Ramblings on media, advertising, clothes and music.
October 17, 2009 3 Comments
This video demonstrates a little of how Google Wave works. It does this by using a scene from Pulp Fiction. This doesn’t sound like it should make sense. Oh, but it does.
With some pride, this is also the first blog post I’ve produced that carries a profanity warning.
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October 15, 2009 Leave a comment
I had my haircut today. (I’m very happy with it, thanks for asking.) It was cut by a man with faintly ridiculous hair.
His hair was dyed, very badly. It was at least a couple of shades too dark, particularly for a man with thinning hair. It was also fashioned in a quite dramatic style, again designed to distract from the thinness of the raw materials. It seemed the strategy was to adopt a style of such confidence that it would disguise the fact that the hair itself wasn’t quite up to the task. It seemed rather like the last-ditch battle strategy of sending what few men you have out of the trenches and over the top, hopefully confusing the enemy into believing that such a display of bravado must mean that there are hundreds more men where they came from.
And as he cut my hair I became more and more focused on his hair. It wasn’t so ridiculous that it would attract a second glance in the street. It was just the fact that you have heightened expectations of a hairdresser’s hair. You place it under that much more scrutiny simply because of what they do.
Which is an issue I think we in the advertising industry really struggle with. We’re professional communicators with a disappointing tendency to communicate really badly on our own behalf.
If you’ve worked in the industry you’ll be familiar with the common examples. The bloated, trite press releases announcing client wins or losses. The belated announcements to clients that key staff are leaving only days before they actually depart (despite the agency having known for months). The fatuous, clumsy language we insist on inventing to describe our proprietary planning processes and to populate our creative rationales.
We’re not, arguably, that much worse than other industries. Lawyers seem also to revel in insular language, architects are equally fond of self-promotion through client appointment and technology companies are, by reputation, not the best at managing HR-related announcements.
But the issue is that we’re subject to greater scrutiny. We’re in the business of communication, so there’s much more interest in how well we do that ourselves. And slip-ups that wouldn’t warrant a mention from any other industry look just plain amateur from us.
This isn’t quite the same thing as the old favourite about plumbers having leaking pipes and builders having holes in their floor. Because unless you make a visit to your builder or plumber’s house, you’d never know this.
But how we communicate is plain for all to see. We judge our builder based on the work done for other people. But our clients can, and do, judge us based on the work we do for ourselves.
Which is what makes me uncomfortable about how the industry handled the TVNZ commission issue. The end result in some ways isn’t really the point. How we managed the communication of an industry POV around it is. It seemed we tried to establish a position that retaining 20% commission was vital, either because there were a tier of smaller agencies that would struggle to survive because that commission represented their only form of revenue, or that that level of commission was necessary to ensure that a New Zealand industry could afford to retain the kind of talent that allows it to do great work, and hold its envied position as a country with a creative reputation that far outweighs its market heft. But by the end we’d turned it either into an issue that possibly didn’t really matter to the big agencies, possibly was a long overdue change to an outdated remuneration arrangement or possibly was just an attempt to prop up excessive salaries in an indulged, out-of-touch industry.
The commission issue was one on which our clients were very focused. They looked to understand our perspective and how, alongside them, we would manage the issue. They saw us in action, our communication’s skills in the spotlight and we appeared rather clumsy. It’s not that the points we started out wanting to make weren’t valid, it’s just that we didn’t do a great job of communicating with the clarity and consistency that we advocate for our clients.
And just as an ill-considered hairstyle undermines the credibility of a hairdresser, so an ill-communicated point of view undermines the credibility of a communications’ industry.
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September 30, 2009 1 Comment
An article in MediaDailyNews highlights that the more popular the TV show the more likely TiVo users are to timeshift the show and to fast-forward through the ads.
To me this reinforces a couple of grim realities for our approach to advertising and media planning.
The first is that people don’t generally like being interrupted. But they particularly don’t like being interrupted while doing something they enjoy. The second is that an opportunity to see is not the same as active involvement.
The simple, and quite reasonable, conclusion to draw from this MediaDailyNews article is that it’s another example of how changing technology is the cause of many of our industry’s struggles. Technology has evolved that allows people to watch TV differently. They can record shows to watch when it suits them, in a way that suits them – as an event, relaxed and uninterrupted. And this same technology allows them to choose to avoid ads entirely. They can put their focus where they wanted it all along – on the TV show.
