Advertising Is Dead

Ad of the year sighted in Hong Kong

Hola Amigos, it's been a long time since I rapped at ya.
    I've been a busy busy man, what little time I have has been divided between freelance, childcare and filling forms at the DSS.
    But just when I hit my lowest ebb, and all hope deserted me...
    My lovely wife surprised me with a trip to the mysterious east.
    Not the all-you-can-eat cantonese buffet next to the Acton Megabowl
    No sir!
    But a two week trip to the Taiwan And the actual Hong Kong.
    I thought, like a modern-day Marco polo that I would traverse the cultural barriers and bring you all that is strange and new from the orient.
    But, once I got there, I was too busy singing 24 hour karaoke, drinking fine scotch whisky and trying to spot Batman hovering over Kowloon harbour to bother with the fickle vagaries of blogging.
    Hong Kong is like blade runner, but without the flying cars and better weather.
    Technology is everywhere. In the news: The week I was there, Alibaba.com the Chinese business portal         floated for a profit of $507 million, And on the street: You can get a mobile signal on the tube for a     start. There's free wi-fi everywhere.
    And this leads on to my favourite ad of the year so far.
    This little beauty (Above: click to embiggen) for vodaphone beats the crap out of the Sony Bunnies.
    It batters the drumming gorilla into submission.
    This ad gives you free broadband. In a taxi.
    Just plug in the modem and off you go.
    Marketing as a service in the back of a cab.
    I'm moving to Hong Kong as soon as I can. With my laptop.

   

Creative Bunkers = Creative Bunkum

   

    Scamp is a brilliant creative.
    See his Volkswaken King Kong ad and weep salty "I wish I'd done that" tears of joy. His advice Tuesday tips should be required reading, nay compulsory for any young creative.
    He posted a delightful polemic on the evils of Creative Generalism. Now he's having A pop at the planners who dare to suggest that they might have creative input.
    Funny, well argued.
    Spelt all proper too, unleik mi post.
    But wrong. Oh so wrong.
    Advertising creatives are trained to produce adverts. That's our business solution. We take an often mediocre product and tack on a creative wrapper.
    But the new economy requires remarkable products and, as the mighty Seth Godin points out, they won't come from within a closed-loop of a creative department.
    There's more than a hint of fear in his post. Ad spend is falling and our jobs are at stake.
    But there is no need to fear!
    Advertising creatives are already generalists. We can come up with ideas for anything.  And a wide range of creative skills and knowledge can only make us stronger.
    Others can do it!
    Out of the bunkers boys and girls! Over the top!
    Break out from the bounds of tHE six-sheet and 30 second TV spot.
    To the accounts and planning and TV departments!
    Storm the corporate boardrooms and the research & development departments with markers set and     minds sharp!
    Advertising cannot hold us!
    Chaaaarge!

You won't get me, I'm part of e-union

Second Life is rubbish.
Particularily as a method of advertising.
As "Wired's" Frank Rose points out, millions of dollars (Real, not Linden) are being wasted on building content into a largely empty virtual world.
But, in amongst the sea of empty corporate islands, burning of Big Brother contestants and flying williesthere is innovation.
Even if it's not quite what the corporations are expecting.
Italian IBM workers, angered by a €1000 pay cut, have staged a picket of the IBM Second-life headquarters.
IBM have spent a fortune on virtual training, only to have it turned against them by disgruntled staff.
Like the unexpected growth of sms use in the past few years (Phones continue to become more complex but use of advanced features is declining) simple uses of technology are often the most popular.
Like organising a strike.
Maybe the fortune IBM spent on "virtual real estate" could have been spent on worker's salaries.
That would have been much more effective advertising.

