An International Smoothie

Devolve and Die - The Integration Myth

For most ad agencies, integration is a unicorn. Picture courtesy of Steffe

This is probably going to make me even more unemployable than I already am, but conviction should trump compromise all day everyday so let's go.

Update: In a beautiful example of synchronicity, the great George Parker talked about this very damn subject at the 4As yesterday. Read his speech, because it's the truth.

Right. So I've been reading Bud Caddell's thought provoking post about what the model for the agency of the future is, if there is indeed a future for discrete communication agencies. At the same time, I've had a bit of back and forth tweetage with Robert Phillips about the mighty ad networks; the WPPs, Interpublics and Omnicoms of the world. 

Ultimately, I've come to a final, personal conclusion that apart from the well worn arguments of why the Big Dumb Agencies (A term that I think my homeboy George Parker should copyright) of this world are in trouble in the face of a convergent and almost organically evolving model of media consumption, they are simply not structured (nor are they prepared to truly restructure) to deal with a truly through the line model (what is the damn line anyway?). 

The people at the top of these networks are either completely oblivious to their own business practices or (more likely) hope to ride the gravy train of client compensation long enough that when it all bottoms out they can escape the rubble with their bonuses and start another agency of the future. Or perhaps they're just not brave enough to make a change.

Allow me to explain.

It was Saatchi&Saatchi who (I believe) are credited with beginning the trend of advertising agencies creating holding companies to acquire specialist companies and amalgamate them into the main body of their company. As a principle of course, this is fine - if the many pros and cons of merging two organizations are weighed and deemed to be favorable. There is a whole industry devoted to mergers and acquisitions. (This is saying nothing about the positively neanderthal assumption that snapping up hotshop x will mean you get better after you subject them to the same creativity-sapping procedures that have razed your own company in the first place. But that's another rant for another time).

Where it starts to get messy is the point where we've reached today. Take a holding company, say one of the big 4 of Omnicom, WPP, Interpublic and Publicis. They're composed of hundreds of organizations, spanning all across the globe and dealing in a number of functions; media, creative, direct, banner shops, market research, branding, healthcare and so on. Yet they have one share price, one report that goes to their shareholders every quarter. It's in the interests of their accountants that all their constituent groups and all their companies under their banner do well. Which is why JWT have RMG Connect for their digital and direct work, TBWA have Tequila and RCKR/Y&R have Saint and so on. They act independently on some accounts, but the goal is always to move work into the partner company. These kind of alliances exist between creative and media shops as well; a global client is appointed and the work gets shared between a number of the holding group's constituents.

There is NOTHING wrong with this of course, if you have the balls to say it. But we get ad agencies claiming they're fully integrated, and everything can be done in house. To be fair this may be true for smaller clients, but when it comes to huge pieces of business it's not just local market forces that are at play. Each of the big 4 has global client relationship people (enforcers basically) that make sure WPP stays sweet with Shell, Nissan with Omnicom and so on.

You'll never have an ad agency come clean and say "We actually don't want to be completely through the line, completely integrated or anything like that, we want to do well as a devolved function and make sure our sister companies do well as well". Or "You know perhaps our digital/interactive/media partner isn't the best at what you want to achieve, let's put it out to pitch". It just doesn't happen. 

Because (to borrow a sports cliche) at the end of the day, very few agencies truly care about the client's business. Don't believe me? Look at the work. Look at the work, look at the way the majority of ad agencies are dealing with the revolution that is happening under their noses when it comes to media consumption, production and distribution. If you can stomach it, read the yawn-inducing trade rags and their self absorbed he-said/she said, their ridiculous and laughable advice and ads for mega-conferences claiming to be your communications elixir. Then ask yourself if it's the client's interests that are close to our hearts or if it's actually our back pockets, dividends, making sure quarterly profit covers the interest payments on the crippling loans taken to be able to shout about how big you are, share prices and collective rear ends that we're concerned for more.

The majority of the Big Dumb Agencies are riding the slowing gravy train, they'll continue to do so until the client wisens up, tells the global enforcer to go jump and takes the scariest step that is admitting they have been wrong. I find it shameful that we pull the wool over our clients eyes as long as we can rather than empowering them to make the best decisions for their businesses. And yes, I can cite instances from my very brief career to date. As is eternally the case in life, there are exceptions, but by definition they are scarce..

Make your clients famous and you'll be famous. The best partnerships betwix client and communications agency are not merely business relationships, they're marriages of understanding that what is good for one is good for the other. They're organic and ever-changing. Not the same plans and executions rehashed year after year, territory after territory. They exist, often in isolation in some cases. The goal has to be to make every relationship like that. To make the work truly matter.

The future of the ad agency is doing the right thing for our clients, their customers and their potential customers. Not just doing the easy thing.

Changing Strategy

Indeed. Picture courtesy of Chris Radley.

One of the few good things about having time off while you wait for people to heal is the opportunity for introspection it provides you with. The rare relief to take a step back and think about what you're adding to what you do.

This time off coupled with PSFK's excellent series: Spur from Redscout (brought to my attention by the super smart Gareth Kay) have meant that yes, I've been thinking about stwategy. 

When I first started applying to agencies, it was deemed I was "too unorthodox" and thus wouldn't be a good account exec, and because I didn't go to art school or have a partner, it would be impossible for me to have a creative thought. So almost by default (or maybe by blogging) I was branded (get it?) a planner. I was pretty damn happy because while some of the smartest and most generous people I'd met also happened to be planner/strategy types, the vast majority of them didn't fit the image that was being projected of the account planner. Regardless, I hoped I'd be able to absorb some of that collective and individual awesomeness by osmosis.

Imagine my surprise then, at the identity crisis and the need for validation that permeates through vast chunks of the strategic community with frightening regularity.

Brand, channel, engagement, immersion, emerging media, technology and many more that I can't remember. All these words are prefixes to strategy, to planner. And I believe all are wide of the mark. 