But our mistake is in looking at the technology as the issue. In fact we’re guilty of doing this with technology in general – technology fuels media fragmentation, technology facilitates the social networks that lure people away from ‘traditional’ media, technology (in the form of the internet) has changed the way people relate to brands, and the expectations they have of brands, to the point where advertising struggles to achieve what it used to.
But the mistake is to blame the technology, to take the easy out that ‘technology is killing advertising’. To blame TiVo, Facebook and YouTube. Because they’re not to blame. What’s killing advertising is years of crap advertising.
We used to be able to put whatever we wanted in front of people. (Or, to be fair, whatever clients wanted to put in front of people). But those people didn’t have a mechanism for avoiding the advertising that wasn’t interesting/useful. At best it just washed over them, at worst it disrespected their intelligence and verged on offensive. But our big mistake was in how we chose to measure the effectiveness of what we did.
We basically measured reach, or opportunities to see, and we tried to establish a cause and effect relationship between advertising and brand health measures. But by and large we measured exposure to advertising, not engagement with advertising. Marketers were able to simply expose what they thought should be interesting to people, instead of engaging people with what was actually interesting to them. And because we chose not to measure this, we could choose to ignore it. So we, or our clients, could put aside the fact that most of what we produced was actually alienating our audience and sowing the seeds for the problem we now encounter.
Which meant that at the point at which people were presented with a means of avoiding advertising they took to it with relish. Not because of the technology, but because their expectation of the utility of advertising was so low. It wasn’t generally interesting so it was generally avoided. And at the same time, a lot of the advertising that was useful previously (of the special-offer/buy-it-here/limited-time variety) migrated online where it became much more user-friendly, comparable and useful.
What really depresses me about this is that we don’t seem to have learnt a lesson. We have in ‘digital’ an amazing new medium and an opportunity to do things better. Wonderful opportunities to create engagement, meaningful and long-term, with people, but it seems like we’re re-creating exactly the same pattern. We’ve reverted to CPM as our primary measure of effectiveness. We measure impressions, the number of times an ad is presented, not the number of times it creates meaningful brand engagement. (I realise there are also plenty of other measures but it’s the one that I most often hear discussed with clients.)
The problem is it’s such an easy, and therefore tempting, out for Marketers. Set a goal that’s based on a deliverable that’s distinct from quality, make it easily quantifiable and report success. And perpetuate the theory that you can’t really measure the success of ‘marketing’ because it’s too multi-dimensional.
And when the dreaded, easily-disparaged Financial Controller asks for some proof of ROI present a summary that establishes that lots of people had the opportunity to see the ads you produced, that some of them clicked on those ads, and that a brand health measure moved at some point immediately following a burst of advertising activity.
But it’s measurement and ROI that are right to the heart of the challenge we face as an industry. There are three things we can all agree on:
And all of these issues are tied up together. The basic problem is that we don’t have a means of determining value – of proving that good work is more effective and delivers huge value that we should be rewarded for.
But we’re not really working on how we measure it. We know it’s difficult and that there’s not an easy answer. But in the meantime we’re measuring the wrong things and watching as things get worse. As long as we let ‘exposure’ remain the primary measure of effectiveness we will see our industry get further commoditised while the quality of work continues to fall.
The most pressing issue for the industry isn’t TVNZ and its commission reduction. Nor is it what we’ll do now that D&AD and One Show have banned scam. And it’s not whether new technologies are killing advertising. The most pressing issue is the need for a robust measurement system that proves that good advertising is exponentially more valuable than bad advertising and that places ‘engagement’ at the centre of the effectiveness discussion.
If I were CAANZ I’d go to every similar advertising federation the world over. I’d ask them to levy every agency they represent. I’d raise enough money to engage McKinsey and have it build that measurement model. And once McKinsey has proven that engagement is the only measure that reliably predicts brand success and that great advertising is the only tool that can reliably deliver that engagement, we might have a chance of seeing good work embraced and agencies well-rewarded. Because that’s a language that clients can understand from a source they trust.
If we do we might find that we get to produce more of the kind of work we know works best. We might find that every marketing organisation becomes more successful because of it. We might find that we get paid more for conceiving and producing that work because its value is clear for all to see.
And we might ultimately find that we create an industry that never again needs to grapple with how to stop people avoiding what we produce. Because they won’t want to.
September 24, 2009 Leave a comment
I came across a lovely quote from Eliel Saarinen (apparently a famous Finnish architect) this morning. He was quoted by Russell Davies in an article about Rural Computing.
