The Brainchild Blog

Over and Out.

2009-12-29T17:08:00.000-08:00

It ain’t over till the flatulent old man crawls out the calendar door, hopefully getting a sharp slap on the ass in the process. But, in the spirit of putting 2009 out of its stinking misery and moving ahead we offer 21 predictions of uncertain provenance and even more dubious accuracy:

1. Someone will begin the New Year whining that, mathematically speaking, the decade actually starts in 2011, not 2010. They will be ignored.

2. Whether we’ll label the next 10 years “double up, ”double down,” or “double trouble” is something that really should be more predictable.

3. If a vibrant consumer economy is the precursor to a vibrant advertising economy, it’s time to start applying for Chinese work permits, learning one of the 1,652 languages and dialects spoken in India or giving up public gum chewing and other habits that get you flogged in Singapore.

4. According to BNET, approximately 163,400 jobs at advertising agencies, marketing organizations and various media outlets have been lost in the recession. This figure will prove to be significantly understated.

5. Ad Age offers the brighter picture: they peg the ad agency component of the carnage at a mere 26,300 or 14% of the total. This figure will prove to be a drug-induced fantasy.

6. No matter which numbers you choose the disbelieve, the leading candidate for next year’s best catchphrase reportedly comes from Pete Scanlon at San Francisco’s Engine Company 1: “Keeping your job is the new raise.”

7. One way this recession will differ from the previous: first dibs on recovery will go to “marketing service agencies” who offer expertise in public relations, experiential, CRM, direct, guerilla, events and political and public affairs communications.

8. You’ll note that the above doesn’t specifically call out digital companies. This is because every shop worth a damn can now say “hey, we got your digital right here” and maybe even mean it.

9. If you want a viable career in advertising, pay attention to recruiter par excellence Pamela Reeve when she says that fortune will increasingly favor creative problem solvers over specialists.

10. The downside of a tilt toward broader persuasive capabilities versus the kind of craftsmanship that comes with focused practice: the decline in the overall quality of US advertising will continue unabated.

11. The upside: there are at least 163,400 people give or take, who’d probably welcome any chance to continue to thrive in some corner of the industry than no chance at all.

12. From the department of irrelevant interjections: the first five times I saw the word “Aporkalypse,” I thought it had to do with Congress putting 100% of the federal budget into earmarks - not the possible consequences of swine flu.

13. Speaking of politics, the bright spot for broadcast executives in 2010 will come from campaign media spending with reputable sources forecasting a return to the $3.3B rate of 2006. This will result in many media folks singing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” even those who shouldn’t sing.

14. Look to California to be the center of silly season spending as multiple multi-jillionaires, a gaggle of high profile ballot measures and the usual raft of frolicsome campaigners bestow ballot bucks left, right and - you knew this was coming - center.

15. Adding fuel to the festive electoral glow: after years of declining audiences, Nielsen reports that TV viewing is now trending slightly upward. Jon Hutchins, of Media Strategies & Research, intriguing explains that recession-strapped people are staying home in droves, watching all the TVs they bought with fantasy cash during formerly flush times.

16. Approximately 41% of the dramatic programming, rising to 49% for late night TV viewing, will continue to be occupied by advertising and in-broadcast promotion.

17. This may partly explain why Nielsen also reports an increase in viewers multi-switching, -clicking and thumb-twitching between the TV, Internet and smart phone screens.

18. High on the list of things to watch while watching something else: Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga will continue to be in the top 10 Google searches in 2010. This will also prove that having a detectable pulse has only a marginal relationship to pop iconhood.

19. The American Association of Advertising Agencies is soliciting “transformative” ideas about the advertising industry. Maybe that starts with the stunning recognition that the louder we all shout, the less anyone hears.

20. Put it this way: the 2009 update to the Howard Gossage gem “if you don’t have a bigger hammer, use a sharper nail” was “bigger hammers only bend dull nails.” In 2010, we’re tempted to conclude with the thought that “hitting an infinite number of dull nails with an infinite number of small hammers makes a whole lot of noise and not much else."

21. Instead, let’s end it this way: have a great year. Or else.

Same as it never was.

2009-05-19T08:44:00.000-07:00

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.”

GNN: Could a Google News Network save journalism?

2009-03-17T07:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Breaking My Own Rules. Shamelessly.

2009-02-05T07:49:00.000-08:00

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."

Downside Up: The Best Way To Deal With The Recession May Be To Look Past It.

2009-01-15T15:04:00.000-08:00

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.

Whoa Is Us.

2008-12-14T16:51:00.000-08:00

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.

Upside, down.

2008-11-06T21:14:00.000-08:00

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.

Obama Abuzz

2008-09-05T07:32:00.000-07:00

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.

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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.

Chasing the Apple Cart.

2008-07-31T09:40:00.000-07:00

Forget share of mind. The next great US advertising battle is over share of phone.

Steve Jobs, the smartest man on the planet, wants to control the world. Google, the smartest company on the planet, probably thinks it already does. While Microsoft, Yahoo, Time-Warner, not to mention Omnicom, WPA and Publicis - scary smart folks one and all - spend every waking hour plotting ways, if global empire isn’t happening, to still wind up with decent sized duchy. Now that the post-Cannes hangovers have finally settled - yours for having gone, mine for having drowned my bitterness at being stuck on the distaff side of the pond - it’s appropriate to indulge in some good old-fashioned handicapping. Because the evidence suggests that control of the advertising world will, increasingly, revolve around who controls that thing in your pocket. I am referring, oh ye of filthy mind, to your mobile phone.

Following the good advice given by the Cheshire Cat to Alice, the right place to begin this conversation is at the beginning. And that, inevitably, takes us to a bit of news that you may have only glanced at while adding to your blood alcohol count along la Croissette - the introduction of the second gen Apple iPhone. Featuring the same come-hither sex appeal as the original, the big upgrade is the data-supporting technology, which, if it performs as advertised, will bring us frighteningly close to the Jobs-promised nirvana of a truly mobile world wide web. Translation: mobile is suddenly poised to add an unlooked for dimension to broad band/cast convergence - like a stalker, the damned Internet will start following us around.

Whether that’s happy news or not is something history will arbitrate. But it does suggest that advertisers and agencies, sensing freedom from the constrictions of living rooms, computers, desktops and perhaps even gravity will cast newly lustful eyes at that little portable device with its great big promotional potential. Having trouble getting your brand to intersect with frenetic consumers in a media shattered world? Not to worry, your logo can appear on the mobile as frequently as the highly irritating network bugs - which Wiki tells us are called DOGs (Digital Onscreen Graphics) in Australia - that populate every nanomoment of the broadcast day. Kick that potential up to the next notch in a fully converged world - telly blending into computer blending into mobile device - and you begin to see why the vision is producing better results than Viagra in agency executive suites across the land.

Hats off, honor is due to Steve Jobs and the Apple wizards for nailing this far ahead of anyone else. In fact, let’s double the kudos since the iPhone, in tandem with Apple TV - Jobs’ bid to extend the domination into your home - represents a brilliant double play for integrated control over the consumer-facing channels of information and entertainment distribution.

So what happens at the end of the movie? Does boy get world? Does Goggle gracefully concede the territory? Will the agency networks get it right this time when, under similar formative conditions in the 90s, they got it so very wrong on the Internet? Inquiring minds don’t want to wait for the credits to find out, so I pulled out my iPhone - what else? - and dialed Tony Levitan, serial entrepreneur, co-founder of Egreetings, and, as it happens, someone making a play in this space via Lexy.com. (Full disclosure: yours truly is helping the company on the advertising front).

