March 11 - Digital?

As we start to tick off the months of 2011, I’d like to call for a moratorium on the term digital agency. More specifically, the often bandied around term “pure play” digital agency.

Surely, in an age where even television is broadcast digitally, the idea of digital as an area of speciality is rapidly becoming redundant?

Many of the campaigns I have worked on recently, none of which I would consider to be especially digital, would have been possible without digital.

Digital, and more specifically the internet, are neither channels nor media these days. They are, I believe, idea facilitators.

They enable an idea to be broadcast or narrowcast, shared one to one or one to many and also to engage and invite people to contribute to it.

Digital also helps brands collect data. And data, as any good direct marketer will tell you, should never be considered an expense but a bargain.

So if all the above (and so much more) is possible because of digital, why oh why are there still people out there talking about being digital?

It’s surely the 21st century equivalent of calling your agency a television specialist?

In a recent post on the Weiden & Kennedy London blog, Neil Christie coined the term Post Digital. A very interesting piece of terminology I think.

“Digital is not a channel,” wrote Christie, “it’s the context in which everything lives.” He backed up his statement with this;

“Declaring in an article in Wired way back in 1998 that the digital revolution was over Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT Media Lab, observed that, ‘Like air and drinking water, being digital will be noticed only by its absence, not its presence.’
Today we are breathing Negroponte’s post-digital air: pretty much all media are now digital. People can watch TV shows on their laptops, read newspapers on their phones, absorb video content from poster sites, read e-books on their Kindles and get the news from Twitter.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

What makes Neil Christie’s opinion even more pertinent is the fact that Weiden & Kennedy are widely recognised for their digital work.

Their much talked about Chalkbot campaign for Nike took out the Cyber Grand Prix at the most recent Cannes Lions. And their Old Spice Man campaign is already the stuff of digital legend.

“We've reached a tipping point,” says Christie, “where the tech and the audience have reached a level of maturity where digital is everyday and normal.

Now, what agencies and marketers need to understand is how people behave in relation to content, community, technology and media. This isn't easy because it's evolving rapidly and constantly.”

And because, as Neil Christie says, digital is still evolving, those who still cling to the term pure play digital seem to believe that they are the only people who are capable of navigating the hitherto uncharted waters of next generation digital.

In his blog post, Neil Christies argues that in the past, “Digital agencies had the technical knowledge, and the traditional agencies had the big, emotional ideas.”

Of course those from the pure play digital area would probably make that statement somewhat differently. They’d argue that traditional agencies were just that – traditional.

They’re not. Haven’t been for a while. In fact I wrote about this very topic in this column a couple of issues ago.

So if digital is dead and post digital is the future, what kind of agency do marketers need to help them in this constantly evolving new world?

Neli Christie has the answer.

“Not ‘digital’ agencies. Not ‘creative’ agencies. Not networks or boutiques or platform-agnostic transmedia nodes.

Just smart people who get it and who care about doing great work that makes a difference, regardless of medium.”

The only problem that marketers will have, is finding such an agency.

STOP BY AND VISIT

W&K London Blog

Jan 11 - Books & Browsing

I’ve been wanting to write something about the iPad for some time now, but figured I’d wait until the dust settled on its much hyped launch before doing so.

There’s been plenty of blog coverage on Apple’s tablet device, both good and bad, but I won’t bore you with the obvious.

Anyway, last weekend my wife and I were enjoying a sunny Sunday afternoon in South Melbourne. It was her turn to choose the book for her bookclub, so we went into a bookshop.

As is often the case, she couldn’t decide between several of the books that had caught her eye. So she spoke to the lady behind the counter, who was very happy to help her.

The shop assistant’s help was, I believe, an excellent example of customer service. But more than that, this was a person with a genuine love for the product she sold.

Suffice to say, my wife walked out the shop with not one, but three books.

Meanwhile I took some photos of the store, as I felt it had a wonderful ambience, which I shared on Twitter.

You’re probably wondering by now what on earth all this has to do with the iPad. Very little to be honest, but my experience in that bookshop was very reminiscent of the teenage years I spent in record shops.