Then there are the plannery things that are to be done. Drink tea, wear a cardigan, buy suitably plannery glasses. Call yourself a geek, stare out the window, be disparaging in equal amounts about your useless account management and egotistical and petulant creatives. 

Read Stephen King, romanticize about how you would run the agency, obsess over the perfect proposition, make sure you remain 'strategically aloof' in meetings so your impeccable strategic nous cannot be questioned. Sit in your ivory tower with other planners and propagate rampant intellectualism. 

Use big words when smaller ones will do. Talk about doing powerpoint a hell of a lot.

Stop. being. a. douchebag.

We bemoan the fact that our clients are trapped in antiquated models of media and thinking, yet we restrict our own job descriptions with the same philosophy. 

The suits 'do', the planners 'think' and the creatives 'draw/write'. 

What if I want to think about something, sketch a crude solution, talk to the creatives and muck up a concept and present it to a client at the end of a weekly status? Is that cool? Will we, as individuals and a collective industry survive? WILL THE CLIENT BE OK WITH IT?!?

I had the pleasure of lunch with Paul Isakson just before Christmas last year and he said a ton of smart things, one of which I remember being:

 "I stopped caring about being a planner a long time ago". 

And then it struck me. The people who are the best at marketing strategy are the ones who really don't care about planning. They just solve problems.

It's something Eaon and I wrestled with at Geronimo while coming up with what we called an innovation brief. There's a real need to break out of this "Client must brief us before we can think about something" mentality that plagues the industry. If I was a client I'd be disgusted if the company I hired to solve my communication problems only thought about something when I told them to. In fact, if I didn't get proactive solutions from my agency, I'd fire them and hire somebody who would.

We figured out that essentially, our job was to identify business problems and then create solutions for said problems that were contextual, culturally relevant, rewarding and engaging for people. And then impress upon our clients the need for that solution. So that's how I define what I do. Job titles be damned.

The masses of poor quality work we see and the repeated marketing-related disasters that crop up in the trade rags weekly are in my opinion, more of an indictment of the strategic community than any other. Aren't we supposed to be the ones hired for our saber-sharp intellect? Because let's be honest, we're not here because we look good!

I think there are some broad areas that we can improve to be better (insert your choice of flavor here) strategists.

1. Understand the individual pressures of your colleagues' and clients' jobs and then impress upon them that you're not there to show them up intellectually, but to make them better at their jobs. You should want them to be valued, get promoted and to get recognized for their achievements just as much as you want those things for yourself. Measure what you do by what they are held accountable for. You'll never have an 'irrelevant' idea again.

2. Immerse yourself in humanity (it's the best phrase I could come up with). We aren't burdened by budgets or studio deadlines, so we should (as I believe was the point of planning in the first place) take time to read, watch, listen and understand everything about the world in which we live in. Not the office, not the post/zip code, not the city. But the world. What are people's cultural references? Why? 

The world has never really seen the mass migration that the past 2-3 generations experienced and there is no such thing as a homogenous culture (apart form perhaps some advertising agencies staff). Whether we like it or not, it's our job to know about Lost, Twilight, Microsoft's next operating system, Mass Effect 2, Avatar and High School Musical 3, American/Pop Idol, Big Brother, what Hugo Chavez is doing in Venezuela, Dan Brown, the resurgence of the fixie scene, the situation in Palestine, what our budget deficit is, house prices, what's on the front page of the Enquirer / Daily Mail, how factory strikes in China may constrain laptop production this year and so on and so on. 

Being a sponge means when it's time to distill our thinking down to that one perfect point, we have all the raw materials we need to make that point an absolutely bone-crunchingly "Boom" point.

3. Quickly move to a place where we begin to get uncomfortable again. Shake it up. Do what you haven't done. Defy convention. Break some rules. Ask for criticism. Ask to work on the most difficult piece of business in your company. Ask for forgiveness and not for permission. Inject some passion and lava back into our workplaces. Don't let the accountants win. Everyone knows a child who always asks "Why?" until you get to a point where you just say "That's how it is!!" and the kid shoots you a look where he knows you're trying to stop the conversation. Be that kid and never stop asking why.

4. Take interest in seeing things through to the end. And figure out how you can help. It's completely alien to me how someone could 'hand off' a brief and then see it next when something is presented to a client. Being well versed in all things tech is pretty damn crucial here, to help you stay ahead of the curve as well as help you get ideas to clients quicker, get approval quicker and get to market quicker. "But you'll step on creatives' toes!!" I hear some people saying. I'm not saying do their job, I'm saying help them do it better.

5. Don't constrain your and your company's ambitions by thinking only about client communications. Please, it's only been said a gajillion times. Make things and make things happen. And make it amazing.

There are more of course, and I'm probably off-target with a lot of what I've written, but that's the comments section and y'all are for :)

Let's make strategy awesome again.

Remembering Dr. King

Image courtesy of geoconklin2001 via Flickr

Today's Martin Luther King Jr. day. There's not a lot that needs to be said about the man, but if you want to read more, his Wikipedia page is a good place to start.

My absolute favorite quotes from the man are these two:

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy"

and

"The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be... The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists."

The Cheeseburger Approach to Media

Cheeseburgers are pretty damn awesome. Picture courtesy of roboppy via Flickr.

I started writing this post 6 weeks or so ago when the IAB joyfully announced than internet adspend had overtaken TV adspend for the first time in history, and am only happy with it now. So much for the immediacy of the interwebs.

Anyway, now that the self-appointed and anointed digerati have had their parties and patted themselves on the back, maybe we can come crashing back down to reality. 

And the reality is the majority of this adspend online is on search, which leads to another interesting point - people who work in the digital space have been crowing for some time how online isn't just 1 channel (it's a brazillion), yet when it suits them in the epic battle against the evil forces of above-the-line they fly the 1 channel banner while sticking their tongues out with all the grace of the 4 year old version of the guy typing these words throwing a tantrum in aisle 7 of a Toys-R-Us when he didn't get a He-Man sword.

