Mail moments

On average 294 billion emails are sent every day. Not every week, every day. That is, I’m sure you’d agree, one hell of a lot of emails.

When I came across this statistic last week, it had me wondering how many emails would be sent of people had to pay for the privilege.

You see, like many digital offerings impacting on the offline world, email is and always has been free.

Unlike stamps, envelopes and packages.

Just imagine how many people would be far less inclined to communicate via email if it cost a couple of cents to send one.

And as for the spam industry, well the less said the better. In fact, the minimal cost of emailing thousands of people at any given time is what gave birth to spam in the first place.

Take spam out of the equation and the number of daily emails would probably be reduced quite substantially.

The daily number however would still be enormous. I wonder if it still will be many years from now?

Last year there was a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about Facebook introducing an email service.

Much of the talk centred around Facebook taking on Google’s G-Mail service and Microsoft’s Hotmail.

I spoke to my 18-year-old daughter about it and she couldn’t understand why anyone would want a Facebook email.

When I asked her to clarify why she had said this, she rolled her eyes (as teenagers tend to do) and proclaimed that email is too slow.

Too slow!

She went on to tell me that she had a couple of email addresses but very rarely used them, preferring instead to use instant messaging services, especially the one in Facebook or good old text messaging on her phone.

Which surely points to a decline in email use in the not too distant future, as my daughter and millions of kids younger than her, begin to enter the workforce.

So what then, does the future hold for good old snail mail?

After all, if my daughter says email is too slow, what on earth would she think of the postal service?

Well believe it or not, she holds it in very high regard.

Perhaps because we receive so little personal mail these days, she sees mail addressed to her as something special. Something worthwhile. And definitely something worth waiting for.

Hard to believe I know, but this “I want it now” generation is more than happy to wait for things that are worth waiting for.

My 14-year-old son is the same.

He ordered a skateboard from a website in the USA and is more than happy to wait six weeks for it to arrive. Weird, I know, but I think it bodes well for the direct marketing industry.

At least I hope it does!

Last year I judged at Australia’s greatest showcase for direct marketing, the ADMA Awards. One thing that really struck me during the judging was how few truly great direct mail packs there were.

Obviously email is impacting on direct mail volumes. A lot.

After all, if a stamp costs 60c, then it must be getting harder and harder for marketers to justify not communicating with their customer base via low cost email.

But just as kids hold the future of email in their hands, so too could they represent the saviours of direct mail.

This generation of kids who say email is too slow and, believe it or not, old fashioned, may not like brands to communicate with them via this channel.

What they may appreciate though, is brands sending them offers and enticements using good old snail mail.

Why?

Because, like you and me, they like to feel loved. And nothing makes a customer feel more valued than receiving something special in the mail.

That’s something special by the way. Not some cheap and tacky piece of junk mail.

Things seen differently

I read two outstanding think pieces about the advertising business last month. As is so often the case, both of them were on blogs, not in the trade press.

And both of them were written by planners; Amelia Torode, who is based in the UK, and Bud Cadell, who is based in the USA.

That, however, is where the similarity ends.

Torode’s piece, which generated plenty of blog comments and discussion, was titled “The future of advertising is utterly depressing.”

With a title like that, you know you’re up for an interesting read, especially given the current wave of change sweeping through the ad business.

On the surface, Bud Caddell’s piece had very little in common with Amelia Torode’s.

Snappily titled, “Rock stars, ninjas and assholes,” it looked at a something regularly discussed within the walls of agencies – people with a reputation for big ideas and even bigger attitude.

As a nigh on twenty year veteran of agency land, I have had plenty of experience with industry rock stars. Some of it good, some of it not so good, but always focussed in and around innovation and ideas.

And in my experience, people who are often dismissed or derided as rock stars, tend to be the people who drive agencies forward.

To quote from Apple’s legendary “Think Different” ad from many years ago;

“They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.

Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They explore. They create. They inspire.”

Bud Caldwell’s piece came not to damn the rock star, but to recast him or her. Which is why he also used the terms ninja and assholes.

In Caldwell’s eyes, “An asshole is an asshole, and assholes are not a new phenomenon. You shouldn’t hire them if you can’t stand them.”

No argument from me there.

As Caldwell says, “An asshole is someone who makes everyone’s life miserable, even when it has nothing to do with work.”

Rock stars however are an entirely different beast. And rock stars, I think, will be the people who help define the future of our industry.