My robot double is prepared: Soon I will be invincible

Evil supergeniuses (genii?) and millionare industrialists collide.
The First Iron Man trailer is out. And I finally picked up Soon I Will Become Invincible, Austin Grossman excellent supervillain magnum opus.
(Incidentally, the name Dr Impossible was MINE! Should I destroy him for his insolence?)
All this cyborgery (the main hero in SIWBI is a half-robot lady 'Fatale") got my supercomputer brain thinking.
What bits of the traditional creative business can be replaced by technology?
I see via fast company that this website can replace your direct agency by allowing you to create and send out mailers via a handy web interface.
Not even the bullet proof Copywriter is safe from the march of technology!
Should we be threatened?
Or should we instead view these as enhancements?
Like Matt Jones's vison of extending the senses of parcour artistes, can we view social networks as extensions of our central nervous systems?
Is the agency of the future a trendy office filled with fancy chairs and exotically-haired creatives:
Or one person sitting at the centre of an high-tech web of social networks, outsourced services and creativity?
A one-man agency.
A one-man agency dedicated to evil?
A one-man agency that WOULD RULE YOU ALL!

...I should probably get out the house.

Nerfed by 2.0

Steve Reubel has posted an interesting job description at his Ad Age blog. Geek Marketing.
People in marketing that can bridge the gap between traditional marketing and the digital world.
Now I'm in search of a new title. And this one might just fit.
Being a geek I tend to consider professions like classes. The Art Director used to be solid, dependable role with a defined skill set.
Like a Paladin or Rogue.
Or dilettante.
Ok, maybe not the dilettante.
But you get my drift.
Then along comes the web 2.0 and I find I've been nerfed.
De-buffed.
Rendered harmless like the foam weapons of the same name.
Writers are quids in, everyone needs writers.
At a recent creative headhunter meeting I was told the Writer openings outnumbered the Art Director 36 to 1.
Art Directors are screwed.
So I need a new class.
Any ideas?
Geek Marketer is winning(or should that be geek marketeer?)
Though "Concepatatron" is a pretty close second.

Demonic Pacts For Fun And Profit

Fear ye!
    I was accused of continuing the "rape of human souls" after my first post.
    But rather than shy away from the evil reputation of our industry, I've decided to embrace it.
    So in search of inspiration, brave reader, I go not to the brightly-lit marketing section of the bookshop.
    No, not I.
    I go to the dark, squamous, cobwebbed corner bathed in gibbous moonlight
    The corner labeled Occult.
    And pick up a copy of the brilliant Uncle Ramsey's Little Book of Demons by Ramsay Dukes. Subtitled The Positive Advantages of the Personification of Life's Problems it argues thus: Human beings are crap at dealing with abstract problems, but we have 50,000 years of dealing with other people with distinct personalities.
    By naming your problems Demon you can enter into a dialogue with them, a partnership. A pact, in the Faustian sense (because like any demonic pact, we get something out of it too)
    And I wonder whether this could be applied to the tricky subject of brands.
    I've sat in meetings when a client has struggled thus."Yes, I like it, and I'm sure it would sell lots of the product but it's off brand". Utterly frustrating.
    Mark Earls suggested using B'nard, to remind us that a brand is essentially a nonsense word. A complex metaphor, one that often stops us talking about the real problem.
    But can we look at it another way? Read what Neil Boorman author of Bonfire of the Brands has to say:

I now realise that it's these damn brands that are the source of the pain. For every new status symbol I acquire, for every new extension to my identity that I buy, I lose a piece of myself to the brands. I placed my trust, even some love with these companies, and what have I had in return for my loyalty and my faith? Absolutely nothing.
How could they, they're just brands.

    But what if they're not just brands?
    We've had the Gaia hypothesis and Richard Dawkin's meme.   And this report here shows that inanimate dust "comes alive" in space.
    So can a brand be considered to be an independent personality, a corporate egregore?
    Could it be possible that as complex autonomous systems, brands should be considered to be "alive"? Is the reason that brands have grown out of control because we're not dealing with them as the potentially malevolent entities they are.
    If nothing else, it gives us a new way of dealing with them. Ask not "what does the consumer want" but "what does the brand want" and "what do we need to give the brand so that we both end up happy".
    Brand I name the DEMON!
    Let's get bargaining.