His answers: “Many still look at the phone primarily as a communications device - but it’s fast becoming a vehicle for information and entertainment. We also know that people will accept mobile ads, audio as well as visual, that come along with delivered value, just like they do with TV.” The pragmatic point: “the mobile phone is an extremely high quality, immediate response, sampling device that works through both the eyes and the ears. That makes it an extremely powerful medium that opens up the chance to influence both the consumer engagement and its consequences.”

But that doesn’t mean Levitan is willing to call it “Apple 1, competition nil” in the contest for marketing dominance. In fact, he believes that “mobile will be “the great equalizer” for two reasons. First, because of the small screen size, it’s not an easy get for Google or anyone delivering content that’s primarily visually driven. Second, because the advent of flat rate mobile service pricing from operators like Sprint and Virgin Mobile” will prove transformative” for everyone including Apple. “In 1999, flat rate pricing from AOL meant people could stop thinking about what they were paying for the Internet and start dreaming up new things to do with it. That was the primary catalyst for web 2.0. The same will happen when flat rate is the rule in mobile. “

At that point, if friend Tony is right, who winds up controlling the world in your pocket is anyone’s guess. Game on Mr. Jobs.

How low is down?

2008-05-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

Note: under the heading of "if you don't have anything nice to say, write it here" the good folks at Shots once again allowed me to get it all wrong on the pages of their fine publication. Herein the tragic results:

Here’s a fun game you can play at home, at work, or even on the endless trip from wherever you are to wherever you’re going, especially if that place happens to be some place like, say, Cannes. It starts with the happy fact that today's science allows us to calculate the number of nasty genetic malfunctions that could possibly happen inside your DNA simply by multiplying all the potential combinations of chromosomes by the number of human cells - a total roughly expressed as 3.041 followed by 78 zeroes*. Now, compare this with the result when you multiply the 10 major Lions categories by the 700-plus Gold, Silver and Bronze honors that will be handed out at your swank Mediterranean destination.

The result may be piss-up math, but the conclusion is inescapable: you have a vastly better chance of getting cancer than you do of winning a damned thing at Cannes. Especially if you happen to be laboring at a US branch of a US agency where, with a few notable exceptions, it’s been another 365 days of lackluster business as usual.

And that, friends, is actually the good news. Because so-so is a lot better than so low, which is precisely what we can expect in coming years given the volume of dark portents hovering, cloud-like, around US advertising creativity. The disturbingly proximate cause: a deepening recession coupled with what recent history tells us happens to advertising in the land of the brave and the home of John “I’ve-Got-Greenspan’s-Book” McCain during economic downturns.

Welcome back to deja vu. Once again, we’re hearing commentators deploying the highly dreaded and incredibly hackneyed “perfect storm” analogy - this time to describe the convergence of melting mortgage markets, rising food and fuel costs and the now dramatic collapse in consumer confidence. Once again, we can anticipate declining ad budgets and the soft fluttering of pink slips. And, yes, once again I’m writing a Shots column about lousy US chances at Cannes, thereby proving my singular inability to ever get it right.

“Plus ce change, plus ce la meme chose” is as true in 2008 as it was when I first joined countless other piratical scriveners in, err, borrowing the phrase to make a point about the circularity of things. Although, the macabre-minded should know that this time we’ve managed to replace irrational dotcom exuberance with a new angst rooted in declining American willingness to spend personal money that wasn’t there in the first place. In technical terms this is known as a “bummer,” especially since the entire US economic boat has been floating on the strength of mass willingness to plunge into credit card debt while simultaneously suctioning the entire equity value out of the family home and hearth.

Of course, all of this gloominess begs the question of just how low is down and, on that score, the report is mixed. On one hand, despite solid growth, US shops resisted the screaming staff buildup evidenced during the dotcom boom. Ergo, the chances are slim we’ll see either the same wholesale amounts of layoffs or shops shuttering because Darwin was right and the fittest have already survived.

By the same token, there are some factors, call them “recession amplifiers,” that could well accelerate a host of trends with tectonic creative consequences including media fragmentation, audience erosion and, mais oui, production inflation. Given a burbling case of economic indigestion, each becomes a less surmountable challenge; taken in combination they seem far more likely to provoke agencies to compromise standards in pursuit of survival than to put more Lions into red, white and blue creative hands.

This, of course, isn’t to say that you can count theYanks out of the mix. Even in this year of modest ideas delivered modestly, we bring a few jewels to the party. My personal list starts with the Wieden Coke execution that floated heads and shoulders above its Superbowl competition. There are even some smaller shops that might surprise the world - DeVito/Verdi’s radio work for the National Horseracing Board and ambient media for Legal Seafood along with Butler, Shine & Stern’s standup continuation of the innovative Mini tradition.

Better yet, in time you have to expect that the way the smarter US agencies have embraced emergent digital reality will pay statuary dividends. R/Ga’s amazing online product for Nike in 2007 and this year’s “Coke Versus Coke Zero” integrated campaign from Crispin support both the contention and the hope. And with convergence clearly here - telly merging with computer merging with mobile - those skills may wind up restoring the US to its former luster along la Croisette.

But until that blessed day, I have to confess to a sense that our near-term prospects look somewhere south of limited because, right now, the US versus Rest Of World is really no contest. The Rest of World wins.

* The number of cells in the body is a matter of considerable biological controversy-ranging from a mere 10 trillion, which I guess would describe a Giselle Bundschen, up to 100 trillion for a John Goodman. The number of cells in Ophra Winfrey’s body varies week by week, depending on how the diet is going.

Hal Riney

2008-03-30T21:23:00.000-07:00

This is how it appeared in the Shots online newsletter. What was amazing to me, at least, was how many people had the same feeling - a personality that won't be seen again.'

Hal Riney, the advertising legend whose ideas sparked and voice graced iconic work for brands as diverse as Saturn, Henry Weinhardt's Beer and Ronald Regan's presidential campaign died ls after a struggle with cancer. Considering this was a guy who once walked off a hijacked airliner simply because he was bored - okay, "ran like hell" - chances are more than good he figured he had the disease licked until the very end.

It's hard to know how a reputation like Riney's translates across the boundaries of common language and different cultures. Come to think of it, I harbor significant doubt that most of today's advertising generation - awards whores that we are - know anything more about Hal Riney & Partners than its role as the incubator for a small startup called Goodby, Silverstein. If that. But trust me on this: there were two "teams of the 80s" to be found in San Francisco. One was the football 49ers who brought home the Superbowl bacon not just once, but thrice during the decade. The other belonged to Riney and the fact that for an equally impressive amount of time, his style, his diction and his strategic thinking dwarfed the balance of the industry in the popular culture.

I never worked for the man and only met him a few times. But with the pleasure of having partnered recently with some of the brilliant creatives who helped create the work and know the story, I'm pretty certain about one thing: it'll be a hell of a long time before someone matches Riney's force of personality, larger-than-life stride across the advertising stage and command of the brands he constructed so well for so many years.

Shaking Boots

2008-03-09T11:33:00.000-07:00

Incipient instability is the only firm ground on the US advertising landscape. And no, this is not the promised land.

Those of us who live on, adjacent or even within spitting distance of earthquake fault lines are highly attuned to what seismologists call "foreshocks" - the host of little temblors that precede Mother Nature’s definitive demonstration that her cosmological Midol didn’t exactly kick in as advertised. But while there’s a certain life-lived-daftly joy to writing the foregoing sentence - almost certain to piss off women on at least 3 continents - the real intent here is to point out that the foreshock metaphor now finds ready application to the advertising environment simply because so many signs of underground tectonic activity - cracks cracking, disjunctions forming and fissures widening - portend serious disruption up here on the surface.

