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If you were looking for a sign of the ad industry’s health, you would have been really pleased with the main message that Boards Summit 2009 keynote speaker Stefan Sagmeister put forward. Instead of focusing on the recent economic collapse, about 600 people listened to Stefan recommend taking a year off every seven years to recharge and work on new ideas. Good times ahead! |
Where are we today as consumers?
“People have gone from living in ! to living in ?.” – slide from Bob Deutsch’s presentation, Brain Sells
Over the last 18 months, people have gone from a world of high expectations (i.e. skyrocketing housing and stock market prices) to expectations of a diminished future. We’ve watched a world that is too fast, complex and competitive escalate to uncertainty and unpredictability. What is a marketer to do in a world that is swinging between extremes?
“Dad, what’s digital?” – Eliza, 11
In an amazingly short timeframe, digital media capture, management and delivery has completely redefined our industry. It’s also becoming invisible and assumed, the true sign of technology success. AICP officially unveiled the new AICP Digital chapter at the conference, which prompted Charles Day from Lookinglass Consultants to ask, “what’s not digital?” Does that make AICP into AICP Analog? 
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“These days consumers are not prisoners.” – Rei Inamoto, AKQA
The Panopticon was a prison methodology developed in 1785 that allowed a central observer to control the largest number of prisoners with the most efficiency. For 50 years, marketers were in the middle, beaming out their messages to a captive audience that their product contained the key to happiness. Within the last five years, this paradigm has shifted putting the consumer in the middle, giving them the power of surveillance over brands.
“Friends will be the new search engine.” – Rei Inamoto, AKQA
When one person sends out a message to a group on Facebook or Twitter, she is broadcasting. When hundreds of millions of people send out messages about products they use, they become brand spokespeople. Brands with strong social media practices spend months interacting with and learning from these new spokespeople before launching new product. Brands new to social media usually start by reacting to negative commentary. Which approach sounds best for you?
“It’s not what we can do for a brand, it’s what a brand can do for us.” – Rei Inamoto, AKQA
For 50 years, consumers enjoyed free TV programming in exchange for their time watching commercial messages. This dynamic is breaking down as 50% of viewers with DVRs skip over the commercials. Brands cannot offer you free time (here, have an extra hour of your life on us), so they need to find a new value exchange, a.k.a. earned media. To reach more autonomous, independent consumers, brands need to generate more authentic stories or experiences.
Where are we as an industry?
“We’re all fucked.” – Rick Webb, The Barbarian Group
Trevor Edwards, corporate VP at Nike said that, “We are not in the business of keeping the media companies alive.“ Newer brands are already achieving better results for less without professional marketers. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, has 1.5 million followers on Twitter and has sent out almost 1900 messages — for $0 — to people who want to hear from him. Wow. Done right, earned media can be more effective than paid media, showing that Rick may be right.
“For a group of communicators, we don’t communicate very well.” – Jerry Solomon, EP of Epoch Films
Jerry continued by saying that “Tech didn’t just give us a new medium, it killed paid media. Earning a lot of positive media is really f’n hard.” If the future is all about building long-term, meaningful relationships with consumers, then we as an industry need to know how to do just that. Hours can’t be given away. Clear metrics are not available. Meaningful case studies haven’t been written yet. “We’re ahead of the competition, but behind our customers. If we don’t try, we will leave the whole thing to the social media experts, and we don’t want that,” Jerry concluded.
“We’re not all fucked.” – Hashem Bajwa, Droga 5
Marketing expertise is still in demand and consumers are still open to messages, as long as we give them something of value. “People love brands,” Hashem continued, “It’s our job is to walk people back toward brands.”
Ted Royer, ECD of Droga5, talked about the value of the “lazy ask,” which refers to creating compelling requests that are easy to do for a good cause. The Tap Project, now in its fourth year, asks people to “give a dollar for something you normally enjoy for free at the moment you are already enjoying it.” That money then goes to help provide clean water for underprivileged people around the world. The formula works like this:
Advocate > Lazy audience > Lazy ask
As Ted mentioned, “Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find an easier way to do something.” The interesting theme is that all of Droga 5’s lazy ask projects are cause-based marketing efforts, not purely product-driven efforts.
As Nick Law pointed out earlier this year, agencies need to learn how to build systems, as well as tell stories, in order to build longer term engagement. Agencies send out work to die. It’s launched in Q1 and replaced in Q2. A joke that’s funny the first time becomes less interesting the more you hear it, whereas a game of chess becomes more interesting the more you play it. The future is bright for agencies who can build systems (Droga5‘s Million campaign, Nike +, Fiat’s Ecodrive) and then use storytelling to drive traffic.
A great investment is to build infrastructure for shared experiences, like providing a local WiFi system so everyone can communicate to the outside. For example, marketers are testing interactivity during the retail experience, setting up an instant photo booth to allow friends to solicit feedback for clothing and outfits in real time. This approach connects people together – “does this dress look good on me?” – and helps the retailer move more product and reduce returns.
How do we make work fresh?
As a species, humans have a hard time dealing with change. But we are forced to adapt to ever-increasing change. So, how do you build change into the discipline of creative design? Back to Stefan Sagmeister’s keynote. He exposed the idea of sabbatical as a necessity, not luxury, for truly high-performing creative people. His plan is to intersperse five retirement years into peak working years: one year of sabbatical for every seven years of working. His main rule is to pursue something you’ve never done before. The result is that Stefan’s sabbatical research flows directly back into studio and back into society, not just benefiting a grandchild or two.
Put into context, his sabbatical represents 12.5% time off over eight years, which is considerably less than Google’s 20% policy. Both Stefan and Google point out that over 40% of their best ideas come from this time off. Stefan chooses only to work on projects that matter to him. So when the job becomes tough, he never wonders why he’s working on it. To stave off boredom and anxiety, he also looks to design projects that feel partly brand new and partly familiar. Stefan figured out how to make his nine to five job into a calling.
During Stefan’s keynote, I noticed that about 20 people out of 600 in the audience have taken a sabbatical. Hopefully, the economy will return to normal and the rest of us will learn how to prevent ourselves from remaining “normal”. Great food for thought, indeed.
Regards,
Bill