spotter Pamela Reeve, who served as Ogilvy North America’s Director of Recruitment from 1998 to 2004, and you get some sense of the underpinnings of a plan to turn retrograde circumstances into upward motion: the confidence that all bad things, fiscal calamities included, must come to an end; the courage to take a hard, warts-and-all, look in the mirror; individual or corporate determination to do what it takes to move up the creative food chain; and, bluntly, a rare willingness to take a few white-knuckle-inducing risks in pursuit of larger reward.
As Pam puts it, “I’ve always believed that advertising fortune favors the prepared. But during periods like this, the economic equivalent of a 100-year storm, I know that fortune also favors the bold.” The proof of concept: aggressively recruiting powerhouse talent at a time when everyone else was building pink slip pyramids helped Ogilvy defy dotcom devastation, 911 and a pernicious advertising slowdown to create one of the most innovative and productive periods in that agency’s storied history. While noting that Ogilvy is taking a different tack at the moment – the agency just laid off as much as 10% of its New York staff – she still strongly believes “the lesson learned is that the time to start thinking about hiring is when everyone else is firing.”
This isn’t to say that only big, reputation-rich, shops are situated to make lemon-drop martinis out of an oversupply of lemons. In Pam’s experience, “it may sound cold, but agencies of every size and stripe should always be aiming to trade up for better, smarter, more effective people. Bad times make it possible for hopeful contenders to appeal to prospects who otherwise wouldn’t give them a second glance. And that cuts both ways – employees eager to move themselves and their portfolios to a higher plane can shop themselves to places where they might have more freedom and more say-so in the work that gets produced.”
Of course, while the philosophy is decidedly iconoclastic, it comes with method as well as madness. “Stop reacting and start thinking,” she suggests. “Realize that the business is changing, which means you may need different skill sets coming out of the recession than you did going in. Then, take the essential – often challenging – steps needed to shift your internal culture and, equally critically, your systems, to accommodate your objectives.”
While the cynical - okay, and the newly laid off - might call all of this a bit draconian, I’d contend that it proffers both good news and better news for a business you either have to love or have to leave. The former: if routine mediocrity stems from complacency, this is a period when nobody can be complacent about anything. The latter: By forcing us all to be more nimble and adaptive, we’re actually being prompted to find the new doors and directions required by fundamental consumer, media and marketplace changes in the industry that were already well underway.
Put it this way: while the bulk of the advertising world remains transfixed by the economic carnage implicit in the Dickensian cliché, there’s every reason to look though this recession to what comes next. There’s a technical name for those willing to do so. We call them winners.
It’s an argument I’d make again today. In part, because I so violently agree with Obama chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel’s provocative admonition to “never waste a good crisis.” But, also because the differences in the origin and degree of catastrophes then and now are so vastly overwhelmed by the similarities in the opportunities presented.
Writ large: this is a unique time when the mediocre can become good, the good can transition to great and the great are well advised to recall that where you stand tomorrow has everything to do with how smartly you position yourself today.
Talk to legendary US advertising talent spotter Pamela Reeve, who served as Ogilvy North America’s Director of Recruitment from 1998 to 2004, and you get some sense of the underpinnings of a plan to turn retrograde circumstances into upward motion: the confidence that all bad things, fiscal calamities included, must come to an end; the courage to take a hard, warts-and-all, look in the mirror; individual or corporate determination to do what it takes to move up the creative food chain; and, bluntly, a rare willingness to take a few white-knuckle-inducing risks in pursuit of larger reward.
As Pam puts it, “I’ve always believed that advertising fortune favors the prepared. But during periods like this, the economic equivalent of a 100-year storm, I know that fortune also favors the bold.” The proof of concept: aggressively recruiting powerhouse talent at a time when everyone else was building pink slip pyramids helped Ogilvy defy dotcom devastation, 911 and a pernicious advertising slowdown to create one of the most innovative and productive periods in that agency’s storied history. While noting that Ogilvy is taking a different tack at the moment – the agency just laid off as much as 10% of its New York staff – she still strongly believes “the lesson learned is that the time to start thinking about hiring is when everyone else is firing.”