“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”
I really like this idea as a way of thinking about what we do.
I think context is interesting for us in two ways. Context should play a much more important role in how we understand consumer behaviour and the relationship people have with the things we advertise. And context should also play a much bigger role when we plan the how the work we produce is most effectively experienced.
I’ve never been able to articulate it very well, but I think everyone who works in the industry is conscious of the artificial, at-least-one-step-removed nature of what we do and how we do it. We often talk with a degree of self-awareness about the artificial nature of advertising agencies, and we know that as a sub-species we advertising people are very different (rather privileged, certainly sheltered) from the world-at-large, the audience for whom we are working.
We also often note that how we learn about the things we advertise is a bit contrived, as opposed to the way that ‘real’ people relate to them. We might use a new soap, eat a new bread or drive a new car with the genuine intention of learning about it so that we can better promote it, but by necessity we do it in a slightly artificial way, actively learning about it, rather than passively experiencing it. (I don’t say this as a criticism, because by definition our experience is different.)
I think we also see the same with research, where we conduct focus groups with the genuine goal of learning more about people, but in a very artificial way. We most often put people in a sterile, neutral environment and ask them to talk and explain, rather than observing ‘real’ behaviour in its genuine context. It’s like animals in zoos, or golfers in driving ranges – it approximates reality, but it just can never be the same and is therefore not as illuminating.
I think this is a real limitation because nothing is experienced devoid of context – the room makes a big difference to the chair, just as the road makes a big difference to the car.
Then there’s the context that media delivers to an execution that I think we need to place much more focus on. (I’ve written about this before.) And I really like the analogy with a room in a house as a way of thinking about it.
You can design a room in isolation. You can have a very specific brief for a living area – natural light, hardy surfaces for kids to crash into, muted colours for relaxation, ample wall space to display art etc. And you can do a great job of meeting this brief without giving any thought to the remainder of the house. But at some point you have to open the door and let the room function as part of a greater whole. And while the room might still function really well, it may be that when the rest of the house is considered you find it could be improved slightly to work more cohesively with the whole – more aesthetically consistent, easier flow from room to room. It might only be 10% better, but that will still be 10% improvement based on thinking about the room in its bigger context.
And that’s exactly what I think we miss when we separate creative and media thinking. We’re effectively designing rooms and then looking for houses to put them in.
This certainly doesn’t mean we get bad ads. We just get ads that potentially aren’t 10% more effective. Which when you’re dealing with the fine line that separates OK from truly effective, is actually a big margin and a huge sacrifice.
September 10, 2009 Leave a comment
An article in today’s Brand Republic highlights that clients find managing media pitches ‘painful’.
“More than three quarters of clients say that they find managing media agency pitches a ‘painful and time-consuming process’ but at the same time over 90% feel that it is more important than ever to get the most from the agencies they work with”.
The article is based on research conducted by Billets, a company specialising in media audits, and seems thoughtful and considered. But I got rather caught up in the first paragraph (above). There are a few observations that can be taken from this, none of which fill me with great heart.
It seems that for the majority of clients a pitch is considered the most effective means of getting the most from an agency, either, one assumes, because a pitch will deliver them an agency that can deliver more, or because a pitch is the most effective mechanism for extracting more value from an existing agency.
And it also seems that while more than 75% of clients believe it is a ‘painful and time-consuming process’ to conduct a pitch, they still believe it’s less painful and time-consuming than working with their existing agency to get the most from them.
This is slightly terrifying (as well as carrying unfortunate echoes of statistics related to divorce). Essentially, the vast majority of people would rather walk away from a relationship (agency or marriage) than work to improve it.
Why? Because they believe the failure is always the other party’s fault. And because they believe that someone else will understand them better, appreciate them more and work harder to make them happy.
Unfortunately that pretty accurately reflects my experience of clients, but, delightfully, not my experience of wives.
September 10, 2009 Leave a comment
With thanks to informationisbeautiful.net (a great site, by the way), here’s the reality of Twitter.
Doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. Doesn’t mean it’s not interesting. Doesn’t mean it’s not part of the future. Just means it’s not the be all and end all.
September 7, 2009 Leave a comment
I’m coming to the uncomfortable realisation that whenever I sit down to write something at the moment it starts negatively. And the last thing the industry needs is another negative voice, so, until the feeling passes, I’m going in search of positive things to pass on.
Like this – Skinni Popcorn. A great use for Twitter, bringing together all tweets relating to a specific movie, for a snapshot of the prevailing view.