We pause here for a moment to take shelter in the nearest reinforced doorway - a good ground movement survival strategy for the uninitiated - while preparing to itemize a few of the shimmies that might encourage the reasonable to cast a dour eye on the advertising surrounds.

First, despite fervent arguments to the contrary by El Presidente Bush - who, it seems, is a much better denier than uniter - there’s a high probability of renewed recession. The reason: thanks to variety of grim economic news we both could name, the consumer confidence that’s sustained this economy is trending loo-ward. If the current downward spiral continues - reverse direction in Australia, of course - that flushing motion will carry away with it advertising budgets, advertiser’s already thin creative courage and, you bet, a considerable number of the agencies that just barely recovered from the last economic storm.

Second, turning to a different pew in the same church, the short-term consequence of the recently settled Hollywood writers’ strike will be a change in the way networks schedule annual programming and agencies craft their yearly media plans. The bad news: if the old, odd, marketplace vanishes - what media mavens call the “upfront buy” - experience indicates that all vestiges of a rationalized competitive advertising pricing system will follow suit. Which will play hell with a great many advertiser’s ability to afford any sort of broadcast schedule. So long Cannes film section, pal.

Third, adding even more uncertainty to the picture, is that you really can’t tell the players anymore, even if armed with a scorecard. Search engine giant Yahoo hits hard times thanks to Google. Microsoft, seeing opportunity to shore up its pathetic performance in search, makes a bid for Yahoo, giving pundits much satisfaction coining new company names - Microhoo, YahSoft - but giving shareholders much less than you might think. The deeply offended Yahoo Board responds by making lascivious come-hither motions at Google - GooHoo? Prompting AOL, now on its own rocky ground, to enter its own bid for Yahoo - YAOL? Along the way, the US marketing community comes to realize that the one piece of the puzzle everyone thought well settled - search - has just shattered into a jillion pieces.

Of course that’s what earthquakes, even advertising earthquakes, do. And we haven’t even talked about the other foreshocks coming from directions social, technological, economic and political. Oh well, that’s the thing about having a column - another issue, another chance to share the angst. In the meantime, ladies, please pass the Midol. I feel a bad one coming on.

Uneasy lies the heads.

2008-01-25T09:14:00.000-08:00

If content is king, the $152.4 billion US question is who owns the crown?

To be honest, the plan had been to focus this month’s drivel on the highly significant role of advertising in the likely emergence of the first US presidential candidate to spend a billion dollars running for office. Of course, Halliburton, and the rest of the no-need-for-bids-on-government-contracts crowd would probably consider that chump change - but there I go again, digressing before I’ve even started. Especially when the glittering tabula rasa of a brand new year proffers such a fascinating opportunity to spend another 7 issues of Shots consistently getting it all so very wrong.

Oh well, time to insert newly tuned Nike running shoes squarely into mouth and start the party with a prediction that in 2008 the main event - what the American call “the big Kahuna,” the French should call “le grande bouef” if they don’t already, and what the British call, well, whatever they call it - will be the continuing battle for control of content.

I say this only in part because of the Screen Writers Guild strike - a work stoppage that has already forced cancellation of the Golden Globes, the first of Hollywood’s annual nights of narcissism at a cost of god knows how many associated TV advertising dollars. But, more to the point, the signs are everywhere that advertising is fast becoming a combat zone where creative agencies, media shops, integrated firms and all manner of hybrids are competing for the right to come up with the ideas, the responsibility for their execution and the ability to collect cash as a result of same.

Ladies and gentlemen, we direct your attention to center ring where Google is locked in a no-holds knife fight with Weiden who’s doing the dance of death with Naked, 180, Strawberry Frog, Avenue A/Razorfish and Droga5 while simultaneously ninja fighting WPP, O&M, TBWA and Omnicom, all of whom are being stalked by everyone else in the business.

When it comes to “red in tooth and claw,” I’m not sure that Mother Nature will have that much over advertising in the year ahead. But I am pretty sure that at least three interesting random trends are worth tracking for the nonce:

Pros over Joes - while customer generated content (CGC) remains a fascinating possibility, too much of the product to date underscores the truth that consumers just ain’t that good at novel concepts. Advantage: pros as clients realize that engaging with consumers doesn’t have to mean surrendering your brand voice to a film school graduate.

McLuhan was right - in a world where product placement, e-commerce and search revenues are growing at rates that dwarf the balance of the traditional advertising arts, you have to conclude that medium has, indeed, become message. Advantage: those closest to the channels of message distribution. Naked comes to mind as the kind of upstarts who could well wind up owning the world, as does a firm called Boyce:Mangin here in San Francisco who, although small, is potently creative.

Convergence and consolidation. With HD becoming the sole US broadcast standard - can you say “hello, 100% cable penetration? - the market seems ever more ripe for increasing degrees of consolidated ownership of whatever the leading platform(s) happen to be. Advantage: Google, especially when buys its own cable network, opens its own production studio and buys News Corp.

What’s that I hear? Laughter, derision, dismissal. Okay, so you’re probably right. Google can’t possibly take over the advertising world in 2008. Maybe it’ll have to wait until 2009. In any event, felice anos nuevos, amigos. Enjoy.

Addenda: many of us noted with sadness the premature death of Phil Dusenberry, who probably did more for celebrity advertising than anyone else in his generation. At the same time, I also read a touching article about the passing of Indian ad guru Kersy Katrak - which brings to mind how easy it is to remain ignorant of important people and relevant events in other parts of the world. I never knew of him - but wish I had.

This Just In: Random Thoughts On The Year That Was.

2007-12-26T08:39:00.000-08:00

1. Do try this at home: Google “Google” and you’ll get about 1.03 billion references. Google “George. W. Bush” and you get 76 million reference.

2. If the story in 2007 was that “knowledge is power,” guess who had it going on?

3. By the way, Google “knowledge is power” and you find about 209 million references, still a cool 130 million more hits than the “decider.” This makes me smile.

4. As the foregoing might indicate, the biggest story in US advertising this year wasn’t about advertising. Instead, it was an epic and some might argue tragic tale of how, where, when and why people get, process, utilize and/or reject information.

5. Advertising, by the way, is considered “information” for the purposes of this discussion. All Bronx cheers or Euro-trash derivatives directed toward this column accepted as entirely valid.

6. Big 2007 thumbs up for web-based searches for facts, figures, news, consumer reviews, product information and, of course, for dish, dish and more dish. Not to mention gossip. Double thumbs down for television, radio and all the lovely but-sadly-old-school-story-telling media.

7. Most significant holiday gift from IBM or any other multi-national corporation: a huge chunk of strip-mined coal in our creative stockings in the form of a global report suggesting that broadband and broadcast convergence will break current media delivery models into a thousand jagged edged shards.

8. Paraphrasing the eerily prescient Jack Welch, former General Electric chairman: “When the rate of change outside an industry is greater than the rate of change inside, the end is near.” Yikes.

9. The upside of media convergence: now, couples can spend entire football, baseball and basketball seasons squabbling over the mouse, instead of the remote control.

10. From the Department of Random Rewrites: when you come to a fork in the road don’t step on it. There’s already been enough blood shed in the advertising industry this year.

11. Meanwhile, the clicks go on: Cyber Monday 2007 saw $733 million in online spending, representing a 21-percent increase versus last year and an 84-percent jump from the average daily online spending totals during the preceding four weeks.