This isn’t to say that only big, reputation-rich, shops are situated to make lemon-drop martinis out of an oversupply of lemons. In Pam’s experience, “it may sound cold, but agencies of every size and stripe should always be aiming to trade up for better, smarter, more effective people. Bad times make it possible for hopeful contenders to appeal to prospects who otherwise wouldn’t give them a second glance. And that cuts both ways – employees eager to move themselves and their portfolios to a higher plane can shop themselves to places where they might have more freedom and more say-so in the work that gets produced.”
Of course, while the philosophy is decidedly iconoclastic, it comes with method as well as madness. “Stop reacting and start thinking,” she suggests. “Realize that the business is changing, which means you may need different skill sets coming out of the recession than you did going in. Then, take the essential – often challenging – steps needed to shift your internal culture and, equally critically, your systems, to accommodate your objectives.”
While the cynical - okay, and the newly laid off - might call all of this a bit draconian, I’d contend that it proffers both good news and better news for a business you either have to love or have to leave. The former: if routine mediocrity stems from complacency, this is a period when nobody can be complacent about anything. The latter: By forcing us all to be more nimble and adaptive, we’re actually being prompted to find the new doors and directions required by fundamental consumer, media and marketplace changes in the industry that were already well underway.
Put it this way: while the bulk of the advertising world remains transfixed by the economic carnage implicit in the Dickensian cliché, there’s every reason to look though this recession to what comes next. There’s a technical name for those willing to do so. We call them winners.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Whoa Is Us.
An entirely biased, subjective and random review of the year's top advertising stories. And if you’re wondering if next year it’ll be the top 29 stories, my, we are a clever one, aren’t we?
1. Glad tidings for all arrived right on the seasonal crack of December 2nd with a notice from the US Bureau of Economic Research that the United States –better fire up the defibrillator –had formally entered a period of recession starting in December. Of last year.
2. Just in time for the holidays: the spectacle of the US government playing a frolicsome game called “bailing out the bailout.”
3. For US advertising, this isn’t a repeat of either the high-speed immolation of the dotcom meltdown or even the much slower motion train-wreck of the early 1990s. Instead, the track beneath us – the one leading into 2009 – has simply evaporated.
4. Thus do the gods make sport: it’s the sudden deceleration in a crash – not the impact itself – that kills you.
5. Even advertising juggernaut Google can feel pain. According to the online trend-tracking newsletter Adotas, CEO Eric Schmidt and his team are on the verge of scything a variety of less promising ventures. Could that include the free dry cleaning and gourmet lunches?
6. My prediction: what comes next is likely to be both viciously Darwinian and relatively short-lived.
7. The former mirrors an assessment that existing trends – including the “red in tooth and claw” battle for control of content – will only accelerate.
8. The later reflects an observation that, since 9-11, the world has demonstrated an improbable resiliency and speed of recovery in the face of catastrophic events.
9. From the Department of Hold Your Water: I’ll get to Obama and his unmistakable impact on the future of the business after a few more turns of the bitter boat around the ocean of despair.
10. Among the most significant now-accelerating patterns: the transition from efficiency- to engagement-based media metrics. This is a game-changer that bodes ill for a status quo structure that rests on the structural tripod of “reach as many people as you can, as often as possible, while charging as much as the market will bear.”
11. The biggest missed marketing opportunity of 2008: Dramamine, trademarked as the “original motion sickness medicine,” failing to capitalize on sick-making stock market gyrations. Hello, Pfizer?
12. The second biggest missed opportunity: having disfiguringly stepped on their collective happy parts by flying private jets to beg Congress for a bailout, the CEOs of the big three US auto makers recoup some dignity by driving electric cars to the hearing where they will ask for $10 billion more. Why didn’t they carpool?
13. In its second annual study of global media habits – last year’s findings were basically “abandon all hope” for the creative community – IBM found people increasingly catching favorite TV shows online and/or watching TV while on their computers.