And record shops, as I’m sure you’re aware, are disappearing rapidly, mostly as a result of the internet, which has made music as easy to get as a couple of mouse clicks.

Much of the talk about the iPad has centred around it doing to magazines and books what the iPod and MP3 did to CDs and records.

I for one hope it doesn’t.

The demise of physical reading material may well eventuate, but I think it will take a lot longer than music. Basically because of pricing.

When you buy an album from iTunes, it costs less than a CD does, because there is no CD or CD packaging involved in the cost.

The price of a book is, give or take a dollar or two, roughly the same as a digital version. Which is fine if all you want is a book to read. But in my experience there’s so much more to books than reading.

Which makes me think that books will follow the lead of the music industry and offer well priced digital versions or more expensive collectors or special editions.

When it comes to magazines however, things get a little trickier.

Many publishers are creating magazine applications for the iPad. These generally feature extra content, video, access to lots more photos and more.

As you can imagine, this doesn’t come cheap.

Writing on his blog, David Hepworth from The Word, a UK based magazine, said,
“Every magazine publisher at the moment is faced by a new problem, do you or do you not invest in a version of your magazine for the iPad?”

His favourite magazine, The New Yorker, has recently launched an iPad application.

“They're inviting subscribers like me,” said Hepworth, “to pay another $5 a week to get a version of the magazine for a tablet. I don't think I'm the only one who thinks that's a bit much.”

If my experience with the iPad app of a well known magazine is anything to go by, I’d say Hepworth is definitely on to something.

The app I downloaded cost $8, which I thought was good value. But if I buy it every month, then it will end up costing me close to $100 a year. Not to mention the impact on my broadband usage, as the app is around 600mb in size.

The print magazine however is available on a one year subscription, delivered to my door for around half the cost of the iPad version.

Once publishers solve that problem, I suspect print copies of magazines will diminish. As for books, guess we’ll have to wait and see.

GO VISIT

David Hepworth

Nov 10 - Dinosaurs roar

Over the last few years what started as a whisper has gradually turned into a social media enhanced roar – the advertising agency is a dinosaur and it’s on its last legs!

I do believe I may even have said it myself once or twice. But is it really the case?

Many of the ad agency doubters are people who are not from what have come to be called “traditional” agencies. And the fact that they bandy about the term traditional says a great deal I think.

Why? Because there is nothing traditional about an agency in 2010.

Actually that’s not completely true. There are many procedures and processes that have been used for years that work and work well. But when it comes to creative thinking and problem solving there really is no such thing as a traditional approach.

The idea of making a 30 second television ad may be traditional, but the answer to that brief is sure to be anything but. And that I think is where the naysayers and doubters of agency land come unstuck.

Agencies are in the ideas business. End of story.

Sometimes those ideas appear in what is known as traditional media, sometimes not. The primary focus is, and always should be, the best way to reach a consumer. This should be dictated by the consumer themselves, not the agency.

So if a 28 to 35 year old woman loves watching Junior Masterchef, and your product or service is targeted at that consumer group, then the creation of a TV spot to run during the show is a must have. That’s not traditional. That’s common sense.

But what about digital, cry the naysayers. Wouldn’t it be smarter to target her using digital media? What about a Facebook group or some sort of social media presence?

Well guess what – so called traditional agencies do that stuff too.

Maybe 10 years ago they didn’t. In fact, they probably weren’t doing it 5 years ago either. But these days, any agency that’s looking to survive into the 21st century offers a hell of a lot more than a corridor of hip young things pumping out television ads.

A couple of months ago I sat on the direct marketing jury for the MADC Awards. The category was dominated by what we used to refer to as mainstream agencies.

And according to one of my art directors at Wunderman, the same thing happened when he judged at this year’s ADMA Awards.

Which is proof, if proof is what the naysayers need, that the big agencies are perhaps a little more relevant than the people taking pot shots at them may realise.

