Tag: advertising

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Technology is not the only fruit (2015)

Originally published by Imperica. I have decided to re-post it here as Imperica has announced it will be shutting down on 31 July 2020.

As agencies continue to struggle for margins, and remain unable to successfully cope with the ongoing march of software, why is technology seen as the only way forward for innovation? Are agencies being blind to other more lucrative areas, and are we about to witness a mass extinction in the agency world as more and more of the services they offer are given over to machines?

I was lucky enough to be invited to attend Big Brand Week in London and spent time at their recent innovation event. While it was genuinely fascinating to hear how agencies such as Karmarama, and organisations like the Unilever Foundry and Telefónica, are getting together with startups, accelerators, incubators and similar collectives, the only answer appeared to be turning to technology for innovation. And it’s the same message they’ve all been saying for at least 3 years.

Agencies, by their own admission, are failing to get to grips with this new era of computing. Continuing to use the label of digital isn’t helping – them or their clients – yet are they paying lip service to the Trojan horse that will be their ultimate undoing? I think so.

Technology has become a mask, a way for agencies to hide behind their lack of knowledge. And while it’s true there have always been people within agencies who have made their career on a stack of BS, it now feels like a phenomenon that has become a pandemic. Talk about viral.

Advertising hasn’t really got to grips with how technology is changing more than just media, or the channels and platforms through which they pipe their messages. I’m not sure anyone on the panel had a convincing argument. Although stories from Collider and Unilever appeared to demonstrate that in some areas things are improving, yet there was much debate around how startups need to change to accommodate global businesses – very little about how that should be working the other way around.

The shift needs to happen

For my piece in Rudy de Waele’s excellent book, Shift 2020, I posited that agencies would become extinct within 7 years. A lot of people took me to task for making that judgement. Yet, more and more I see consolidation happening as a way to remain relevant and to generate revenues. Technology is not turning the tide. It won’t, either.

The shift required is fundamental. Advertising is still living in a linear world, yet the changes around them are exponential. And until that changes, innovation remains something people on panels talk about, or apply to ideas that are anything but innovative.

In one of Tom Goodwin’s recent AdAge articles, Specialization Was a Mistake: How Agencies Can Restructure for the Future, he presents his future for agencies. It’s a smart idea, one that Tom has obviously been thinking about for some time. It’s well worth a read.

There is a kernel of what I think the advertising industry can do to prevent my premonition coming true within Tom’s piece. Agencies and their ilk need to turn their backs on technology as the saviour, and use it as a tool. It’s coming for the majority of their work, so all that’s left it to get better at the one thing technology can only facilitate rather than create: ideas.

I’m not talking about a 30-second spot, or an idea expressed as a print advertisement. I’m saying we need to think big, to take organising ideas, ones that can change the course of a business, or even a sector. These ideas should be a well from which the brand can continually drink, to express through services, ethics, products, channels, media, tactics, internal communications, hiring practices… It has to be something that can be the fuel, not the exhaust.

Technology isn’t that. Partnering with startups isn’t that. Not alone. It’s time agencies woke up to the exponential changes happening, otherwise they’ll be the communications equivalent of the internet fridge.

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It’s not brave, it’s just good (2013)

Originally published by Imperica. I have decided to re-post it here as Imperica has announced it will be shutting down on 31 July 2020.

Bravery has come to mean something entirely different in the world of advertising. It’s not like rescuing a child from a burning building, or savings lives by delivering food to isolated villages in a war-torn country.

Yet, everyone wants to be brave. They aspire to do ‘brave’ work. They rarely do.

This is because ‘brave’ is a synonym for many other things in Adland. Mostly, it means good. Because those agencies that actually do brave work – or as the journalists will have you think, the brave clients that go along with an idea – care about the craft, they fight for the work, they spend hours outside of their allotted work-time, making sure that it’s better than ‘best’.

That’s not brave, that’s passion!

What about those brave clients I mentioned?

Clients, as most Adlandians will have you believe, are terrible. They like to cut away the best bits of the work, to scupper the beauty and deliver something that’s barely lowest common denominator. And the account teams and the creative and planners, they let this happen. They accept it. More often than not, the client won’t even see this kind of work.

“The client isn’t brave enough for this!”

How would they know if they aren’t prepared to even show the client?

Perhaps, it’s because work is done in isolation – client writes a brief and signs off a scope of work, then they are shown some hand-drawn ‘scamps’ along with loads of charts talking about mobile this and Facebook that. A deck, presented by someone who may have preconceived opinions of their own about how the client will respond.

“Clients find it hard to understand creatives,” we’re told.

I disagree.

As a creative, I’ve fought hard internally to work with clients, which has latterly led to me being called a strategist. But good work requires a creative to truly understand what’s driving the business decisions, why the client might say no to something – although I have found it usually leads to having a solid argument as to why it’s the right route to take. And if you can get collaboration – even once – you’ll often find the creative reins are loosened for the next brief. True bravery is rarely achieved by one person alone.

Of course, good work is always possible when the account person works with and for the agency, when they don’t refer to themselves as ‘the client in the building’ and always say yes without consultation. It should never be them and us. It’s bolder to behave as a ‘we’. This isn’t art, after all. They are not there to be a filter for what gets shown – that’s where the creative director comes in.

Clients have a real role to play here

It’s an important role they play.

It’s worth clients – as well as their chosen agency partners – remembering that good work doesn’t require bravery: it takes trust. If you’ve posed a question, be prepared for a brilliant agency to respond with something that provides the right answer. If it’s not necessarily the one you were thinking of, you’ve failed to exercise that trust. This will lead to mediocre and forgettable work that will ultimately fail.

Trust should drive your business relationship – the best agencies know this, which is why they mostly do good work (every agency has accounts that don’t rely on trust, let’s not pretend otherwise). A relationship built on trust will allow creative work to be different, to attempt things that haven’t been done before, to oppose conventional choices when it’s right to do so.

Postscript

Don’t do brave work. Just do good work. Not just for yourselves, but for your clients. Build that trust. Throw out the ego and work with everyone who has a vested interest whatever their job title or position in the agency hierarchy – a lesson I took a while to learn. It will probably be the bravest thing you’ll ever do in your creative life.