14. Media rating service Nielsen – no axe to grind there – cheerily interprets the IBM data to mean that “early trends...indicate that online usage is complementing, not substituting for, traditional television viewing...”
15. Oh goody, there will be some place to run our ads.
16. Okay, you’ve been patient, so let’s talk Obama. All those in favor of nominating his election as “story of the year” raise your hands. All those who believe the economy was the bigger news, raise your stumps.
17. For my deflationary dollar: Obama and the Great Recession™ of 2008 will be linked in the same way that FDR is permanently associated with the Great Depression.*
18. Before we digress: www.youtube.com/watch?v=puMz1Q3E000
19. According to TNS Media Intelligence, the total US political ad-spend for 2008 was as high as $2.7 billion.
20. While this falls short of the predicted $3 billion in political media, it does signal we’re well on track for a single candidate for president to become history’s first billion-dollar man. Or woman. Or other.
21. Obama’s use of social networking and other engagement technology clearly set the 2008 gold standard. Imitators beware: you can count on replicating that success the minute you have a candidate who can fill football stadiums.
22. None-the-less, in the near term, Obama’s stellar results are going to push more marketing companies out of the “reach and frequency” camp and into engagement mode where the ability to measure the cost and consequences of a single contact are given greater street cred than brand attributes like awareness and image.
23. The pendulum swings both ways. In a few years, CMOs will wake from a troubled slumber to realize that you really do need both a lot of people to know and appreciate your brand in order to get the relatively fewer to buy it.
24. This just in: advertising, in the form of paid messaging leading to a sale, had absolutely nothing to do with the outcome of the US Presidential race.
25. If it had, Hillary Clinton – who’s campaign famously launched the “who do you want answering the White House phone at 3 a.m.?” broadside – would be measuring Pennsylvania Avenue drapes instead of the shrouds at Foggy Bottom.
26. This also just in: advertising, in the form of old-school live infomercials, cold calling, sales parties and door-to-door selling had everything to do with the election result. Tout ce la change.
27. In October, Obama and Britney Spears tied as the top two YouTube subject searches. Now that’s a merry thought.
28. Apropos of which: don’t you with the Bush team would wake up some sweet morning, smell the coffee, and say, “why don’t we knock off work early this administration, and let the next shift get started?”
* Great Recession is a registered trademark of Jef Loeb, all rights reserved, your actual mileage may vary, offer void where prohibited.
1. Glad tidings for all arrived right on the seasonal crack of December 2nd with a notice from the US Bureau of Economic Research that the United States –better fire up the defibrillator –had formally entered a period of recession starting in December. Of last year.
2. Just in time for the holidays: the spectacle of the US government playing a frolicsome game called “bailing out the bailout.”
3. For US advertising, this isn’t a repeat of either the high-speed immolation of the dotcom meltdown or even the much slower motion train-wreck of the early 1990s. Instead, the track beneath us – the one leading into 2009 – has simply evaporated.
4. Thus do the gods make sport: it’s the sudden deceleration in a crash – not the impact itself – that kills you.
5. Even advertising juggernaut Google can feel pain. According to the online trend-tracking newsletter Adotas, CEO Eric Schmidt and his team are on the verge of scything a variety of less promising ventures. Could that include the free dry cleaning and gourmet lunches?
6. My prediction: what comes next is likely to be both viciously Darwinian and relatively short-lived.
7. The former mirrors an assessment that existing trends – including the “red in tooth and claw” battle for control of content – will only accelerate.
8. The later reflects an observation that, since 9-11, the world has demonstrated an improbable resiliency and speed of recovery in the face of catastrophic events.
9. From the Department of Hold Your Water: I’ll get to Obama and his unmistakable impact on the future of the business after a few more turns of the bitter boat around the ocean of despair.
10. Among the most significant now-accelerating patterns: the transition from efficiency- to engagement-based media metrics. This is a game-changer that bodes ill for a status quo structure that rests on the structural tripod of “reach as many people as you can, as often as possible, while charging as much as the market will bear.”