Of course they’re still making great TV ads, they probably always will, but there’s so much more to a “traditional” agency than that. As well as moving into the direct marketing space, the big guys are making serious inroads into digital as well.

Don’t believe me?

Well it was Australia’s oldest agency that won the pitch earlier this year for this country’s biggest piece of digital business. And they did it in conjunction with a 50 year old direct marketing agency.

Yet the doubters and naysayers, with their blogs and twitter accounts, continue to proclaim the impending extinction of agency dinosaurs.

To be completely honest, I have no idea what the future holds for advertising agencies. But unlike the dinosaurs way back when, I very much doubt that they will become extinct.

In fact, I suspect they will continue to evolve, just as the landscape in which they operate does.

So much so that 50 years from now, people will look back and wonder how on earth anyone could have come up with the term traditional agency.

Bernbach broke tradition. So too did David Ogilvy and Lester Wunderman. May the agencies they created continue to do so.

October 10 - No advertising

Not long after the dust had settled on yet another year of over-hyped self-congratulatory advertising industry back patting at Cannes, a much more interesting awards related story began doing the rounds of the blogosphere.

Esteemed US adman Alex Bogusky wrote a post on his blog petitioning for a new type of award, to be given to companies who manage to do something good without having to resort to advertising.

Chatter around Bogusky’s post was all over Twitter when it first dropped, leading to a misconception that what he actually wanted was a new non-advertising award. Which is anything but what he was arguing for.

It does however show that social media channels often fall victim to Chinese whispers.

In actual fact, Bogusky’s post was written to raise awareness of advertising to children and the ethics and responsibilities thereof. In his own words, he wanted an award to recognise “Brands that have decided to take into consideration all the potential effects of their marketing and have built a plan that carefully avoids abusing the power of advertising.”

Now that’s a pretty lofty goal, I think you’ll agree. Sadly though, I think it got lost in some sort of an “OMG! Bogusky wants a non-advertising award” haze on Twitter.

Luckily for me, I clicked on one of the dozens of retweets and mentions of Bogusky original post and found myself printing out his blog post so I could read it over the weekend.

Away from the hysteria of social media. Bogusky’s post laid out a calm considered argument against advertising to children. And that was pretty much it.

As the policeman at an accident would say, nothing much to see here. Move on.

But then I got to thinking.

Doesn’t Bogusky’s agency have Burger King as a client? Yes. And hasn’t his agency produced several X-Box computer game tie-ins with Burger King? Yes again.

So now, not only was the blog post nothing like what I expected it to be about. Nor was the man who wrote it.

Bogusky is one of the superstars of modern American advertising. So why would he write something, in the style of a manifesto, which decried the use of advertising, in an area his agency had very obviously benefited from?

So I put aside the printout and did a bit of digging online.

It didn’t take me long to find out that Bogusky’s agency had chosen several years ago not to handle any advertising of Burger King products to kids under twelve. I also found out that the man in question had recently resigned from his own agency.

After a lifetime in advertising, Bogusky had seen the good it had done, for companies, for economies and for his bank balance. But he could also see how much power advertising wielded.

His aim now, as he moves into the next stage of his obviously stellar career, is to get the industry to monitor some of that power.

Self-policing, if you will.

In his own words, “What if we decided that advertising to children was something none of us would engage in anymore?”

Now I’m not sure about you, but if he manages to pull something like this off, Bogusky could well become adland’s answer to Jamie Oliver.

Which as anyone with an opinion on advertising will tell you, is the last thing they ever expected from the man most of us industry observers considered to be the consummate adman.

READ IT YOURSELF

Click here to read Bogusky’s blog post in its entirety.

August 10 - Private stuff

A couple of weeks ago I got an email advising me to update my status on the Do Not Call register. Like most Australians, I hate it when telemarketers ring me. Especially when it sounds like they are ringing from another country!

So as you can imagine, I did not hesitate in clicking on the link in the email and updating my status. Which should ensure that my wife and I get to make dinner in peace for the next couple of years.

We were discussing the Do Not Call register in the office the next day while working on a creative brief. The brief in question involved finding a way to combat door-knockers.