This announcement, and the subsequent fanfare from parts of the advertising fraternity, seemed to be completely missing the point: The way we look at media and channels is totally broke.

If I went solely by my experiences with media agencies (particularly those who talk about people first and better results ), I'd be able to confidently say that they're primarily staffed by robots for whom analytical thought is impossible.

I don't say that lightly. I'm sure you'll all agree that seeing media 'plan' (in the loosest sense of the word) after media plan wheeled out with the same channels, the same 'strategy' and the same sense of enthusiasm gradually wears any benefit of the doubt down to finely ground dust. As an example, the aforementioned media agency this year has, for 5 different clients shown me the exact same media plan. For toothpaste, car insurance, shower gel, the same. Great planning.

Of course, I know that not all media agencies are the same. But I think the way we look at media doesn't reflect the way the people we try to connect with do. And that's the biggest indictment of the model that I can think of. I could add how every media plan I've seen basically is about buying the lowest cost media with the highest margin for the purchasing company, but I won't.

How do regular people divvy up media? Does the man on the street think "I need to check the Premier League scores, let me interact with the mobile channel" as he walks down the street? Does he find himself in front of a store window with the TVs showing Sky Sports and think "Oh, let me now direct my attention to the television medium"? Of course not. He, like pretty much every other person just wants to be able to get to whatever content he wants quickly, and preferably without being interrupted by banal mutterings about products he may or may not need.

Which leads to what I call my Cheeseburger theory of media (patent pending of course). When you sit down to eat a cheeseburger, everything that makes that burger (the bread, the cheese, the lettuce, the condiments, the meat and so on) is crucial in making the experience of eating that cheeseburger awesome. If the cheese is off, you could peel it off and throw it out, but then it's not a cheeseburger. If the condiments aren't to your taste, then you lose flava. And so on...

Rather than looking at media channels in isolation, we should consider what the cheeseburger for each brand should 'taste' like. And I believe that means ditching the way we consider channels and media for something that fits better. 

For example, I might watch Heroes on TV, on NBC.com, on my iPhone or on another streaming service like Hulu. It's still Heroes for me and it's in video. No matter where or when I watch it, it's video. I might listen to Radio 4 in the car, on an iPod Nano (or similar portable player) or as a podcast on my laptop, or on my phone. It's still whatever program I was listening to (let's call it File on 4, cause that's awesome). It's audio, whichever way you slice it. See where I'm going with this? 

I think it's time we slice our channels the way we take them in, it makes life a LOT easier. 

So we have: 

• Video 
• Pictures 
• Sound 

Simples right? I thought so too initially but then Eaon raised a valuable point about where we digest media - that and Charlie's "Context is King" thinking got me thinking again. We've got the what we process, but what about where?

When it comes to where content/media is digested (I refuse to use the word consumed in this post) there is a company's website, perhaps they have in-house media like a magazine, their social media presences and other media they own. So that's owned media. 

Then there's the media that's purchased, be it time on TV, the radio, or real estate online and so on. Paid media then. 

Finally, there's the form of media that makes marketing managers and communication folk the most nervous, but the type that people trust the most, other people. What people are saying about your product in reviews, on their own blogs, on YouTube, in forums and the litany of other personal places where people can express their feelings about a product, company or service. This is earned media. 

When I think of media, those 3 slices are the way I cut the pie up:

• Paid
• Owned
• Earned

So to make that a little bit easier for me to understand, I've very quickly mucked around and put all that into a picture

 

(At this point, I totally realize I've talked about Cheeseburgers and then come up with a weird picture that's definitely NOT a cheeseburger. I'm going to say that I'm under duress and leave it at that)

People who work in communications love to play lip service to 'integration' and the like, but in reality they're too busy trying to hoard their slice of the 'channel pie' to give a damn about how their idea fits with anyone else's. 

I can name employees of 5 so called creative agencies in London who in the past 12 months have looked at an idea from another agency (be it a PR, ambient, interactive or in-store concept) and said something like "That won't work with the TV". I'm considering naming and shaming, but hope that at some point, these organizations and employees cotton on that if they truly give a damn about their clients' businesses (rather than giving a damn about the fact that their invoices are paid up), they'll change the way they approach 'integration'. And maybe, they'll start taking the cheeseburger approach. Stranger things have happened, barely.

Filleting the Funnel: The Powah of Interactive

Digital advertising is dead. And agencies that tout their 'digital' credentials are deluded. I really hate the term digital. I actually think I detest it with the same passion that Nick Griffin hates people whose DNA unzipping didn't result in them looking 100% Caucasian. I hate it because it undervalues and plays down and puts into a box something that is unboxable. And I hate it because it has been taken for a ride by wanky ad agencies that have no clue what it means.

So digital as a silo like TV, like print, like direct mail, sucks. Digital as a silo is dead. It probably has been for a while. I mean think about it, really think about it - what does digital really mean? The wise folk of the world over at Wikipedia define digital (amongst other things) as the 1s and 0s that are everywhere, but never seen.

If we take that and run with it, is this digital?

Image courtesy of planetgordon.com via Flickr

How about this?

Picture courtesy of carla777

See where I'm going? Digital stuff is everywhere. It is, after all 2000 and frickin' 9. So this notion that you can put 'digital' into a department is nonsense. Agencies that have a discrete digital department need to wake up and smell the narcotics, because they are restricting themselves before getting to the starting line. 

It's this fundamental lack of understanding of how technology has changed the behavior of customers everywhere that trips up a large chunk of companies when they try to convert their siloed (can I say jurassic) creative processes into a seamless world. 

So for this reason along with others (the arrogance of the so-called brand guardians, the staggering sense of conformity that is nurtured in so many client-agency relationships and more...) I would take exception to Richard Huntington's claim that orthodox agencies have "got with the program when it comes to "digital". In many cases, self-proclaimed digital agencies haven't, with traditional agencies even further behind. 