11. The biggest missed marketing opportunity of 2008: Dramamine, trademarked as the “original motion sickness medicine,” failing to capitalize on sick-making stock market gyrations. Hello, Pfizer?
12. The second biggest missed opportunity: having disfiguringly stepped on their collective happy parts by flying private jets to beg Congress for a bailout, the CEOs of the big three US auto makers recoup some dignity by driving electric cars to the hearing where they will ask for $10 billion more. Why didn’t they carpool?
13. In its second annual study of global media habits – last year’s findings were basically “abandon all hope” for the creative community – IBM found people increasingly catching favorite TV shows online and/or watching TV while on their computers.
14. Media rating service Nielsen – no axe to grind there – cheerily interprets the IBM data to mean that “early trends...indicate that online usage is complementing, not substituting for, traditional television viewing...”
15. Oh goody, there will be some place to run our ads.
16. Okay, you’ve been patient, so let’s talk Obama. All those in favor of nominating his election as “story of the year” raise your hands. All those who believe the economy was the bigger news, raise your stumps.
17. For my deflationary dollar: Obama and the Great Recession™ of 2008 will be linked in the same way that FDR is permanently associated with the Great Depression.*
18. Before we digress: www.youtube.com/watch?v=puMz1Q3E000
19. According to TNS Media Intelligence, the total US political ad-spend for 2008 was as high as $2.7 billion.
20. While this falls short of the predicted $3 billion in political media, it does signal we’re well on track for a single candidate for president to become history’s first billion-dollar man. Or woman. Or other.
21. Obama’s use of social networking and other engagement technology clearly set the 2008 gold standard. Imitators beware: you can count on replicating that success the minute you have a candidate who can fill football stadiums.
22. None-the-less, in the near term, Obama’s stellar results are going to push more marketing companies out of the “reach and frequency” camp and into engagement mode where the ability to measure the cost and consequences of a single contact are given greater street cred than brand attributes like awareness and image.
23. The pendulum swings both ways. In a few years, CMOs will wake from a troubled slumber to realize that you really do need both a lot of people to know and appreciate your brand in order to get the relatively fewer to buy it.
24. This just in: advertising, in the form of paid messaging leading to a sale, had absolutely nothing to do with the outcome of the US Presidential race.
25. If it had, Hillary Clinton – who’s campaign famously launched the “who do you want answering the White House phone at 3 a.m.?” broadside – would be measuring Pennsylvania Avenue drapes instead of the shrouds at Foggy Bottom.
26. This also just in: advertising, in the form of old-school live infomercials, cold calling, sales parties and door-to-door selling had everything to do with the election result. Tout ce la change.
27. In October, Obama and Britney Spears tied as the top two YouTube subject searches. Now that’s a merry thought.
28. Apropos of which: don’t you with the Bush team would wake up some sweet morning, smell the coffee, and say, “why don’t we knock off work early this administration, and let the next shift get started?”
* Great Recession is a registered trademark of Jef Loeb, all rights reserved, your actual mileage may vary, offer void where prohibited.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Upside, down.
It’s late, late, late on a slightly soggy Manhattan night. In the corner of my apartment, the glowing eye that never blinks but always flickers glares at me, continuously recycling the previously recounted, as talking head after talking head probes and parses the latest dizzy-making gyration of the global markets. Thesis: when you combine the collapse of institutions, worldwide financial panic and a sharp kick in the chicken tenders to capitalism’s favorite hind-tit-sucker – the advertising industry, of course – it all seems eerily familiar. Synthesis: you can still love history even if you hate living through it.
In any event, here we are, incontrovertibly back to the future, where for reasons known best to augurists, entrails-readers and fiscal theorists, Déjà Vu and his irritating cousins Been There and Done That have decided now would be a simply splendid time to remind us that a mere six years after swallowing the last heaping helping of dotcom/9-11/ recessionary stew, we are again forced to contend with circumstances that were easily predicted but entirely out of our control.