Of course my immediate reaction was to exclaim, “How about a do not knock register?”

This garnered quite a laugh, but I was in fact being deadly serious. To me, door-knockers are just as intrusive as telemarketers.

In fact, considering the way they work and the type of households they target, I suspect door-knockers may actually be worse.

Anyway, before I go off on a crazed door knocking tangent, I’d like to talk about the issue of privacy and some of the benefits of being open to not being overly precious about privacy.

Privacy, as we’ve seen with the many debates around Facebook, is a hot topic right now. But is it an issue for everyone?

I recently signed up to do the Around The Bay in a Day bicycle race in Melbourne. To help me monitor my progress whilst I’m in training I downloaded an app for my iPhone called Runkeeper.

Apart from the fact that it’s free, and has many ingenious features, one of the best things about Runkeeper is it allows me to share my training regime on Facebook.

Sounds good huh? But in order to enable Runkeeper to do this, I need to allow it to share my personal information with Facebook.

Now of course I could easily decide not to do this, but I find that sharing my training progress and cycling routes online is far more motivating than keeping it to myself. It’s also highly motivating when friends comment and offer messages of support.

So as you can see, being open to sharing some of your personal information can have its benefits. And I believe that if something benefits you, then you should probably do it.

To be honest though, I don’t think this applies to Facebook as a whole.

For starters, I’ve seen friends tagged in photos that I really don’t think they’d want to see shared with their work colleagues or clients.

I’ve also seen smart people make some seriously stupid comments in their Facebook status update. But that’s a topic worthy of a whole ‘nother column!

Suffice to say, when it comes to privacy online, it pays to read the terms and conditions of everything. That way, you only have yourself to blame.

Although in the case of Facebook, this isn’t always the case, as they do have a habit of making unannounced changes. Many of which seriously affect your privacy.

My advice, for what it’s worth, is to set your privacy settings to maximum on Facebook, especially when it comes to photos and tagging. And to be more flexible when it comes to apps.

I’m sure there are lots of people who get as much out of their favourite Facebook apps as I do out of Runkeeper. But these apps cannot work if you don’t allow them to access some of your personal information.

And whilst it’s only one man’s opinion, I’d rather Runkeeper shared my information with the world than have my best friend share drunken photos of me on Facebook. Not that there are any drunken photos of me, obviously!

July 10 - Time Out!

Seems like hardly a day goes by in 21st century adland where someone or other doesn’t proclaim the imminent demise of something or other.

I’m probably as guilty of this as the next person, but I currently have an overwhelming urge to stand up and shout, time out people!

Never before have so many people been so dogmatic.

Self anointed social media gurus proclaim the death of television. Digital divas constantly deride so called old fashioned advertising agencies. And kids armed with nothing more than a blog comment anonymously deride the work and words of others.

Like I said - Time out people!

There no valid excuse for much of the bad advertising we find ourselves surrounded by. Thing is, many of those bad ads started life as a great idea. So how does a great idea become a bad ad?

To be honest, that’s a story worthy of an entire issue of this magazine. Everyone involved in making an ad has the best intentions. But somehow along the way the original idea simply gets whittled away. Bit by bit by bit.

So rather than sitting on our high horses deriding the product produced by our industry, how ‘bout we start looking for a solution. Because if we don’t, we may well see the death of the 30 second spot.

Talking of which, when Joseph Jaffe coined that term for his popular new marketing manifesto he made what seemed at the time a valid point - People don’t want to be interrupted by advertising.

So why are many of the most popular videos doing the rounds on YouTube ads? If the public don’t like them, why do they seek them out on YouTube.

Because they’re good, that’s why.

Which makes me think that Jaffe’s original manifesto may need to be fine tuned a little. Rather than simply saying that people don’t like advertising, perhaps he should write a new book about how people don’t like bad advertising.

And one place where we see a hell of a lot of bad advertising is on the internet. Honestly, when was the last time you saw a banner ad and thought to yourself, gee I wish I’d done that? Probably never I’d imagine.