How can I be so sure?

Because at their core, underneath all the extravagant and tantalizing models for integration that so many in the advertising business wax lyrical about, there remains the truth that the model we base the creative process on is archaic, flawed and in dire need of re-appraisal. 

I'm talking about the legendary communications funnel, that mysterious structure that no doubt sits in a locked vault in a secure room somewhere on Madison Avenue. It's wrong. And it's probably been out of date for a while, but I think in the last decade the disparity between how people behave and how the revered funnel states they behave has grown exponentially. So really it's up to us to try and evaluate where it's falling down, because you can bolt on whatever you like on a rotting foundation, eventually the whole damn thing will collapse. 

So let's begin.

Marketing 101 tells us that this is how communications works: 

You could argue that even when this model was proposed (sometime when Cyrus commanded the Persian empire), it didn't fully acknowledge the roles of what other people say and do play in an individual's decision-making process (something that we all would be wise to explore further by picking up my homeboy Mark Earls' book Herd and reading it multiple times).

If the assumption that this decision making process is hermetically sealed from other potential sources of input (friends, family, reading a review in the newspaper, seeing someone with it on the street.. etc) was contested before the advent of mass internet use, surely it is now safe to say that the model for making purchase decisions needs a total overhaul. And by extension the way in which we plan and organise communications needs to reflect the way in which a potential purchase decision is made.

The advent of the information age has, as well know brought an end to the corporate gravy train in many ways because as has been said many times before, it is now more important than ever that what you say in your communication equates to what you do. There are plenty of high-profile examples of what happens when this is not the case from United Airlines' painfully witless response to their breaking of Dave Carroll's guitar (which now ranks in the top 10 search results for a "United Airlines" Google search) to the whole Dominos pizza fiasco. And I think it's pretty safe to say that with the internet being increasingly in the palm of your hand (AdMob do an excellent monthly mobile internet metrics report which you should all check out if you don't already) and with everything from mobile phones to mp3 players being able to capture sound, photos and video; the amount of information that people can contribute and digest with regards to our clients' brands and products will only increase.

So what's my point? My point is that now, from the point of initial exposure to a piece of communication or the point of identifying a need/desire to purchase (i.e. the point where you flip the 'awareness switch' about a particular category/product/brand), a person's exposure to information has the potential to greatly increase with regards to whatever product he or she is now more acutely aware of. 

So if we were to talk about the stages of awareness, interest, evaluation and purchase in the context of how much information is sought to enable the decision making, perhaps the picture should be more like this: 

So, I'm saying that because of the vast amount of information we have at our disposal, and the ability for anyone to comment on their experiences with a brand/product/company, the inverted pyramid of the marketing funnel has to take into account the potential for a new injection of communication activity. 

Eaon talks about McKinsey and co labeling this stage as 'active evaluation'. The name is not really important, but the realization that this is occurring is crucial.

So to wind it back to the beginning of this ever-increasing ramble, I said that the majority of ad agencies and clients don't fully understand the power the information age has given us as practitioners and people as customers; instead having 'digital' penned in as a website, display advertising (which AdAge reminded us last week is a hugely flawed channel) and spunking a ton of cash on paid search. 

I'm not saying that we shouldn't build a website, shouldn't spend some money on SEM and so on, I'm saying that there needs to be an increase in creating content for people who are already coming into contact with your brand in a space where you're not saying anything. Review sites, Amazon, YouTube (now the 2nd largest search engine in the world, after it's daddy), app stores (from iTunes to Android to Ovi), the dreaded and loved at the same time social networks and so on are all places where whether you like it or not people are looking for what other people are saying about your company. 

But it should never stop there. There's a concept in almost every sport that the effectiveness of say a tennis shot, a quarterback's throw, a square cut and a litany of other moves depends on the the wind-up and the follow through. Without both the actual shot/throw/stroke are greatly diminished. The same can be said for effective communication. 

If you can't get on the shopping list, your work in creating ads is essentially useless. If you provide a less than memorable in-store/purchase/aftersales experience, you might get one sale, but you won't get another. And you definitely won't get recommended. Do that to enough people and someone will hammer you somewhere on the web. And if you're not creating content that is entertaining/useful/genuinely engaging then people who search for you will find that someone hammering you and the Google monster will start to pull that further up the rankings, to a place where even Mediacom won't be able to buy space.

So what do we do? I haven't done a list in a while, so now's as good a time as any:

1. Know your product, know your category intimately. What matters in that category, what features do people base their decisions on (note this is likely to be diametrically opposite to what you want them to base decisions on), what stops people from considering your product? Ask these questions.

2. Understand that people don't think or act in a linear fashion when it comes to making a purchase decision, they're constantly shopping around, looking for reviews, talking to store staff/friends/co-workers about their dilemma (I remember when I was working at Apple we found that on average, people would buy a mac after visiting the store 6 times!). 

3. Find where people are asking questions about your category, find the communities that already exist devoted to informing people about TVs, locking wheel nuts, Morris dancing shoes or the markings on Master Chief's helmet in Halo 3. They could be on a forum, on ICQ or at a periodic meetup in a dark alley somewhere. Wherever they are, become a valuable part of that community by offering advice, answering questions or addressing complaints. And please take the time to discover people who are already talking good about you and make them the heroes of your story, facilitate fandom and your fans will be your most effective marketing ever.

4. Lock down both point of sale and after-sales. Make sure your staff/retail partners are who you want them to be (it's tough but then no-one said this was easy), provide as many points as possible for people to complain about you and then respond to each and every one. I promise you, from personal experience, that when you're pissed off at a company and vent and then that company replies in a polite and timely manner, it is a million times harder to remain that angry at them.

