Advertising Is Dead

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.

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)

Man the lifeboats

Ok, advertising is two years behind any fashion. So it's no surprise that I start a blog now. Already every man and his dog has one.
    Hell every man and his cat has one come to that. But here's my point, We'd better get "with it" pretty bloody soon or we're screwed
    No one working in advertising should be able look at this and not feel a horrible prickle of fear run down your spine.
    São Paulo No Logo by Tony De Marco documents the Sao Paulo skyline six months after the ban on outdoor advertising. It makes sobering viewing, especially if you've spent the last ten years making a living from posters
    And you though Tivo was bad for advertising.
Mark my words: this is not a one-off. Ignore it at your peril. Advertising is broken: media fragmentation, cheaper faster broadband and a rising tide "interruption avoiding" technology means that big ad agencies will soon be sinking like a veritable fleet of Titanics.
    Traditional creative approaches no longer work. And traditional creatives need to adapt to survive, or end up on the scrapheap, like a Brazilian billboard.
    That's my plan. Who's with me?