12. From the Department of Modern Curiosities: every time Google says it has no intention of being an advertising agency it recruits someone away from an advertising agency. Case in point: the co-President of Ogilvy’s New York office.

13. Some commentators begin to claim, Nostradamos-like, they can see the vague outlines of Web 3.0 emerging from the primordial ooze of Web 2.0. Not to be trumped, I claim to see Consumer 4.0 staggering on shore, wiping off the disgusting ooze.

14. From the Department of Online Anxiety: clear signs that we’re in real danger of drowning the brand baby in the direct response bathwater.

15. In what has to be one of the most amazing runs in the history of post-millennial advertising, Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, an Omnicom unit, racks up more than $2 b-billion in billings in a 3 month period. Sir Martin reported green and it isn’t even St. Patty’s day.

16. Technology providers announce that new traceable microchips can be implanted in food packaging, thereby allowing grocery stores to dispatch scanner-equipped vans to circulate through neighborhoods, determining the state of your fridge.

17. The on-going fight over ratings and other advertising measurement services definitively proves that none, one quarter, half, three quarters or the entirety of every advertising dollar is wasted.

18. For this and all other 2007 news related to advertising performance metrics see: Disraeli, damned liars and statisticians.

19. This just in from the Department of 500 TV Channels and Nothing To Watch: The president of the Fox “fair and balanced” network, gloats that the writer’s strike will boost his profits by encouraging more viewing of reality TV. Terrific advertising environment, that.

20. Most Salacious Story of the Year: allegations of sex, slander and scandal in the battle between former Wal-Mart Chief Marketing Officer Julie Roehm and Wal-Mart.

21. Shots editors demonstrate early signs of dementia praecox, commissioning my column on state of US advertising when, as everyone knows, much more interesting creative stuff is coming out of London, Amsterdam, Singapore, Barcelona, Bangalore and your occasional Azerbaijani yurt.

22. Rumors that “customer generated content” will put agencies out of business somewhat undermined by the quality of customer generated content in 2007. See, for example, NFL Pitka-helmed Superbowl TV spot.

23. Apropos nothing at all: Paris, Britney, Lindsay.

24. “Fair and Balanced” Fox claims it might actually clear $3 million for a single :30 on the 2008 Superbowl.

25. Seen on the front page of the New York Times: “Silicon Valley Again Awash In Venture Capital.” Are dotcoms about to perform a Harry Potter-like reappearing act?

26. From the Department of They’re B-A-A-A-C-K: Left coast agencies begin to get inquiries from newly funded dotcoms.

27. But the biggest story-behind-the-story-story of this or any other advertising year comes to us straight from 1962, when advertising legend Howard Gossage famously penned the line “if you don’t have a bigger hammer, use a sharper nail.” The 2007 update: “Bigger hammers only bend dull nails.”

Attention Deficit Disorder:

2007-11-24T09:14:00.000-08:00

When asked what’s wrong with US advertising, our faithful columnist responds, “what were we talking about?”

Friday, 10/26/07 - The day starts with phone calls, three telemarketers asking for “Mr. or Miss owner or human resources manager,” one nervous job seeker hoping to show and tell. Five text messages follow on the mobile, a few IM’s, all punctuated by an unending stream of e-mails on my Mac, each announced by an idiotic chirp that reminds me of a demented squirrel. Procrastinating while I blow past the banner ads, I contact surf my new social networking addiction - the one where people add names to a list for the same reasons hunters display dead animals on their walls. The snail mail arrives and the holiday catalogues and broadsheets sit both uninteresting and unopened on top of the bills. Out of the corner of one eye, CNN struts and blinks on the office HD-enabled television set; stories of fires in California, carnage in Iraq; random slices, bits and chunks of a multitude of drug ads bearing warnings about the risks of headache, nausea, seizures and four hour erections. All of it flickers in and out of consciousness like so many moths dancing around a candle in a darkened room. I have tuned into everything, I have tuned into nothing. Time to go home.

Four years ago, I asked the American Association of Advertising Agencies for an estimate of how many advertisements are aimed at US consumers on any given day. The response then was between 2,500 and 20,000 depending on “what you call an ad and who you believe.” Today, I asked my wife how many advertising messages she had noticed in the last 24-hours. Her answer was, “maybe 3 or 4.”

To those of you who holler back that this is just another tiresome example of not-so-nascent advertising overload, I respectfully urge you to peel the duct tape off your squints. What you are seeing - in the U.S., at least - is the highly consequential working of something called the “attention economy.” And even more than the evisceration of agency compensation, the dilution of creative control and the evaporation of any kind of client-to-agency loyalty, that fact should have brows deeply furrowed from one end of Madison Avenue to the other.

First articulated in 1971 by Herbert Simon, the late Noble Prize winning economist, the theory of the “attention economy” loosely rests on the premise that “in an information-rich world, the wealth of information... creates a poverty of attention.” The marketing translation: when everyone has unlimited access to information of every sort and about every thing, the $152.3 billion dollar US advertising question becomes - “what will actually get anyone’s attention?”

Based on a data point of one - my wife - the answer is “not a whole lot.” But I happen think she’s more representative of the general population than not and for two reasons. First, the profusion of household, mobile, ambient, out-of-home, environmental and what have you - a rousing cheer for the evil bastard who decided to mount video screens in elevators - has resulted in a virtual carpet-bombing of promotional messages. Given that, it’s unsurprising that consumers flee to the twin shelters of inattention and indifference.

But if you really want to get down to the prime problem, just take a look at the way that a great many US advertisers have chosen to deal with the attention competition. Like the stereotypical rude American tourist attempting to communicate with a seemingly uncomprehending hotel clerk, these companies have decided the trick is to speak much s-l-o-w-e-r. Use, much, shorter, words. And talk much, MUCH louder.

Do people really understand that the ads are being deliberately dumbed down while the volume and repetition are being amped up? Do they get the fact that advertisers no longer manifest any respect for legitimate boundaries - including privacy - in pursuit of penetration? Do either or both of these factors make audiences increasingly cynical about the intentions and credibility of the rest of us? You be the judge.

But if you happen join me in concluding that this trend toward the dark side is doing no one any long-term favors, then I’m happy to share some insights from one of the rare people in our industry who not only understands the dynamics of attention, but also has formulated an intelligent way to win for his clients in this context. His name is Daniel Baxter and he serves as a partner and chief brand strategist at Portland, Oregon’s Borders, Perrin, Norrander - one of the more interesting shops populating the Pacific Northwest.

Arguing that “if you believe a TV can make you buy a car, welcome to 1951,” Baxter deploys a strategic approach dubbed “Value Flow” that’s composed of four pivotal elements:

First, he believes that we need to recognize that attention, like information, can be stored and retrieved. “You see that with Tivo, with Netflix; you see that when people store their itineraries on Travelocity or their tastes in books on Amazon.“ That being the case, he argues that “attention retrieval,” under the rubric of “attention empowerment ” - deserves as much effort as any other aspect of the marketing mix.

Second, he persuasively argues for “mapping” all the connections that link to brand and its consumers. “That includes everything from developing a clear understanding of how people consume relevant media to charting the role of everyone from the manufacturers to the employees to the sales reps to the retailers.” “We even,” he says with a laugh, ”take a look at the connection between the brand and our agency business plan to make sure the fit is secure and synergistic.”

The third element requires going beyond an analysis of brand attributes and benefits to get a precise picture of the brand personality. ““A lot of companies think product innovations are the sine qua non of a brand. But when a competitor can duplicate that innovation in one sales cycle, product personality is critical; it’s what defines a brand these days.”