Gorilla Advertising

   

Have you seen the ad with the gorilla?
    Playing drums.
    To Phil Collins.
    There's no strategy, just a gorilla playing drums. As the website says:
    "There's no clever science behind it - it's just an effort to make you smile, in exactly the same way Cadbury Dairy Milk does"
    But in the gnarled black knot of evil that is my adman's heart a little spark of joy just plinked into life.
    It even made a little "plink" noise.
    Because this ad isn't looking for a "target consumer". Just as well, because "the consumer" is no more: like Crimpoline suits and the Alpine Lorry. It's not bogged down in tortuous strategy. Instead it's building a fun personality for the brand.
    A shiny, gorilla-shaped brand lighthouse round which ill happily sail in my little chocolate boat of fun.
    Ahoy!

You got issues, we got tissues

How do you sell more Kleenex?
    There's only so many tissues one can use, even with a cold.
    Or the Internet.
    Take a look at mykleenextissue.com. Instead of advertising, they've decided to innovate: not with a new product but with a brilliant soft innovation. A new oval box and nine different seasonal designs. Then they made the boxes customizable. Upload your own picture, change the colour, add text.
    You can even get a preview of how your box will look (see my own bold design on the left) Apparently the tissues are flying off the shelves.
    All because of not advertising.
    The biggest challenge that creatives currently face is how to adapt our skills to an economy that no longer needs traditional advertising to create sales.
    How do we get access to companies to influence the products they make. This is the sort of low-cost idea (compared to advertising or new product development) that we are ideally equipped to create. But we're only ever involved at the end, after all the important decisions have been made.
    I'm a wee bit stuck on this. Answers on an e-card.
    Time to "Let out your creative juices" as they say on the mykleenex site ;)

(full story here at Fast Company)

We can't keep up with the Joneses

Where are the Joneses. Bless you Ford, brave brave lovely wonderful Ford.
    This is the best thing I've seen/experienced/taken part in since The Lost Experience     (the alternate reality game run by channel 4 and ABC: totally changed the way i think about advertising)
    It's advertising Jim, but not as we know it.
    And it wasn't done by an ad agency. It was created by Imagination: The model-making, porsche in-car-navigation-system-designing, event and architecture company.
    Permission marketing at it's finest.
    Remarkable.
    I wish I'd done that.

Battle of the Blands

Branded Content: the holy grail of Advertising 2.0
    Or if not The Grail, maybe the holy lance.
    Or the head of John the Baptist.
    Give people something they actually want instead of forcing ads on them and you'll get a much better response.
    Give people advertsing that they're  actually willing to pay for and you have the Ark Of The F*cking Covenant!: Self Liquidating Communications. Ads that don't just pay for themselves, they make the agency money!
    That's what Saatchi & Saatchi's GUM factory were trying to do with Honeyshot, the first band to ever sign to an advertising agency.
    Honeyshot released a record into the charts, that did pretty well. Until, shock horror, it was revealed to be nothing but an advertisment! For shockwaves hair products. And the highly ethical music business decended like wolves on the helpless girls.
    While the Honeyshot experiment was a glorious failure I belive they will be hailed as bold pioneers compered to this lot...
    Giles Fitzgerald, of Frukt, uber music marketing gurus, posted this delightful list of "sponsored battle of the bands" on his blog (thanks to Iain Tait's crackunit).
    It seems that heads of marketing worldwide, are stuck in the same groove: "I like music, I want to hang out with bands: lets sponsor some bands! That'll sell a bunch of product!"   
    Must try harder.
    Much as people mocked Honeyshot, GUM at least tried to make something that people would want.      
    Instead of just slapping a logo on a random selection of musicians in the hope of some sort of goodwill "halo". it's me-too marketing at it's laziest.
    That being said, not all talent searches are a waste of time. Take the Poppets Pop-Pickers national Karaoke Contest (you can soooo tell they wanted to call it "Poppet Idol" but the legal team got scared). Sometimes a display of raw talent like this makes it all worthwhile.
    Oh yes...