5. Make it your business, and the business of your ad agency/ideas factory/whatever to intimately focus on the technology of tomorrow and today, how people use it, how their use changes and how their interactions with it provide you with opportunities to facilitate activity related to your clients' company (there's a great post about how agencies need to think like software companies that you should all read as well).

Until we do that, we won't get the age of interaction. No matter what type of agency we work at, no matter what we say on our agency websites, in our client meetings, or on our blogs. It's simple. 

So really digital is dead, the funnel is actually an hourglass and it's time to get our interactive on. Boom.

As a sort of postscript, I found this cartoon over on Le'Nise's blog (via Something Changed), about converting awareness into a sale, it kind of illustrates my point - I think...

You can't turn Chicken Shit into Chicken Salad

 Picture courtesy of swanksalot

"We're of the opinion that it's best to not get involved in any kind of online conversation because that way if someone misuses our product, we can't be held responsible"

These wise words were uttered yesterday by a marketing employee of a worldwide company (with annual profits in the billions that is listed on both the London and New York stock exchanges) as justification for not having any presence or stimulating any conversation (beyond brochureware) on the web. This is what happens when chicken-shit lawyers rule the roost.

This is aside from the fact that if you MAKE something that is misused you're often held responsible.

Kind of proves the point that has been made countless times that companies that get shit work for their advertising agencies usually deserve it.

The Only Choice

Fork in the road, image courtesy of i_yudai

I think it's safe to say that recent events such as JWT shutting its Chicago office and the very quiet breakup of Enfantico (in stark contrast to the pomp that greeted the birth of the agency of the future) should only serve as further warning to advertising agencies and indeed marketeers that those who continue to put their fingers in their proverbial ears about the changes in our business do so at their peril.

Gareth has very neatly drawn a spot-on comparison between the changes taking place in the music industry and how we in the communications business are faced with quite a simple choice - perhaps one that some of us have already taken, but still a choice that needs to be revisited with every piece of work that we put our name to.

What do you want to do?

In my mind there are really only two answers to the question, and the answer you take will essentially decide how you and your company, your clients and co-workers will fare in today's world. 

Do you want to make money and beat the dying horse or do you want to make a difference in peoples' lives? 

One will lead to other but one will lead to bland, boring communications that will continue the cycle of pitch, relax, ignore, lose business and re-pitch that so many agencies are stuck in. 

Now we all know this isn't 300, The Last Samurai or Braveheart - we're not doctors, we're the scum of the earth, perhaps part of the most distrusted business in the world. But I still mean make a difference, be a positive force of change. And it doesn't have to be a huge difference, but something that makes the experience truly differentiating and tangible.

Frankly I'm tired of looking at proposals that have USPs galore that would look just as valid if they were produced by companies x, y or z. To steal a line from Hugh Macleod and repurpose it, it doesn't matter what your product does, or more importantly what you say it does - what matters is what people do with it. And what they do with it is where we, as marketers in an amazingly interesting time can channel and play a part in.

There are countless examples of products which were meticulously researched by bored focus groups eager to grab their money and run, painstakingly targeted to a perfectly segmented consumer and in the end the people who most eagerly partook in the purchasing of said product were completely different, if not diametrically opposite to the unholy target group. TGI or no TGI, products like the INQ phone, the entire SUV segment and some would argue even Viagra didn't end up as the companies that make them planned. They were embraced by people with specific interests. And I think that to disregard these communities of purpose and solely turn to often outdated and flawed data is a classic recipe for failure. Our focus should be on finding people who give a shit about something that we can tie to our product and then give them something that makes their day to day life more entertaining, more useful, more meaningful. And then telling them about it.

Some might say it's simple, or common sense. And it is. But it's not being done. And that's fact. Work is getting worse, we cling to our gems of effectiveness (whatever that really means) amidst increasing piles of work that is churned out and logo-swappable (take the logo away and put a competitor's logo on, can you really tell the difference?). Or we blame clients, as if years of being yes men and women has nothing to do with it. One of the most liberating things for me coming into this business was being told that it was my job to do what was best for my clients, not necessarily what they wanted - mediocrity has crept its way into the grand majority of our organizations, mine is no different. And really the only way out of it is to drag our organizations out of this cycle by doing it ourselves. I've given myself until the end of this year to prove to myself that I can do it - otherwise it's just noise. 

Ways of working may be too ingrained in many people to change immediately, what do you then? I'm pretty sure that this isn't the right way, but this is how I'm trying it now:

1) Take cookie cutter work and throw it out: If any client briefs come in that contains words such as 'generic' or 'based on' - throw them out. And give them an alternative that works. Make sure it works :)

2) Do something small for a client, maybe something they're scared of doing - something they said they wouldn't do. Do it without asking, don't tell anyone and if it works tell them, if it doesn't, no-one will know anything.

3) Have no ego. Please, please, please, forget the importance of job titles, of how much you make, of and awards. Industry-wide circle jerking may have its place, but is now the place for it? If you do truly great, truly paradigm shifting work then they will come. Oh and if your agency is in the habit of doing scam work, punch whoever is responsible in the mouth (Take note Y&R India and FP7 Doha). 

4) You have to understand how your company makes money. There is a school of thought that silos every department, allowing them to work supposedly more efficiently - I don't think that you can claim to address anyone's business problems if you don't know how your business makes money and the problems it faces in doing so. For example if your agency has a yearly lease of £4,000,000 there are some serious decisions you need to make about how feasible it is that you can ever be more than just a "doing it for the money" outfit. 

5) Never disregard the experience you have at your disposal. I love the phrase "The old cannot kill the young forever", but it doesn't apply here. To say that I, with 2 years of marketing experience (barely) can solve my clients' communication dilemmas flying solo is ludicrous and hugely debased, you take the good from everyone. Don't burn the building because you don't like one room. 