It all makes you long for a little good old-fashioned market-propping irrational exuberance. Or, at the least, for a modicum of stability in what has become, without doubt, the meanest decade in the US history of the marketing arts and crafts. In fact, between the panic now taking a star turn on CNN, widening web 2.0 media fragmentation and the lingering sense that this e-ticket ride will take its own sweet time to reach bottom, we have to wonder what fate with throw at us next.
On second thought, maybe we don’t want to know.
Of course, it would be a severe mischaracterization to call this a mirror image of events past. For one thing, March of 2001 brought in a virtual economic tsunami that swept upwards of 30% of the existing sector jobs into the briny deep, where they swiftly and irrevocably disappeared. This time we seem destined to experience death by a thousand pink slip paper cuts – particularly as the large publicly traded agencies reluctantly but inexorably trim already lean ranks. Similarly, if memory serves, the dotcom bust resulted in the great arrow of advertising growth trending deeply into net negative territory as long as flaming debris continued to rain out of the sky. By contrast, if Publicis unit Zenith Optimedia is right, we’ll see an advance of between 1.5 and 1.6 percent through 2009. And, no, I won’t propose renaming the firm Zenith Optimisticmedia for projecting any positive movement whatsoever.
What I will suggest is that limited certainty comes in twos. The first is that, yes, some agencies and more than a few jobs will inevitably become casualties of what many believe will be a long and fairly deep recessionary dip in marketing services. The heartbreaking poster child for the gloomy downside: in its first major win in what seems forever, Ogilvy New York picks up the $145 million Wachovia Bank business only to see that bank melt before a drop of ink could dry on the contract. But there’s a second, far more upbeat perspective: we all know that it’s in the nature of market cycles to be circular and that recovery from what’s going around will come around at some devoutly-to-be-wished point in time.
Reflecting on a conversation with Madhu Malhan, vice president/director of creative branding at Publicis USA, it crosses my mind that maybe, just maybe, it’s not too soon to think about considering what might lie on the other side of the darkling glass. If you’ve never heard of Madhu, she’s the proud possessor of one of the most unique careers in the business. A former 15-year executive director of the Advertising Club of New York – sponsors of the International ANDY Awards - she spent the succeeding years as “Minister of Culture” for Ogilvy in New York before assuming her new post with its brand image-making brief “to make sure Publicis is part of the creative conversation, wherever it occurs.”
Her informed view: these are entirely novel circumstances for the vast majority of the now-working advertising generation. “We’ve lived through recessions, but nothing with the economic gravity of current conditions.” Given that, she believes that it’s entirely natural for people to “start battening down the hatches and hope this doesn’t last too long.”
But, if Madhu’s calculus is correct, that won’t be the best survival strategy for either the industry as a whole or the people who labor therein. In fact she, like yours truly, believes that even if the current contractions fail to give birth to anything entirely new, they will almost certainly accelerate developments that were already having a transformative impact. “It goes without saying that we’ll all have to be increasingly 360-degree-literate. And that’s just as essential for agencies who will need to find ways to demonstrate their bottom line value to clients as it will be for agency employees who need to do the same for their employers.”
What’s the likely impact on post-carnage creative? While Madhu does acknowledge that many bigger brands and larger agencies will wind up “playing it safe,” she also presents the intriguing prospect that the crisis will provoke a new crop of imaginative thinkers to mine fresh creative territory. "People will leave the larger agencies, voluntarily or not, resulting in a fresh batch of entrepreneurs, determined to do things differently and better,” she argues. "That could prompt an exciting new creative revolution. At least we can hope it does!"
All of which leads me to make the next mental leap and start speculating about whether the industry that emerges from the current fiscal firestorm will be exactly the same as the one that went in. After all, history illustrates that major US economic upheavals – Midwestern farmers contemplating open revolt during the Great Depression of 1929 – have always had a powerfully radicalizing influence on contemporary society. And if this is truly the “economic freefall” described by all those talking heads, well, we know exactly what can happen. Very interesting things float free.