Unlike previous generations though, the rock stars of today and tomorrow could well be found outside of agency creative departments.

The likes of Google and Facebook are proof of this.

Clever kids who were conveniently categorized as geeks and nerds, who went on to revolutionise our business using codes and algorithms.

For Amelia Torode, the future of our business may lay with, she feels, “People who don’t know (or dare I say care) about Snow Plough or Saatchi & Saatchi in the 80’s.”

I disagree.

And agree as well.

The new comers to our industry, people schooled in writing code and developing, are never going to be interested in Volkswagen’s classic Snow Plough ad.

This is because these people are generally not interested in the field of communication loosely known as advertising.

What they are interested in using their creativity to solve problems, innovation and rising to a challenge.

These are traits they share with the people who created the Snow Plough ad back in the pre-digital age.

The Saatchi brothers also shared these traits, as did legendary figures like Bill Bernbach and David Ogilvy.

For these people were the industry rock stars of their day.

And as Bud Caldwell clearly identifies in his blog post, rock stars should never be confused with assholes.

Another name for rock stars, I believe, is a term coined by Amelia Torode for another group of people she thinks will define the industry of the future, “madder people.”

I quite like the term madder people to be honest.

Although, I still think the best definition of all can be found in the Apple “Think Different” ad – “The ones who see things differently.”

They may often be a pain in the butt, but these rebels with a cause will create the industry of tomorrow. Not smiling, always looking to please “yes men” in perfectly tailored suits.

STOP BY AND VISIT

Amelia Torode

Bud Caddell

Beyond advertising

Over the last few months there has been much written about the future of advertising, especially in the blogosphere.

The catalyst for all this chatter and discussion was an article published towards the end of last year by Fast Company magazine.

Given the amount of change wrought upon the advertising industry since the internet became something we take for granted, I’m surprised people can still find something new to say about the future of advertising.

That’s not to say that there isn’t anything to say. More that I’m getting a bit tired of self proclaimed experts wheeling old the same old clichéd predictions and pontifications.

Joseph Jaffe’s acclaimed book, Life after the 30 second spot, is now six years old. I’m sure you will have read it. Most people in marketing did back in the mid to late noughties.

Suffice to say, in spite of its predicted extinction, the 30 second spot is alive and well.

In fact, now that all the free-to-air digital television channels have finally launched, I’d say there are more opportunities for good old 30 second ads than ever before.

That’s not to say that the quality of TV advertising is very high, because it certainly isn’t, but stories of its demise appear as yet to be unfounded.

One of the more interesting of the “future of” articles and blog posts that I’ve read over the last couple of months came from John Dodds, from the blog Make Marketing History.

If you’re in marketing, and you’re not a regular reader of Doddsy, you should be. He’s a very insightful commentator.

Dodd’s post was entitled The future of the marketing director. Here’s its opening paragraph;

“Everyone’s writing self-serving pieces about the future of advertising, yet few of them seem to realise that the true subject is the future of marketing.

Central to that is the future of the marketing director, an important role that has, all too often, relegated itself to some kind of administrator of outsourcing.”

Ouch! Bet you never saw that coming did you? Well not in this column anyway.

Dodds goes on to say, “The reversal of that trend starts with knowing what marketing really is.”

But I know what marketing is, you’re probably thinking. Of course you do, but do your colleagues and superiors?

To them marketing is basically advertising or promotional activity.

I know there’s so much more to it than that. I’m sure you do too, but what about the rest of your organisation?

The way Dodds sees it, marketers need to take on a more evangelical role. One where spreading the word and educating others is part and parcel of the job.

He doesn’t however mean evangelising products or brands, because you probably do that already.

What Dodds wants marketers to do, is to evangelise marketing itself, and its importance to the company.

Of course I would say this, but I reckon he’s on to something.

Over the last couple of years, thanks to our old friend the GFC, companies looking to cut costs have had marketing budgets under the microscope.

Obviously this is because they see marketing as a cost to the business. But perhaps it is because marketers are not doing enough to promote the importance of marketing within their organisation.

Because if it was promoted like a product or service, then perhaps it would be more highly valued. And management would look elsewhere for cost savings.

As John Dodds says, marketing needs to take on an evangelical role. For it is only by evangelising, that you can turn the sceptics and doubters of the corporate world into marketing believers.

And, as Dodds himself says, “Until this is achieved, marketing will be under-valued.”

STOP BY AND VISIT

Make Marketing History

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.