Of course the social media mavens will seize upon that last sentence and say that banner ads are interruptive, so are part of the advertising problem.

They’re right of course, but again the problem as I see it isn’t interruption per se, it’s bad advertising.

If banners ads were created to engage, perhaps people would like them more. But at the moment most of them suffer from poor production values and even poorer quality creative.

Regular readers of this column will know that I have long been an advocate for the use of social media in new generation marketing. But social media isn’t the cure all panacea that vocal Twitter users claim it to be.

Sure Facebook has more users than even Mark Zuckerberg thought possible, and Twitter continues to grow in influence and importance, but that doesn’t mean we have to abandon everything that has gone before.

As I said about 500 or so words ago, we need to declare an industry time out.

Rather than digital agencies taking pot shots at traditional agencies, and social media opinion makers paying out on anyone who’s never uploaded a photo to Facebook, how ‘bout we all take a few moments to take stock.

Every medium has its place in the marketing mix.

An agency is an agency, what’s important are the brands they work with, not the media they choose to run their work in.

And the one thing we’re all guilty of is mistaking the consumer’s hatred of poor quality advertising for a dislike of advertising generally.

June 10 - Tinkering

I can’t remember how many cars my parents owned during the course of my childhood, but I have vivid memories of two of them; an orange VW Beetle and a white Mini.

It isn’t that the cars themselves were particularly noteworthy, although the colour of the Beetle was definitely not what you’d consider subtle, it was the attention that my father lavished on them.

Actually maybe attention isn’t the right word. Because he was never that big on washing or polishing cars. What he loved to do was tinker with them.

On a Saturday afternoon when I was either at the football or listening to it on the radio, he’d be under the bonnet, tinkering.

The saying if it ain’t broke don’t fix it meant nothing to him. Fiddling with the carbies, adjusting the spark plugs, cleaning the air filter – he just could leave them alone.

You’re probably wondering why on earth I’m taking on this trip down automotive memory lane. Well believe it or not, it has absolutely nothing to do with cars or the automotive industry.

What prompted to think about my dad and his endless tinkering was a video that landed in my inbox that had been created to demonstrate the design changes that had been made to the YouTube website.

As I watched the video, all I could think was why? No, not why make a video, but why make so many changes that it required a video to explain them?

Not a short video either. This one ran for over five minutes.

I’m a regular YouTube visitor, as I’m sure many of you reading this column are, and I have been perfectly happy with the layout, design and usability of the site. So why change it?

And why change it so drastically? Because they can.

Sounds simplistic I know, but the catch of many of the most successful offerings of the web-2.0 era have been built on the catch cry “always in beta”.

And “always in beta” is a philosophy I work by too. At our agency we constantly test and refine our work based on results and analysis of data.

But what I’m talking about here isn’t testing and refining. It’s change for change sake. Well I think so anyway.

Of course YouTube are not alone in this. All the popular social media sites have a tendency to needlessly tinker under the bonnet.

Facebook seems to get overhauled every couple of months, much to the dismay of users. Twitter is constantly fiddling with things and even Foursquare, a relatively new social offering, has recently had a revamp.

As a regular user of the above mentioned social media sites I consider myself a brand advocate. And every time they go and mess with their design or usability I consider it a bad brand experience.

So I decided to write about this on my BrandDNA blog. Suffice to say my post received some interesting and passionate comments, including this one from Lauren Brown, who blogs as She Sees Red;

“Considering the internet is such a public space - maybe not by technical ownership, but certainly by modes of engagement, it disturbs me that there is this constant flip.

Like continual renovations or redecorating your local train station - nice in theory, but when you just wanna be able to buy a ticket and run onto the platform before the doors shut, annoying.



I would like to see a little more conversation about changes happening - like a DA notice or something. Most of the time I probably won't care and will adapt, but it's nice to know, prepare, or at least forget and remember again. 


Personally I think unnamed, unspoken changes to sites that leverage their power on their “social media überlord status” does have a whiff of arrogance about it.”


STOP BY AND VISIT

She sees Red