In any event, here we are, incontrovertibly back to the future, where for reasons known best to augurists, entrails-readers and fiscal theorists, Déjà Vu and his irritating cousins Been There and Done That have decided now would be a simply splendid time to remind us that a mere six years after swallowing the last heaping helping of dotcom/9-11/ recessionary stew, we are again forced to contend with circumstances that were easily predicted but entirely out of our control.
It all makes you long for a little good old-fashioned market-propping irrational exuberance. Or, at the least, for a modicum of stability in what has become, without doubt, the meanest decade in the US history of the marketing arts and crafts. In fact, between the panic now taking a star turn on CNN, widening web 2.0 media fragmentation and the lingering sense that this e-ticket ride will take its own sweet time to reach bottom, we have to wonder what fate with throw at us next.
On second thought, maybe we don’t want to know.
Of course, it would be a severe mischaracterization to call this a mirror image of events past. For one thing, March of 2001 brought in a virtual economic tsunami that swept upwards of 30% of the existing sector jobs into the briny deep, where they swiftly and irrevocably disappeared. This time we seem destined to experience death by a thousand pink slip paper cuts – particularly as the large publicly traded agencies reluctantly but inexorably trim already lean ranks. Similarly, if memory serves, the dotcom bust resulted in the great arrow of advertising growth trending deeply into net negative territory as long as flaming debris continued to rain out of the sky. By contrast, if Publicis unit Zenith Optimedia is right, we’ll see an advance of between 1.5 and 1.6 percent through 2009. And, no, I won’t propose renaming the firm Zenith Optimisticmedia for projecting any positive movement whatsoever.
What I will suggest is that limited certainty comes in twos. The first is that, yes, some agencies and more than a few jobs will inevitably become casualties of what many believe will be a long and fairly deep recessionary dip in marketing services. The heartbreaking poster child for the gloomy downside: in its first major win in what seems forever, Ogilvy New York picks up the $145 million Wachovia Bank business only to see that bank melt before a drop of ink could dry on the contract. But there’s a second, far more upbeat perspective: we all know that it’s in the nature of market cycles to be circular and that recovery from what’s going around will come around at some devoutly-to-be-wished point in time.
Reflecting on a conversation with Madhu Malhan, vice president/director of creative branding at Publicis USA, it crosses my mind that maybe, just maybe, it’s not too soon to think about considering what might lie on the other side of the darkling glass. If you’ve never heard of Madhu, she’s the proud possessor of one of the most unique careers in the business. A former 15-year executive director of the Advertising Club of New York – sponsors of the International ANDY Awards - she spent the succeeding years as “Minister of Culture” for Ogilvy in New York before assuming her new post with its brand image-making brief “to make sure Publicis is part of the creative conversation, wherever it occurs.”
Her informed view: these are entirely novel circumstances for the vast majority of the now-working advertising generation. “We’ve lived through recessions, but nothing with the economic gravity of current conditions.” Given that, she believes that it’s entirely natural for people to “start battening down the hatches and hope this doesn’t last too long.”
But, if Madhu’s calculus is correct, that won’t be the best survival strategy for either the industry as a whole or the people who labor therein. In fact she, like yours truly, believes that even if the current contractions fail to give birth to anything entirely new, they will almost certainly accelerate developments that were already having a transformative impact. “It goes without saying that we’ll all have to be increasingly 360-degree-literate. And that’s just as essential for agencies who will need to find ways to demonstrate their bottom line value to clients as it will be for agency employees who need to do the same for their employers.”
What’s the likely impact on post-carnage creative? While Madhu does acknowledge that many bigger brands and larger agencies will wind up “playing it safe,” she also presents the intriguing prospect that the crisis will provoke a new crop of imaginative thinkers to mine fresh creative territory. "People will leave the larger agencies, voluntarily or not, resulting in a fresh batch of entrepreneurs, determined to do things differently and better,” she argues. "That could prompt an exciting new creative revolution. At least we can hope it does!"
