this is violence

A few months ago I was listening to NPR and there was a person on talking about the miniaturization of technology and it’s relationship to the power of the individual. The rationale went something like this: 100 years ago, to launch a serious military attack against a country would require an army of tens or hundreds of thousands, a massive industrial complex and logistical resources to make it all work. Today, sadly, the technology exists for a team of hundreds, or perhaps even dozens, to use tiny nuclear weapons to wage a potentially even more deadly attack, without the support of a nation and without any warning. Regardless of the likelihood that this scenario could unfold, the larger point, that the power any single individual has to affect large scale change is inversely proportional to size of technology is clearly accurate.

Im nothing if not macabre, so this naturally lead me to thinking about advertising. Specifically, advertising and brands online

I wouldn’t be the first to talk about the failure of advertising on the web, or the minimizing effect the web has on large brands, but I think the most critical thing that the marketing industry is missing is that the miniaturization of technology and the hyper connectedness this enables is not the ultimate advertising tool we’ve been lead to believe it is, it’s actually the most destructive concept in the history of our industry. We work in an environment in which any day, and increasingly day-by-day, without warning, without the support of a major brand, any individual is capable of introducing a piece of technology that completely disrupts the existing landscape.

With a system unencumbered by the notion of scarcity, or locality; and where an individual can create and distribute an idea or a digital product with the exact same effectiveness that an major multi-national corporation can, what use is a big brand? And if big brands are of no use, what use is a big ad agency? While we’re frantically trying to understand how digital integrates into our latest campaign, or what metrics to track for our banners, or what our Facebook strategy is, the same people we’re trying to sell to are making their own entertainment, sharing their own information and making their own products and services without us. Agencies are all scrambling, looking for better advertising, and we’re missing the fact that people don’t want better advertising, they want better experiences and what we’re all witnessing is that they don’t have to wait for us, or our brands, to give it to them, they’re taking it themselves.

Unfortunately, for large brands and the agencies that support them I think the biggest problem is structural: Agencies are designed, both physically and culturally, to codify methodologies within static systems. Historically, this has been their strength. Television, radio, and print all work this way. There is a definition to the medium and it’s relationship to the viewer, a fundamental and fixed structure. We then take this system and wrap it two or three times a year with a bow we call the “campaign.” But none of this exists online, there is no singular “web”, there is no context to how people get and experience information, there are only contexts, and they’re growing and changing every day. Every new site, every new product, every new project is disruptive and there is no possible way to know in advance the level to which any of them will break down the entire system we’ve designed our system around.

The key to survival is going to be rethinking our relationship to both our clients and their customers. We will have to acknowledge that we’re not dealing with a broadcast medium and that the notion of a campaign is anathema to how people interact with the web. Rather than slogans and one-liners, we need to be designing products, digital products, but products none the less. We will design these and release them and people will use them in ways we didn’t imagine and that we’ll have to adapt to. The idea that we launch a project and it’s finished is also over. We’ll become comfortable with idea the our projects will grow and change and adapt not based on our plans but based on what our clients customers demand of them. Most important though is the we need to abandon the notion that we know how all this is done. The agencies that survive will be ones that learn to love change, that understand that every project is an entity all it’s own and that it’s not technique or new technology that will save us, but a fundamental understanding of the medium and the human element that defines it.