6) It's in everyone's interests for everyone to do great work. This one is obvious, but I'm still astounded at the insecurity-driven crap from some people pointing out the failings of agency x or y. It's a little callous to rejoice in the demise of any agency. I would love to see a so-called traditional agency really grab the bull by the horns and create paradigm shifting work, because it will start convincing the masses of "me-toos" in adland to try the same. Just as the abstract and pointless dribble of bad work is bad for us, work that makes lives more meaningful is good for all of us.

7) Change the way you acquire new business. This is a separate post in itself (one I probably won't get round to) but there are so many holes in the proverbial vessel of new business that it's unreal we still pursue this as the only method for getting new clients. Find a new way. And tell us all!

8) Remember the power of 1%, do something small, but do it everytime and it will become a beast.

9) Volunteer, volunteer, volunteer. Maybe as someone quite new to the comms business this is easier for me, but any opportunity to showcase your thinking and to add some flava to work should be embraced wholeheartedly. This does a few things: it shows you're not all bluff and no stuff (you have to back the talk up with the goods) and it will win you the respect of your peers, something that is vital in fighting mediocrity. 

10) Ask yourself if you want to make money or to make a difference in peoples' lives. As Paul says, the future of marketing is doing something for people. If you're not prepared to embrace that, not only are you making the wrong choice, but it would probably be better if you find another way to make a living - chances are you may not have a job in advertising for a lot longer. 

And why would you be in advertising for the money anyway? The pay sucks!

The Right Tools, Today

Anybody? Pic from my Flickr

Wow. It's been a while since I got my International Smoothie on. Quite a bit has gone down, Marcus gave a scintillating performance at the Market Porter(for which I still have to do a wrap-up post with how much we raised, I know, I'm garbage), I had a week in Bangkok that went by way to fast (and must give thanks to Charlie for his hospitality and general awesomeness) and in the midst of all of that I somehow managed to cheat a bunch of really great people out of Neil's Thinktank Post of the Month (something I'm still a little suprised at, I was in the air for most of the voting, who voted for me? I owe you all a beverage).

Gratuitous logo use baby.

I also must write about my fantastic experience with Jet Airways on the way and back from Thailand, I'm the first to yell when I have a bad experience with a company so I must commend Jet for the immense brand blowjob I was on the receiving end of. There's also the matter of the jay-oh-bee, where I feel like the awesomeness is growing daily, mainly due to the boss keeping me on track and showing a young blood how it's done.

But all of that will have to wait because I've been meaning to post about this for a while, and now is the damn time.

So SXSW has come and gone for another 12 months, and while there was the expected taking over of the Twitter trending lists (which as Faris points out is just another indicator that in spite of the Ashton Kutchers and Shaq Diesels of the Twitterverse, Twitter is still very much a niche tool used in a large part by a group of people with surprisingly similar interests), I didn't really feel like anything BOOM came out of it this year, perhaps because I was in Thailand at the time, or perhaps that's my own rationalization for not going this year.

In many ways it's irrelevant whether something bombastically game-changing came out of SXSW this year because I think that would be missing the point if we're sitting waiting for superman to fly in and deliver something that will solve our problems. Because we have everything we need now. There's a point at which the talking about new methods of communication has to stop and delivering the positive change to people will have to begin or we'll all be collectively branded as having "all bluff and no stuff". I think that point is here. Today.

I wrote earlier about how I think social media as a tool has it all to prove this year. That's really just a polite way of saying the finger is pointed at all of us who have been raving about things like Twitter, the power of collective good and the ability of companies to exact small positive changes amongst the people who buy their products as well as turn in some kind of profit.

I've heard some complaints about how clients and colleagues don't get it. How it's so hard to get through to them and all the rest of it. We all do it, but frankly this bitching is embarrassing, if the sum of this is keyboard warrior-ism, we should quit now and write wanky op-ed pieces for the Daily Mail. It's our job to be the change, and as Neil points out to remember that it can be a twisting long road. Sometimes it may feel like you're giving more than you're getting, but if you believe in what you're doing, it will eventually be worth it.

Let's face it: budgets will be small (don't we keep saying that doing good stuff is scalable? Let's prove it), people will be skeptical (internally and externally) and it will be a scrap pretty much everyday. But it will separate that talkers from the walkers, it will filter out those who thinks it's cool to be a little different but when push comes to shove they resort to comfortable mediocrity and most of all, there will be a point when we ask (or are asked) why we we're doing it.

Because we have no choice. I really believe that. Now I'm not saying that a particular medium is dead or anything like that, everything is a tool and every tool has a place. I'm saying the model is changing, the way in which we approach the communications business is changing and we need to prove to ourselves that it will work. That we can make marketing a product into something that's good for the company by being good for the people.

We have everything we need now, we have the broadband penetration, the communities of purpose, the booming smartphone market, the amazing collective knowledge to draw upon and the clients who are becoming increasingly desperate in tumultous economic waters. The man/woman in the mirror is the missing piece. It's that simple.

Why is it that simple? How do I know we have the tools we need now? It was this simple press ad that started this whole post for me:

It needs to be pointed out that the agency that made this ad isn't based in New York, London, Chicago, Portland, San Fran, Paris or Sydney or wherever is the next creative hotspot. And yet the message they've come up with gives a financial incentive to begin to address an environmental problem and start a shift in behavior that's for the good of all. For me that's creativity; making a grave issue addressable in a compelling and human way.

I can say that hand on heart because I feel like at work every week there's a little victory, there's another change that is for the better. It's a little Al Pacino from Any Given Sunday-like, maybe I'm a fool, maybe I've got a complex about believing that making life a tiny bit better for people is the key to successful business because I'm the only one in my family who's not a doctor. But that's the way I look at it, as a competition against myself to prove that I can change the way people view marketing. And I know there are plenty of others out there working for the same thing:



So here's what I want to do. I want to do a meetup in December, an unconference, a meeting of awesome, whatever, where people do short and sharp presentations of how this year, they did some of the most amazing and worthwhile work in their careers. How they had to deal with shit from every corner but in the end it was worth it. In the end it made someone's life a little more pleasant.