The final element - and where Baxter and his team put the most focus - is building value into each and brand and audience interaction. “Value comes in the form of information; it comes in the form of personality - making me feel like a part of a group I want to belong to;” it comes in the form of ads that make it worth your while to watch; it obviously comes in the form of satisfaction with what you got and what happened after that.”

Has this approach actually worked? For Columbia Sportswear, which has been BPN’s consistent flagship award winner, the agency tackled two different groups, each posing a unique problem. By understanding the media consumption habits of younger people and developing appropriate online creative, the shop was able to reverse - are you listening, Levi’s? - an emerging pattern of young people rejecting their parents’ sportswear choice. At the same time, the agency leveraged a deep understanding of the brand’s connection to hunters, to make the point that “buying Columbia signals you’re a real hunter, not some stinking weekender.” The promotion not only paid off at the cash register, but the agency cashed in with major recognition in Communication Art’s Advertising Annual - one of the nation’s most respected juried competitions.

Summing up his argument for the Value Flow strategy, Baxter puts gets very succinct: “Why do people pay attention to anything? Because they get value.” Of course, being something of a contrarian, I could easily argue the reverse. Reflecting back on my diary from last Friday, it’s clear that where we don’t perceive any value, we don’t pay any attention at all.

Advertising Nil. Web 2.0

2007-09-29T10:43:00.000-07:00

Dear lost-visitor-from-another-planet-who-obviously-accidentially-stumbled-on-this-blog:

My friends at Shots in London are obviously inclined to perpetuate past errors in judgment by continuing to carry more of my run-on-at-the-mouth pontifications, now in the form of a "state of advertising in the US" column. Were I a subscriber, I'd be outraged. Fortunately, when they carry your words, you get a copy for free to give to your mum. Anyway, the really good news for yours truly is that this new venture actually gives me something to post on this blog from time to time. Hallelujah and here's the first horse out of the gate.

State of the States

The cause of truth, justice and your future in advertising took a couple of thumping body blows this month as the internet-based Center for Media Research reported, leaked or otherwise spilled the beans on two less than comforting snapshots of current conditions in the industry’s most hallowed, and now it seems, most vulnerable, precincts.

Thus does the first shoe drop: For the first time in 12,000 years of recorded human history, according to research from media investment powerhouse Veronis Suhler Stevenson, US consumers are actually spending less time in front of the telly in favor of more time in front of the PC. Although the scope of the estimated TV decline - about .5 percent - may sound trivial, an exercise in marginally fuzzy mathematics indicates it is not. The damage assessment begins with a key fact provided by Nick Talbert, account planner cum creative media strategist at the San Francisco-based upstart agency Mortar, who observes that stateside advertisers spend on the order of $65.3 billion (US) annually on domestic television in all its network, cable, scatter, spot market and ethnic flavors. Considering that the per unit cost of this electronic hyphy is based on the delivered audience, the resulting “monetization” of the reduction is about $326,000,000 - functionally equivalent to the US media billings from the country’s 39th largest advertising account disappearing in a relative nanomoment.

While that may not be tantamount to the industry’s entire economic cliff sliding into the globally warmed ocean, it’s an unmistakable sign of erosion.

Of course, common sense might suggest this is the entirely obvious consequence of having 500 channels on offer and exactly nothing worth watching - unless you count Beckham and Posh. But, apparently that’s not the case according to the analysts who attribute the source of the retrograde motion to rising consumer awareness that news, facts and/or gossip are far more efficiently obtained on line. Result: with broadcast entertainment values trending dumb and dumber and desired information better found on the broadband-enabled Internet, the long predicted savaging of TV ratings is well underway.

We pause here for a rousing chorus of “row, row, row your production and media budgets, your lion and your pencil dreams, your agency bonuses and your ample retirements, gently down the drain.”

And it had better not be just Norte Americano voices we’re hearing in that choir, mes amis. Because hot on the heels of the above-mentioned shift in preferences comes the drop of the second shoe in the form of an IBM-sponsored global study of consumer media habits. Due out in the fall and bearing the indigestion-inducing moniker of “The End of Advertising As We Know It,” the relevant news teasers promise that whether the creative arts and crafts find you gainfully employed on London’s busy Herbrand Street, on the always-charming Herengrach in Amsterdam or on generally practical West Wacker Drive in Chicago – gold stars for those who can identify the associated agencies - your day will not be made by its release.

The gist of the findings: heavy media users around the world are now reporting heavier use of digital media than they are of traditional media. When combined with what will doubtlessly be reams of other data comprehensible only to statisticians and other damned liars, this will lead IBM to opine that “despite natural lags among marketers, advertising revenues will follow consumers' habits....” And that “to effectively respond to this power shift...advertising agencies (will go beyond) traditional creative roles to become brokers of consumer insights.”

Terrific, say I, we can all become account planners jetting around the world cool hunting the latest and greatest. So what’s the worst that could happen - eating too many M&Ms in a focus group room?

Actually, reading between the lines, you might reasonably conclude that a lot worse could and will happen, at least from the narrow advertising perspective. For example, by implication, the findings embrace the increasingly hard-to-argue view that creativity must, in a digital world, become a distributed commodity, with “ownership” split between agencies, media firms, production houses, partridges in pear trees, seven lords a-leaping and, when you get right down to it, the customer.

Whether that augurs well for maintaining, much less enhancing the ingenuity and quality of the creative product is uncertain. So far, the US report card is decidedly mixed, especially when judged against the rest-of-world output where the emphasis on the traditional aspects of ad making – massive ideas, great story telling, brilliant casting – are still de rigure.

What is entirely clear, however, is that this shift will have an indelible impact on the entire agency value proposition, not to mention the reflective agency structure. The business of finding and delivering insights is a vastly different enterprise than the business of creatively building brands. And that goes double if the insights are developed in service of what are, ultimately, direct responsive metrics on the order of click-throughs, page views, opt-ins and even, very controversially, view-throughs.

John Caples, long ago pioneer of direct response, is sitting up and cheering. Bill Bernbach, spiritual godfather of the creative advertising revolution of the 1960s, rolls in his grave. Personally, I’m hanging with Bill.

At the same time, by presenting personal computers and mobile devices as the consumer’s new primary entertainment and information platform, the forecast underscores the existence of a host of threats to the efficacy of any marketing of any sort. Truly, it’s “welcome back to a future” where media over-saturation and message overload – 500 channel options are a tiny drop in the vast Internet ocean - are coupled with declining efficiencies and rising barriers to penetration.

All of which, if we want to go from talking about the glass being half empty to counting the razor-sharp shards, brings up the relevant issue of narrowing ownership of the channels of information distribution. One analyst now predicts that Google will eventually own 90 percent of the paid search market – hardly ideal conditions for price-cutting and access-opening. I’ve also been very interested in watching Tivo, the supposed ad-skippers, teach agencies how to make ads that work during the supposed skipping. As a card-carrying cynic, I can only conclude that they are looking for a way to dip into the advertising revenue stream – which is just what I’d be advising were they a client.

In fact, it’s this latter point that might be the most disquieting of all. Sure the shift from the traditional media to newer boxes is troublesome – but change is ever thus. And, we have pretty good evidence that the sharper US shops, from big and successful places like Goodby, Silverstein, CPB and Ogilvy to much smaller and newer shops like Mortar - not only grok the transformation but are finding a way to navigate through it without sacrificing their creative aspirations.

Less certain is that having fewer people owning bigger shares of the channels of communication is going to be much good for creativity, as we now understand it. After all, the US experience with monopoly ownership is anything but positive. And there’s exactly zero evidence that having one or two companies so thoroughly dominate critical elements of the communications marketplace will do anything to promote any of the good things advertising agencies have historically brought to the party. Including producing great ads.