All of which leads me to make the next mental leap and start speculating about whether the industry that emerges from the current fiscal firestorm will be exactly the same as the one that went in. After all, history illustrates that major US economic upheavals – Midwestern farmers contemplating open revolt during the Great Depression of 1929 – have always had a powerfully radicalizing influence on contemporary society. And if this is truly the “economic freefall” described by all those talking heads, well, we know exactly what can happen. Very interesting things float free.
Friday, September 05, 2008
Obama Abuzz
Reading Nassim Taleb's phenomenal book, "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable," I started thinking about the single most improbable political event of our generation. Which led to the some scratchings on the topic of Obama, buzz and below-the-line promotion for Shots, the British creative pub.
-----------
Could a political change agent also change the future of media outside of politics?
On August 28, 2008 an estimated 38.4 million US television viewers tuned in to watch a politician deliver a foregone conclusion. To impart a sense of the scope of the thing – an audience orders of magnitude larger than any real or virtual assemblage for any presidential nominee’s acceptance speech, ever – pundits on both sides of the puddle have been wildly bidding up the hype: “Bigger than the Idol finale!” Bigger than the Oscars!!” “Bigger than the opening night of the OLYMPICS!!!
Well, not to be entirely contrarian, but aside from the competitive heat the accolades might have generated in Beijing – “dammit Zhang Yimou, I told you we needed Brad and Angelina with the newborns drooling on the drums!” – I really don’t think media metrics are the marketing heart of this story. In fact, I’d argue that what truly intrigues isn’t viewership, per se, so much as what so many people tuned in to view. Specifically: a long-form commercial, albeit one augmented by a hefty dose of emergent technology promotion. In industry parlance, an infomercial.
Of course, this isn’t to diminish the inherent drama or the inevitable significance of the candidate or his speech. Both were there in full measure – first African-American nominee, chance to witness history, need for giant fragile egos to unite, so on, so forth. But, and I say this with all due respect for Obama’s wildly improbable achievement, where were the typical “must have” elements of a big network TV draw? Amount of surprise, suspense and new news? – zero. People being voted off islands, kicked out of boardrooms or forced to deal with total bitch supermodel wannabes? – also zero. Hell, there wasn’t even a single Jerry Springer moment – teenaged girls breaking down in tears about their acne or their pregnancy or their weight – to leaven the utterly expected mix.
Having taken a step in the general direction of apostasy, I might as well embrace the full heretical crown of thorns. Suicide note the first: the Obama campaign has, without question, beaten every agency on earth in setting the gold standard for the future of user-controlled communications in a staggeringly connected world. Suicide note the second: that future looks disconcertingly like the disconnected past.
If the partisan zealots and political consultants yammering away on CNN will stop shouting in my ear for just a moment, I’ll offer what passes as a rationale for the contention.
The obvious initial point is that early returns for this election put peer-to-peer, viral, mobile, word-of-mouth and the whole below-the-line menagerie into a distinctly ascendant role. Seen a shade cynically, if the democratization implicit in Web 2.0 has accomplished anything, it’s turning what British ranter Frank Jordan once coined as “the chattering classes” from the exclusive realm of elite journos and talking heads into a happy – and accessible - place for all of us. Pity, that.
At the same time, we now know with certainty that it isn’t quite time to put paid to the telly. As Daniel Baxter, newly anointed director of strategy for the drop-dead amazing Sandstrom Design in Portland observes: “this proves that TV still works – as a way to connect us to what is real and immediate.”
The last part of the tale, and what strikes me as most creatively charged, is that narrative is once again king of the persuasive sandbox. People didn’t tune in to see if Obama would either muff a line or announce a policy to save the world. They tuned in because his entire story, coupled with a level of eloquence unmatched in the US since JFK, made them want. To. Hear.
Okay, so let’s recap the bidding and let you draw your own conclusions. Neighbors talking to neighbors over electronic fences. Television at its most compelling because it brings us face-to-face with real events that we care about and in real time. People engaging because the stories being told are authentic, credible and compelling. Add in the almost Riefenstahl-like quality of the stadium set and what you have is the story of the future told as homage to the past.