It's been said that being boring and mediocre is become harder and harder. We have the tools to make it so uncomfortable that those that want to have to change or just go home. So I'll see you all in London in December. And you can tell everyone how you did it, how you were one of the first and why it felt so fucking cool to be a part of something awesome.

I'd hate to think that the summation of everything social media is raising money for charity and having Cwoffee on Fridays. They are both great and worthwhile things, but I know there's so much more we can achieve. With the tools we have today.

The Wrong Questions

Picture via The B@man

An oft-quoted but still understated benefit of being someone getting to grips with working life in the midst of the (often ridiculed) blogosphere is the enormous amount of wisdom that is out there. To be able to work with, befriend, listen to and read the work of amazing people everyday is something that many of us take for granted but remains an enormous privilege and benefit of the fantastic times we live in.

To that end, I must give thanks to (in no particular order) Mark, Hugh, Lloyd, Johnnie, Neil, George, Doddsy, Charlie, Paul and Eaon for their individual and in the end collective inspirations (along with the many many others that sit in the blogroll - I read them all and so should y'all) that have got me to this point, where at 3am on a Wednesday morning I'm grinning like an idiot and unable to sleep. So I blog...

Since starting in the big bag world of advertising (full-time at least) the phrases 'context is everything' and 'everything changes' have been two of the staples that I fall back on. Not just in the advertising framework, but the life framework. We spend so much time at work that trying to break it down from the time when you're 'living' is a futile exercise; either you're living all day everyday or you're dead at work. In which case you really should find some other way to earn your daily bread. Because life is, as we're so often reminded, never as long as we think.

Back to these fantastic times then. Words like convergence, utility, passion and downturn are thrown around, remixed and spat out as if this journey that we're all was either mapped out by some people a hundred years ago and we're just passing checkpoints or we're somehow in a vacuum that means we can ride out the storm without so much as a drop of water on our collective communication industry anoraks. No.

Not a single soul planned for this contingency (where are all the trends and forecasting people now? I haven't heard a single word from them on the collapse of capitalism - either in the form of a prediction or an attempt at the beginnings of a solution) and we can't huddle in our ghettos of Madison Avenue and London's West End waiting for the storm to pass. It's not a storm, it's not a story, it's something we'll all have to adapt to. It's change. And whether you believe in it or not is irrelevant. Because it's here, having crashed through our front doors and it's now sitting in our front rooms, waiting for us to acknowledge its presence.

The fantastic thing about this situation is that no-one knows what's going to happen. Isn't that amazing? We can hypothesize that issuing bonds and throwing more cash a wound that cash caused will only help to salve the wound long enough to surprise us when things crash again - but we don't know. We can say we're going to move towards a simpler way of living and exchanging goods for services - but we don't know. The point is to put ourselves, as self-proclaimed creative businesspeople in a position to shape, learn and be involved in the debate as it unfolds. In that light I find the We20 happenings fascinating and look forward to the great minds that will be present when these meetings begin.

So we know change is coming, how does that affect us in our ivory communications towers? In the last week or so I've been asked to comment on recent comms work for Sony and Toyota - in both instances I've been told that it's great work, or a technological tour de force. Before I had a look at both pieces, I did a quick search for how these companies are performing - because of course at the root of it all, effective communication will solve business problems. I found that Sony's net profit fell 95% in year on year terms and Toyota is widely rumored to be slipping into its first net loss since 1950. Read that last sentence again, these are things you hear about when wars happen, not when downturns occur. Within this context, I find it hard to think about how the cost and effort of organising and producing an ad is at all relevant to how help a slumping consumer electronics giant - or how being able to move your hand in front of a webcam to simulate a test drive is going to convince me, or anyone else in fact to spend money on a new car. It's the advertising equivalent of "mine's bigger than yours". These things may well have their place, but I'll venture a guess that today, these are not the ideal points of focus. When I mentioned this, I was told that it was great work, and great work would always have a place - no matter the economic conditions.

My reply to this was two-fold, this may not just be a condition, it may be a transformation - a paradigm shift if you will and the questions we ask ourselves in the definition of 'great' work may be incorrect. Great work is contextual, in terms of the product, service, market, political landscape and socioeconomic climate. That's what makes it great. That what shows passion. To have the drive to sweat out the small stuff and build upon a solid foundation of knowledge of the world that distills into knowledge of a particular product/service area. Like genius, passion is perspiration followed by inspiration. Every pound/dollar/euro (they're almost worth the same now so I can probably get away with grouping them together) that is spent on marketing is a luxury so we must think and then think again as to how to make it have a lasting positive effect on the company/product/service we are pimping. Not how to get a creative hard-on when we roll statistics of how epic the production was, or how we used a never thought of visual effect to deliver something sexy. Note I'm not saying bells and whistles are superflous. I'm saying if we make them the centerpiece then it's a waste of money. Eaon calls it making every action a service positive interaction - I'm personally not so comfortable with all those syllables but the point remains. Move your brand/product/service forward with everything you do - from a customer's point of view. In the context of our world today.

At NESTA yesterday Peter Bazalgette made an excellent point that sometimes needs repeating more often, particular in hallowed halls of advertising agencies/idea companies/whatever.

"The truth is that not a single media company knows what its model will be in ten year's time"

Again, no-one knows. But they know it's changing. So rather than clinging to the edifices of a brilliant past, ask yourself how will I make the future awesome?

This leads me to my next point on passion and positivity. The words are bandied about all the time. But this is the time when passion will really show. So shut up and show it. Don't talk about it. Live it. Some social media luminaries proclaimed that it's easier to be positive and deluded because dealing with bs is something people can't face up to. Lord Carter yesterday then quite astutely pointed out that "being a pessimist is a national activity". Again I thought some people are just asking the wrong questions.