The USA @ Cannes: Too many ads, too few agencies.

2007-06-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

Dear occasional visitor: Every year, for some reason the good people at Shots - the hot advertising magazine in the UK - ask me to forecast US chances of getting major props at the Cannes International Advertising Festival. Following is what appeared in print.

Cordially,

Jef

This year, the United States will have another dreary - no, check that - another totally crappy showing in the film, press and poster sections at Cannes. But we will, and you can trust me on this, kick ass on the integrated and interactive side coming in with what looks to be a pretty fair shot at the Titanium Lion itself.

The reason: there are no advertising agencies left in the United States of America.

Instead, there are 360 communicators, brand activators, experiential marketers, SEO/SEM behaviorialists (organic and paid), content generators, creative media companies, integrated service providers, along with a cackling menagerie of exotic species invented by a veritable army of autopoietically inclined jargonistas who are in constant search of a coinage that will define The. Next. Big. Thing.

To call this pervasive is like calling George Bush verbally challenged or Dick Cheney a bad shot. From the top of the creative food creative chain to the bottom-most startup, companies that used to proudly call themselves advertising agencies now define themselves as, well, something else. And while they still may be cranking out ads, they’re putting heart and soul elsewhere for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks - “because that’s where the money is.”

Example #1: two years ago, after peering deeply into his crystal balls, Jeff Goodby is reported to have advised his partners that the agency would either jump on the technology freight train or prepare to become irrelevant. In one of the shorter and more impressive corporate transitions in recent memory, the agency is named “Digital Agency of the Year” in 2006 by Advertising Age.

Example #2: in a classic case of the “creatively rich get stinking richer,” Crispin, Porter + Bogusky opens what is, in essence, a technology factory in Boulder Colorado. Think of it as twist on an old saw - put an infinite number of Flash-literate creatives in front of an infinite number of G5s and they will create all the great internet-based advertising in the world. Of course, the obvious strategic business goal is to turn a commanding sector position into unshakable dominance.

Whether you view this as evolution or Noitulove, one thing is clear: all this refocusing, redefinition and repositioning isn’t just a matter of changing the names to protect the guilty. Instead, thanks to an urgent shift toward digital fluency, even the best of creative shops are undergoing a fundamental departure from the classic approach that underpins great story-telling advertising - human insights, dramatic tension, painstaking craft and, of course, time. Not just the time to make sure the concept is tight and the execution right; but a sense that the audience will generously donate its own precious seconds to appreciate the end advertising product.

We have only to look back at the Big Book of Bad Advertising History (which I’ll write one of these days) to see what happens when speed of communication becomes the huskies that mush this sled. Back before any of us were born, all the lumbering grey flannel suited agencies were enamored of something called a “Burke Device” - a formula that supposedly promoted spot recall by inflexibly requiring every commercial to feature an unusual or highly provocative event or line of dialogue within the first 3 seconds. Addressing Madge the Manicurist for Palmolive dishwashing soap, a troubled customer says “Madge, my hands are so rough and red they feel like a lobster’s claws.” Talk about your shock and awe - the mere inference that a housewife’s delicate digits might begin to resemble some sea-crawling crustacean was supposed to set a hook so firmly in the consumer’s mind that they would actual remember the commercial, maybe even act on it.

To those of you who are thinking, “yeah, but that is so last century,” I can only reply that most of us writing for the web think 3 seconds is least 1.5 seconds longer than we have to grab a user’s attention and launch the interaction. As we all know, speed not only kills in automobiles; it’s life threatening in the world of ideas.

Of course, that doesn’t mean US-produced commercials will never show up in the shows. But it does suggest that you blokes across the pond are, at least for this shuffle on the mortal coil, producing a superior product. The sole consolation for us insecure homelanders - a great deal of the best work is being produced by agencies owed by or networked with US shops. Personally, I harbor deep and dark suspicions that the people in the London, Paris, Madrid and other, similarly cool advertising loci, wake up each morning thanking their Gold Lions they don’t have to live in creative captivity like their stateside colleagues.

Example #3: W+K/Portland’s “Video Game” animated spot for Coca Cola in the 2007 Superbowl - a send-up of Grand Theft Auto - was pretty good. W+K/Amsterdam’s “Happiness Factory” animated spot for the same client was brilliantly executed to the point that you’d be slightly shocked not to see it collecting some Cannes crockery.

In some ways, the fact that a global superpower can lose so much traction in such a short period of time is a sad thing, with implicit lessons too obvi to belabor. On the other hand, there are those of us who happen to think that having so many creative options on the table - and the chance to screw it up in so many new ways - is a thing of beauty.

But overshadowing all of this is the absolutely compelling revealed truth that a radically changed weltanshaung can permanently and irrevocably change an industry.

So how will the US fare at Cannes? R/GA’s amazing integrated technology solution for Nike+ will carry its win at the ANDY Awards - always a good bellweather - into Interactive and, possibly, Titanium fame. While the only US TV campaign going in with “Whassup”-like buzz is the Martin Agency’s caveman series for Geico.

But I’m shedding no tears for the red, white & blue. There may be no advertising agencies left on these shores - but each year there’s still the amazing and tantalizing prospect of doing Cannes-winning advertising. Whatever you call yourself.

Rethinking the Dink: The Lowered Expectations Bowl.

2007-02-05T14:08:00.000-08:00

There are a few of us around who remember when the Superbowl was still the ultimate forum for the grand advertising gesture. Then - go ahead and set the Wayback machine to 1999, Peabody - we deployed couchward, waiting for that single breathtaking instance of exquisitely polished genius to break through the usual crap with the grace and elegance of a history-making Hail Mary - a perfect spiral of impossible creative that somehow transcended the odds to land, with unerring originality, in the viewer’s surprised and delighted embrace.

I don’t really need to provide you with the roster of those not-so-mini masterpieces: in the run-up to every year’s game, they’re always played just often enough to remind us that “nyah, nyah - you’re just not that good anymore.”

Which is why it comes as no shock that this year's game pretty much lived down to expectations and those predicting short dinks instead of long bombs had every excuse to extol their own perspicacity. For my multi-millions, the biggest blockbuster was actually a recycled gem for Coca Cola from Weiden + Kennedy/London - the “Conveyor Belt” spot which has already done fair-to-middlin’ in the early crop of European ad awards. Everything else was one-liners with a bit of Gen X male humor there, a bit of animal tear-jerk there, and the same ragtag assortment of the okay, the mediocre and the been-there-seen-that-somewhere-before.

And that, friend, is a comment I could have written last year, the year before that, and so on and so forth right back until, dare I say it, the dotcom bust ripped the wind and the guts out of domestic creative sails.

But here’s something I could not - or, perhaps - would not have submitted to the court of public opinion at any time in the past: the Superbowl, as a media environment, has changed. It’s no longer the showcase for the world’s best advertising one-offs. Instead, it’s become a place where marketers have to think in three, well, let's call 'em football concepts - the short gain, the long drive and the 12th man (uh, person).

It starts with an observation that made the rounds of many of the media strategy newsletters and blogs in recent weeks: given the extraordinary saturation of media messaging out there, the Superbowl’s demonstrated value as a place where people actually tune in to watch the ads actually makes the altitude-sickness-making-spot-cost somewhat legitimate. Implication: a short gainer here is as good as deep strike simply because the venue is, itself, clutter busting.