All of which might seem a bit over top. But if a scant year ago, you’d told me that the single most effective US commercial of 2008 was likely to be a 60-minute US political infomercial, I would have laughed in your face.
Vote Obama.
-----------
Could a political change agent also change the future of media outside of politics?
On August 28, 2008 an estimated 38.4 million US television viewers tuned in to watch a politician deliver a foregone conclusion. To impart a sense of the scope of the thing – an audience orders of magnitude larger than any real or virtual assemblage for any presidential nominee’s acceptance speech, ever – pundits on both sides of the puddle have been wildly bidding up the hype: “Bigger than the Idol finale!” Bigger than the Oscars!!” “Bigger than the opening night of the OLYMPICS!!!
Well, not to be entirely contrarian, but aside from the competitive heat the accolades might have generated in Beijing – “dammit Zhang Yimou, I told you we needed Brad and Angelina with the newborns drooling on the drums!” – I really don’t think media metrics are the marketing heart of this story. In fact, I’d argue that what truly intrigues isn’t viewership, per se, so much as what so many people tuned in to view. Specifically: a long-form commercial, albeit one augmented by a hefty dose of emergent technology promotion. In industry parlance, an infomercial.
Of course, this isn’t to diminish the inherent drama or the inevitable significance of the candidate or his speech. Both were there in full measure – first African-American nominee, chance to witness history, need for giant fragile egos to unite, so on, so forth. But, and I say this with all due respect for Obama’s wildly improbable achievement, where were the typical “must have” elements of a big network TV draw? Amount of surprise, suspense and new news? – zero. People being voted off islands, kicked out of boardrooms or forced to deal with total bitch supermodel wannabes? – also zero. Hell, there wasn’t even a single Jerry Springer moment – teenaged girls breaking down in tears about their acne or their pregnancy or their weight – to leaven the utterly expected mix.
Having taken a step in the general direction of apostasy, I might as well embrace the full heretical crown of thorns. Suicide note the first: the Obama campaign has, without question, beaten every agency on earth in setting the gold standard for the future of user-controlled communications in a staggeringly connected world. Suicide note the second: that future looks disconcertingly like the disconnected past.
If the partisan zealots and political consultants yammering away on CNN will stop shouting in my ear for just a moment, I’ll offer what passes as a rationale for the contention.
The obvious initial point is that early returns for this election put peer-to-peer, viral, mobile, word-of-mouth and the whole below-the-line menagerie into a distinctly ascendant role. Seen a shade cynically, if the democratization implicit in Web 2.0 has accomplished anything, it’s turning what British ranter Frank Jordan once coined as “the chattering classes” from the exclusive realm of elite journos and talking heads into a happy – and accessible - place for all of us. Pity, that.
At the same time, we now know with certainty that it isn’t quite time to put paid to the telly. As Daniel Baxter, newly anointed director of strategy for the drop-dead amazing Sandstrom Design in Portland observes: “this proves that TV still works – as a way to connect us to what is real and immediate.”
The last part of the tale, and what strikes me as most creatively charged, is that narrative is once again king of the persuasive sandbox. People didn’t tune in to see if Obama would either muff a line or announce a policy to save the world. They tuned in because his entire story, coupled with a level of eloquence unmatched in the US since JFK, made them want. To. Hear.
Okay, so let’s recap the bidding and let you draw your own conclusions. Neighbors talking to neighbors over electronic fences. Television at its most compelling because it brings us face-to-face with real events that we care about and in real time. People engaging because the stories being told are authentic, credible and compelling. Add in the almost Riefenstahl-like quality of the stadium set and what you have is the story of the future told as homage to the past.
All of which might seem a bit over top. But if a scant year ago, you’d told me that the single most effective US commercial of 2008 was likely to be a 60-minute US political infomercial, I would have laughed in your face.
Vote Obama.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
View Jef Loeb's profile