Yes the world's climate is screwed, the global economy is trashed and wars are ravaging innocent people everywhere. If you can't deal with reality then go to a corner and deal with it. I've said time and time again and it's reinforced even more often by the great people around me that this is an opportunity to exact change. To make something a little better. That makes my juices flow (liquid metaphor placed for Eaon and Neal at Geronimo) more than a Cannes Lion or an invite an awards show will ever do. If you're asking someone why they would even attempt to help make a change then get out of the way and let someone who's asking how they can help show up.

Kd tweeted out a quote that is much more eloquent about it then I could ever be:

"Pessimism is a luxury of good times...In difficult times, pessimism is a self-fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence" - Evelin Linder

Or as I like to put it: Fuck off and smile.

And it's dawned on me that my last point in all this fits rather nicely. And that's about the awesomeness of those you hang your hat with. I was on my way home and fired up Twitter when the dude next to me pointed to an article he was reading about how the existence of Tweetdeck on my laptop was a clear indicator to a huge lack of self-esteem and a cavernous hole in my soul that was probably down to playing videogames and watching WWF (it was called that back in the day). Aside from the irony of people sitting in designer clothes chastising you about your lack of self-worth, it's not about Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or anything.

It's the people.

The people. The community. The homies. The posse. The whatever word you use to talk about people. I find it hard to start defending my use/lack of use of Twitter or any other tool because the mechanism has very little to do with the motive. It's the people. Those who lay into Twitter/Brightkite/whatever might not understand the point. The point isn't to tell people what you're doing. The point is to learn from others, to push yourself forward and take whatever you can with you. If you don't like it then don't be on it. Everyone finds something that works for them. Do that. But if someone finds meaning in something you don't please don't become a hater. But if you find yourself in the midst of haters, let them hate. It's their job.

So, everyday we should ask ourselves:
How can I be better at what I do in light of what I see around me today?
How can I make the best of myself in these amazing times in preparation for whatever may come?
How can I learn from those better than me?

In spite of our self-appointed grandeur and majesty as custodians of this planet, we still cannot choose when change comes - only how we will react when it does. We haven't been getting a lot of good answers. Maybe we just need to ask better questions.

The Power of 1%

I doodled without thinking. And for once it wasn't utter nonsense. Almost.

In the mess of personal brands, social mediaphilia, and the rise of the web 2.0 douchebag - those of us in the comms industry all still have a job to do. And I was reminded of this over the last coupe of days by a combination of my own doodling, Charlie's DMs, Johnnie's excellent blog post, Kedar's tweet, the fallout of what seems to have been a diabolical attempt by the IPA to organise a forum to debate where the industry is headed and a segueway into Taoist Buddhism with Eaon.

There is a propensity to sit back and lay into the way things have been done, be it media agencies and their 'cost-effective' purchasing of media space, traditional advertising agencies and their 'stick it on Facebook' mentality or digital agencies and their 'TV died a while back, anyone who doesn't believe it is a dinosaur' evangelism. The list of things that aren't working is as long as it is broad, with even now former leader of the United States featuring prominently on many selections. We blame smaller budgets, smaller days and countless other people and things for why we can't get stuff done.

As practitioners of awesomeness, frustration can set in at the way things are being done, and if left unchecked can eventually lead to a negative mindset that is poisonous, first within ourselves before eventually spreading to everything we come into contact with. If you feel that you're the only one fighting a battle, eventually you get sick and tired of everyone else not doing anything and eventually give up. For that reason and many others, it's now more important than ever to re-appraise the way we affect our work environment.

And because I love lists, here are some thoughts.

1) Keep Churning
Wikipedia tells us that we live in the Information Age so let's get hunting baby. Mark only reinforced to me yesterday the unfortunate blog circle jerking that we can fall prey to if we read the same people's thoughts all the time. The same stuff circulates in our brain and our writing becomes self-referential and utterly dry.
Like water, we gots to keep running to stay fresh. We need new ideas, new points of view, new interesting stuff to stimulate us more, play devil's advocate to the way we think and push us further. Do a Twitter search of something you're interested in/topical and get down with whoever's discussing that subject. Switching commutification methods from stinky cramped train to airy and slower bus has finally allowed me to get my podcasts on as well, which has been awesome - subscribe to my boy Clarence as a start for something that's an original flavor formation (that's his term - but it's awesome, so I'll use it just this once). It's great to stop staring at a screen, sit back and zone while someone lays out their point of view.

2) Find the Gems
There are some kung-fu crazy people out there who are just as frustrated as you with the way things are going, we need to find them and learn from them and grow together. Last night I left work with a dude who I'd talked to only a couple of times and after we went our separate ways 15 minutes later I knew that there is so much I can learn from him, and I had no idea of it at all. Pockets of awesome people are everywhere, it's up to us find them and get better.

3) Be a Real Person
Charlie told me a while back that making people fall in love with you (so to speak) is the most important thing about the world of work. I totally agree. For someone to go to war with you, they have to want to do it because of you as a person. On your worst days, be as you as you are on your best, it's never easy but nothing worthwhile ever is.

4) Remember the Power of 1%
Not every idea is going to make it, it's sad and unfortunate but it's life. We have to stop sulking, get over it and remember that moving ourselves, our colleagues, our clients or our organizations along even 1% is winning. If we keep winning day by day, we'll break through whatever is holding us back from where we want to be.

5) Be the Change
It's cheesy to say it, but again it's true. There are so few people who will suck it all up and stick their neck out for the sake of doing something they believe is amazing. Call it leadership, charisma, the Obama gene or whatever you feel like calling it, but that is the quality that will let you put everything together and be brave enough to challenge the status quo that has been proved to be leading us down the wrong road. We all need to brave enough to walk the talk.

Mr B. Hussein Obama said something during his inauguration that we should all take heed of

"People will judge you on what you can build, not what you can destroy"

So let's be the solution. And remember, fortune favors the awesome.