Okay, that’s a fairly depressing concept, at least for those of us in the creative department. But before we all take that long dive off a short bridge, there’s a corollary that’s a bit more upbeat - which is what I mean by the “long drive.” In the West Coast Offense, you use short passes, in lieu of small yardage runs, because they’re highly efficient at moving you down the field. In advertising terms, that means you string together a series of small head-nodding spots to put together a campaign that wins you the lion’s share of awareness and kudos. So, okay, running "small gain" campaigns at $2.6 million a crack isn’t for the faint of heart or shallow of wallet. But that’s exactly what Budweiser did yesterday and, I submit, with extraordinarily effective results. Particularly, since that campaign fully took into account what you might call “the 12th man” - a.k.a. "the fans."

Now, luck is with you, because I won’t drive this lame analogy into the ground any further than necessary But I am going to say that one of the things Bud and some of the other more effective advertisers did yesterday was to take account of the experiential conditions surrounding their viewing audience. Moreover, they configured their creative in ways that made sure the spots could thrive in circumstances where the visual is king and dialogue, the icing on the cake. At least, for bakers who put icing on the invisible undersides of their cakes.

Is all this a revolutionary shift from year’s past? Well, not in the sense that we’ve just experienced the equivalent of someone inventing, oh, say, e-commerce. But if this change is rightly preceived, it just might change way advertising strategists approach the Superbowl - and the resulting economics of the event.

Of course, a few of us will always miss that good old fashioned Superbowl masterpiece. But when share of voice and "share of venue" become standard - not creative excellence - one-offs stand almost no chance of being transformative. Even Joe Pytka, who’s historically helmed many of the genre’s top contenders, couldn’t give that fan-generated concept for the NFL enough spin to make any us of watching at my bar yell “touchdown!” Too bad.

Product Overplacement

2006-12-01T15:47:00.000-08:00

Howard Gossage, San Francisco’s iconic admaker of the 60s and 70s, once famously observed that people only pay attention to advertising that interests them. In addition to serving as the first commandment of effective creative advertising - thou shalt make thy advertising interesting, dammit - his notion also provides a bit of legitimacy to those of us busily exploring the boundaries of integrated marketing with its growing toolkit of highly intrusive strategies and tactics.

In effect, he was implying a sort of informal contract between marketers and customers where the former should feel free pitch as hard as they can because the latter will feel equally free to ignore it. And while that wouldn’t justify a guerilla stunt that involves shouting fire in a crowded theater to promote a brand of fire extinguishers, it does cover a lot of ground.

The ethical implication: it’s okay to put wild three dimensional displays on crowded streets. It’s okay to have a beautiful member of your favorite sex encourage you to sample a (legal) product in a bar. It’s even okay to press beyond the limits of taste in pursuit of internet virality.

All because - no harm, no foul - the consumer can simply walk away. Or click away. Or whatever away. Which isn’t just a commercial principle but one that has a lot of First Amendment oomph behind it.

And so I thought - and still mostly believe - until last night, when I found myself sitting in the aforementioned theater watching “Casino Royale.” Let the record show I walked in prepared to love it as the second coming of Connery (it wasn’t that good, but it wasn’t half bad).

What was disturbing was the sheer volume of product placement from major players in the automotive, liquor and technology categories. In fact, about all the producers missed was the opportunity to sell logo mentions on the handguns and the barrels of the silencers.

Nor was it all fairly passive “Bond sends e-mail from his sailboat on a Sony Viao” with the logo framed squarely to camera each and every time. In a stroke of audacity you have to admire, Gordon’s Gin actually suggested a martini recipe - in technical terms, a usage application - in the middle of the high stakes poker game that’s the story’s centerpiece.

Brilliant, yes. But also intrusive to the point of distraction, and in a situation where any implied “you pitch, I ditch” agreement is, at best, a little tenuous. I didn’t feel free to walk away because that would have cost me the end of the story, not to mention the value of my ticket. But I didn’t feel exactly sanguine about staying and getting progressively more irritated by the constant stream of product demos.

Ever since the day of Howard Gossage - yep, that long ago - ad folks have been worrying and writing about reaching a tipping point where the profusion of individual sales messages permanently alienates consumers from sales messages as a whole. And while we may get there yet, I tend to believe that the power of “interesting” story will retain its efficacy for a long time to come.

After all, I didn’t walk out of that movie thinking “a pox on all their advertising houses.” I did walk out thinking there are ethical and practical limits beyond which aware and self-disciplined marketers should not go.

The view from 30,000 feet.

2006-11-04T09:06:00.000-08:00

Random notes about the difference between advertising on the left and right coasts while passing points in between:

1. California is all about trajectory. New York has a sense of both trajectory and history. This is a good thing for those of us who prefer not to be condemned by repeating our mistakes. See, for example, “irrational exuberance.”

2. There's a palpable vibrancy in New York right now; a pride of place that seems more repressed in present day San Francisco. Some argue it's a lingering vestige of the dotcom meltdown. If so, someone drop a line to Guinness. - we’ve got a decent shot at the record for "world's longest hangover."

3. The drive to digital versus traditional in the big agencies is more than impressive. Necessity is indeed a mother, eh?

4. Left coast shops used to be able to effectively compete with Madison Avenue on the basis of agility, willingness to take risks and being closer to the cutting edge. These days cutting edge is far more likely to be found clubbing in London and Amsterdam than it is swimming with the great whites off the Farallones.

5. Still: as Silicon Valley continues to prime the economic pump, proximity to the global center of technological innovation augurs well for a San Francisco Bay Area resurgence.

6. Some SF people get this way better than others - Goodbye, McCann, Butler, Shine & Stern are ahead of the localized curve and by a long shot.

7. Depressing: WPP and IPG announce they are jumping wholeheartedly into bed with born again spot syndication via Spot Runner (your ad for just $500, here). Black clouds about death of craft appear on horizon.

7. Uplifting: New York in the fall. Deb and I spent two weeks smiling.

TV 3.0? Advertising in a Post-Tivo World

2006-08-17T09:13:00.000-07:00

Last year, it was the Accenture study giving advertising executives that queasy-in-the-pit-of-your-bonus-feeling with findings suggesting that Tivo and similar platforms will inevitably result in most consumers skipping most of the in-program advertising. This year, it’s Tivo - the ol’ spot killer itself - with a faint glimmer of, well, I’d call it insight more than hope.

According to a recent story in the New York Times (7/26/06), the industry-leading PVR provider is now using the system’s inherent two-way capabilities to monitor how Tivo users actually deploy its on-board ad-skipping technology. While the company was a bit mum about its findings - other than to confirm that users are, in fact, passing over about 70% of in-program ads - a spokesman made the intriguing observation that there are some notable variations in behavior. The cited example: spots featuring animal characters shown during an animal program weren’t skipped quite as much.

It would be easy to speculate about the whys and the wherefores of this result - primarily having to do with the fast-forwarding nature of PVR technology and the increasingly critical role of seeding messages with attention-grabbing visual cues. But that’s not hugely different from the challenges facing creatives every Superbowl, when the mission, in part, is to get the raucous bar crowd to SHUT UP and watch the freaking ad.

But it does hint at a number of interesting possibilities, including the fact that we may be on the verge of the third major evolution in television (counting the transition from black and white to color as numbers one and two). And while some may argue that Television 3.0 is really just an aspect of Web 2.0, I’d make the case that there are some plausible reasons - rooted in fundamental human nature -that invites us to consider the phenomena independently, as well as convergent.

