Uneven Distribution.
Uneven Distribution is a collection of thoughts on the digital world, its future scenarios and current trends, and the effect they have on brands, advertising, and people. I’m the Digital Creative Director of Clemenger BBDO in Sydney. If you have an opinion on anything I’ve written, please comment. If you would like to subscribe to receive updates via RSS feed please click the icon below.
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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.
Comments
I like this quote from Dave Winer: “Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. There’s little point in saying something until the time is right, then you just have to say it once, and the idea takes over and does all the work.”
[...] @nichodges New blog post/rant. Massive Change. http://nichodges.com/wordpress/?p=47 [...]
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Cheers! Sandra. R.
[...] segmentação, uneven Citação de David Winer tirada desse post aqui. “Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted [...]
