Uneven Distribution.

Your mainframe will survive.

April 21st, 2009

This snippet of Larry Ellison talking about cloud computing is well worth listening to. Not just because he utterly slams the idea of ‘cloud computing’ as an evolutionary term in the software industry, but because what he is talking about goes way beyond nerds talking about Gmail or Salesforce.

What he is talking about is a problem of language, and the result it has on the mindset of an entire industry.

As technology has exponentially advanced, we have reached a point where it’s relevance and, more importantly, the way in which it’s relevance can be communicated, has outpaced the general public’s ability to understand and make use of it. In the software industry one result of this has been the concept of cloud computing. In the marketing industry, one result has been social media, and in particular the role of social media as marketing’s saviour. I would hope anyone who’s reading this accepts by now that all media is inherently social, so while the manifestations of conversations may be more visible, public, and accessible, what is happening is by no means new.

In much the same way billions of dollars has been poured into startups offering services with a buzzword at their heart (but offering no real point of difference), brands are now starting to pay an inordinate amount of attention to these latest idioms. Partially because they don’t understand them, and partially because they have been sold on the idea that these concepts are so new and fresh that they must be the answer to all of their marketing problems. But on their own they’re not. They’re just an evolution that’s a little harder to grasp than every other step this industry has taken. And what worries me is that plenty of people are assuming that we have taken one giant leap, when in fact we’ve just moved on a bit. Everything that came before is still just behind us, and it’s still just as relevant.

“When is this idiocy going to stop? I’ve been at this a very long time. There’s still mainframes. That was the first industry that was going to be destroyed. And watching mainframes being destroyed is like watching a glacier melt.”

I’ve worked as an industrial designer, a graphic designer, web designer, and somehow ended up in advertising. But at the heart of what I have always done is communication. If you think that it’s impossible to communicate your brand through its physical design, its packaging, or its TV ad, but social media is your saviour because it’s 2-way or because it’s measurable, you’re in for a shock. It’s an evolution, yes, and it’s essential to whatever it is you’re communicating, but it’s not the answer to everything. And it’s not going to solve your inability to create great work in those other areas. Because when your customer service twitter account scales (which it must do if you actually want it to be worth the investment), it will end up as just another outsourced call centre.

And then, you’re back to square one. And the whole time you’ve been ignoring your mainframe, and it hasn’t disappeared.

Postscript: I linked to this post in a tweet with the caveat that a “healthy dose of devil’s advocate is included”. I think the thought of the current state of the marketing landscape being affected by a problem of language is incredibly interesting and not completely incorrect. If the thinking in our industry could be modeled in economic terms, I’m sure we’d be ready for a correction. And just like an economic correction, no one can tell how far off course we really are.

Massive change.

March 24th, 2009

Online display advertising as it currently stands will die. It won’t happen tomorrow, but it will die. I’ve been thinking this for a while, and it was refreshing to see on TechCrunch that Eric Clemons seems to agree with me. The old school advertiser-publisher-reader model is so irrelevant in the internet age that we can now admit that newspapers will be as quaint to my children as Movietone news is to me. As a result of the demise of traditional publishers, online advertising as we know it will also die.

And what will replace it? We don’t know yet. And we won’t know until we finally admit that the old model is doomed and we move on to the next generation of advertising. And whatever this next generation of advertising reveals itself as will come from experimentation. There is a temptation to assume that the embracing of digital by traditional agencies, with traditional structures is the beginning of this next generation. But I don’t believe it. Even the best transmedia ideas come from a place that is thoroughly grounded in oldschool, top-down thinking. And while the abandoning of this method is unthinkable, so was the demise of the newspaper industry. Clay Shirky summed it up brilliantly in his post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable:

“Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points….Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.”

Experimentation then. And lots of it. Sounds like a brilliant idea.

The only problem is that this leaves us, as people who do creative work for huge brands, in an extremely difficult place. The biggest agencies attract the best creative minds, and also the biggest clients. But while the former are capable of amazing ideas, the latter are unwilling to take the risk of experimentation. Yes, there has been a swag of what could be called experimental thoughts over just the past few months. Just out of BBDO Australia and New Zealand we’ve had the Yellow Tree House, Team Dry, and Christmas Clones, but these are still a long way from game-changing, and it’s certainly not enough to be considered “lots and lots”. I don’t believe that anyone has nailed the truly transformative creative thinking that will be advertising’s Craigslist or Wikipedia.

So how can we make this change happen?

One outlook would be a combination of long-term brand communications engagement, and brilliant short lived spikes of high engagement creativity. Essentially the people that love your brand or product will happily become a fan on Facebook, follow it on Twitter, and you can have an ongoing dialogue with them over months and years. But in order to remind them how cool the brand is, and in order to attract new followers, you need to have massive creative ideas that touch and entertain millions of people.

In this outlook, media agencies should evolve along with PR agencies, into macro relationship builders. They can focus on building these long term relationships. Getting the communication in the right space and keeping it consistent and on brand (keeping in mind that the idea of being ‘on brand’ will evolve immensely over the next few years).

Meanwhile creative agencies need to continue coming up with brilliant ideas. But better brilliant ideas. And this is where massive change needs to happen, from the creative agencies. How they think about what they do. We need to stop thinking about making ads, and start thinking about making things we don’t know how to make. Ideas that are authentic, adaptive, relevant, transformative, fresh, immersive and social. And nothing less.

The good news is that the next era of working in marketing and advertising could well be the most rewarding in history. No longer are you selling products that no one wants to solve a problem they never had. You may actually be helping people do stuff they want with people they like in places they want to be. Imagine that.