There’s also the opportunity for a fascinating bit of quasi-Kremlin-watching to be found in the story. Specifically: you can’t help but notice that the leading proponent of ad skipping is now gathering data designed to help marketers skip all that lost revenue. To me, at least, that signals some intent not to kill the golden advertising goose, but rather, to find new ways to build new streams of revenue that are, unsurprisingly, controlled by the PVR service providers themselves.

TV 3.0? It’s a topic I’ll return to soon - perhaps as early as the next installment. In the meantime, as it says at the top of the page, your taunts and contradictions are always welcomed.

2006-08-13T09:30:00.000-07:00

Return to Blogopolis

So it’s been a few months – okay, more than a few - since we were able to muster sufficient time or mental resources to keep this running commentary crawling, much less running. However, with humiliation wielding a sharp whip hand, we’re back and, with a little bit of luck or a whole lot of guilt, on the necessarily regular basis.

In fact, the entire experience – including the obvious mea maxima culpa if you’ve visited us in the past and found nothing more than a stale lump of copy – is instructive in one regard. We’ve now learned to the point of certainty that marketing technology, like way too many other forms of technology we could mention, adds to the workload, not the devoutly-to-be-desired opposite.

It’s an obvious truth that will come as no surprise to anyone who’s even moderately dialed into the emergent scene. After all, your average 12-year-old knows that blogs of all iterative stripes - like e-mails, IMs, virals and other engagement technologies - are, after all, interactive. As in, 2-way. As in, they’re all about creating dialogue. Which takes work.

And any who’s every attempted to strike up a conversation with a stranger at a cocktail party knows that dialogue takes considerably more skill, stamina and persistence than talking to yourself. Which is actually something of an odd simile in a place like the blogopolis where the dialogue starts by whispering into an echoing cavern.

None-the-less, we promise to be better in the future. Or, in keeping with the conventions of the advertising blogburg, I promise to keep inserting messages into the echo chamber on a more regular basis. If people talk back, all the better.

Unoriginal sin: advertising in a not-so-brave new world.

2005-07-21T18:56:00.000-07:00

I started wondering when the funhouse ride took us to the world of me-too and how we get back again. Advertising Age's Creativity magazine was kind enough to publish the thinking. - Jef
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A few weeks ago, the New York Times reported that Wal-Mart, presumably slightly green-eyed over close-competitor Sear’s success with the reality show “Extreme Makeover. Home Edition,” had opted for the sincerest form of flattery. In a move of unabashed emulation, the big retailer announced the launch of its very own reality entry, “The Scholar,” seeking to copy Sears’ success in generating zap-proof TV brand mentions in a (they sure hope) controversy-proof media context.

Whether this represents an upgrade on the company’s usual flying-happy-face commercials is a matter of debate. That it’s emblematic of an emerging advertising zeitgeist where clever originality is no longer the singular coin of the realm is not.

Especially here in the land of the freedom fry and the home of spicyparis.com.

In fact, some 21-years after “1984,” the pressures countervailing against the unique and the not-seen-before are more pervasive and intransigent than ever. And it’s not just a matter of seeing more and more spots that paste some highly compensated schmuck’s moderately hip track onto mundane “people using product” visuals and then call it an “idea.” Instead, it’s a growing roster of clients - and their agencies- that seem to be cueing to join the “if it worked for them, it’ll work for us” parade.

My view: Willie Sutton may have had a point when said he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is”- but it’s a hell of a mission statement for an ad agency. Yet, the sheer paucity of discernibly original domestic work suggests the emergent truth that it’s only the scarcest of US clients and rarest of our colleagues who still live by the golden rule – whoever breaks new ground deserves the gold.

At this year’s Andy’s, US-based agencies took home a whole 8 out of 20 top TV honors. Meaning, and please check my math, 60% went elsewhere.

Search the signs and portents for the proximate causes of this trend and it’s easy to conclude that the forces at play are complex, diffuse and rooted in shifting organizational, structural, financial and even cultural considerations. Moreover, as Creativity Editor Teressa Iezzi points out, there are also the more “complicated thoughts (relating to) ideas, originality, remixing, inspiration, influences...”

But when you cut to the cliché, it seems like four critical factors deserve special attention.

The first, no surprise, is economic. Len Orkin, who was – I kid you not - one of Bill Bernbach’s lawyers and is still an amazing advertising attorney, observes that it’s gotten “too damned expensive to do business in this country.” Seen in that light, of course so many clients have become as creatively cautious as they are focused on ROI – and not just in their marketing, but in the products they actually take to market. Personal observation: just as ontogeny inevitably recapitulates phylogeny, less-than-original advertising is almost guaranteed when the thing being advertised is, itself, me-too. See, for example, Detroit automakers and the good agencies now breaking picks on same.

The second is a direct by-product of the above. Economists and scientists talk about the “cost of discovery” which roughly equates to how many person-hours and how many bucks it takes to unearth the new. Apply that notion to shrinking agency revenues, margins and creative staffs and you don’t need Illustrator to paint the picture.

The third is environmental, as in creative environment, as in the sheer volume of ideas coming from both inside and outside agencies around the world. I don’t know about you, but living in a global advertising echo chamber is making it highly difficult to tell where Ms. Iezzi’s “influences” leave off and novel ideas begin.

Finally, there’s the other environmental consideration – the heaping helping of media chaos and clutter that even a cursory reading of the tealeaves suggests will be our ultimate gift to succeeding generations. In fact, it’s in this steaming cauldron that a legitimate answer to ad zapping – branded content – is mutating from the brilliance of Fallon’s BMW Films to the banality of Wal-Mart’s “The Scholar.”

In part, what we’re seeing is an inevitable product of a convergence between Hollywood and Madison Avenue. And in those conditions, it seems almost certain that clients will incline toward a value system that puts a premium on re-makes, sequences and spin-offs of previously proven concepts.

Is this too much worry about the future? Anyone who’s ever been part of a “next generation” and dealt with their predecessor’s nostalgia for the past glories could certainly make the argument. But I’d counter that originality, defined by the storied DDB art director Helmut Krone as “the dark side of the moon; not seen before” is on the wane only in places where you can lose your job - or your client - for championing it.

That being the case it’s time come to grips with the fact that unrestrained and fresh ideas are now as likely, if not more so, to be found out in the world than inside an agency war room. And, that it’s time we started honoring the evolving role of agencies as magnets for innovative thinking – and not just the sole source of heat and light.

Which, in turn, prompts a notion that’s just evil, or perhaps, silly enough to warrant some discussion. What would happen if, following the lead of the Oscars and the Tony’s, we created a brand new awards category designed to prompt agencies to put aside “not invented here” and look under every conceivable rock for an idea that beats “me-too.”

Maybe we call it “best agency adaptation of an original concept.”

For those of you who think this is the dumbest idea since garnishing Wendy’s chili with a severed finger, I have just one word: “Whassup?”

BrainBlog: Opinionated bastards, unite!

2005-06-27T11:37:00.000-07:00

Maybe people just have way too much time on their hands, but it seems like blogging is one of those fads that skipped being a trend to become institutionalized way, way too quickly. As a result, a whole lot of marketers now believe that blogging is the neatest thing to come along since, gosh, pop-ups. And that explains why so many blogs with commercial intent are now persistently hammering on your electronic door. Thinking about this new artifact of our echo chamber world, we began to wonder: is blogging a good thing or bad? More important, is “I blog, therefore I’m cool” a new part of the consumer-validated advertising landscape? Actually there’s only one sure way to find out: put up a blog and see what happens. So we did.

Please stay tuned for our first real posting. Or, on the off chance that something related to advertising is on your mind, pour yourself another perfectly chilled martini from the shaker and spill it.

Jef Loeb