this is violence

“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him”

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement from Philosophical Investigations is a sort of heartbreaking realization for anyone who has ever bargained with their pets, as I have, offering all sorts of rewards if only they would admit that they can speak. At it’s core though, this idea also rings fundamentally true to me, separating the concept of hearing from understanding and asking if we can ever really understand something without the empathy that comes from similarity.

A few years ago I was listening to Andrew Keller give a presentation about CPB and at one point he asked the audience, maybe rhetorically,

“Why didn’t Kodak’s agency come up with Flickr? How much more relevant might Kodak have been in digital photography if they had come up with Flickr?”

The question has stuck with me since, serving as a sort of a personal challenge. Over time, I’ve posed this question to a number other people, and although almost universally their response has been that it wasn’t possible, rarely could anyone articulate exactly why. This just added to the challenge for me. Why not? What was so fundamentally or structurally different about Flickr from any other run of the mill marketing site that made people so certain that it was impossible for some agency, somewhere, to create it?

What I’ve come to believe is that it has nothing to do with the idea itself but rather it’s that, from the perspective of the advertising world, the web is Wittgenstien’s lion. There are instances where agencies hear the web talking and they recognize the words it’s saying but, in the end, the web, the people who create for it, and the social dynamics that drive it are that lion. There is no understanding because there is empathy because there is no similarity.

It was dysfunctional from the start, going back to the very beginning of the relationship between agencies and the web both as a concept and a practice. For the most part agencies didn’t get into the web because they had any great love for the medium, but rather because there was money to be made by adding another channel to the mix. Viewed as addition to the creative arc that existed, the history and the nature of the web was never really a consideration and as time has gone on, the web and agencies have drifted further apart.

Part of this drift I believe is rooted in the structure of mediums that make up advertising. A key element of what makes agencies work is being able to reduce a medium down to a set of finite, permanent truths and techniques and then codifying them. The existence of these fixed rules and the mastery of them is what allows an agency to focus on concept and execution rather than having to spend their time constantly reexamining the core fundamentals of the of any given medium. The web on the other hand, seems to defy consistent explanation. If I describe the web as a system of hyperlinked documents, thats technically true, but it fails to explain the underlying power or social importance we know the web has. Even trying to explain the technically simple Twitter to someone who’s never used it can prove perplexing. What use does anyone have for broadcasting 140 characters worth of content? But further, listening to people explain Twitter more often turns into an explanation of that person’s experience with it. For some it’s a CRM tool, for others it’s quasi instant messaging, for others its a news stream, for many it’s a combination of all of these and more. For Maureen Dowd it’s the end of civilization. Most often, what I hear is: “you just need to try it to understand it.”

To see this in action, you don’t have to look much further than the Modernista! “site” or the Skittles attempt at the same thing. In both cases the “words” of the web are all there: Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Google; but what’s not clear is whether there is any understanding. Certainly Modernista! understands the mechanics of each of these, they get the function. But why did Modernista! put portfolio on Flickr for example? Is it to have a conversation about the work? As far as I have found, no conversation exists. What does Skittles want me to know about them from a tweet stream? That people eat their candy? In both cases, the goal seems more to demonstrate their mastery of the toolset than to engage in any meaningful way with the web as a social construct. Moderista! is a useful example, but they represent the rule when it comes to agencies and the web. Take the new site for Booneoakley. Lauded by the ad world as “embracing social media”, it is, in my view, a commercial. Yes, the videos are on YouTube, but thats the end of it. Again, it’s reducing the web down to a set of tools on to which one sets graphic design.

But in my mind, and even bigger part of this drift is based in the motivations and definitions of success within agencies. Advertising is, as a culture, about a single great event. It’s about the rush of make or break moments and the success of individuals. Its entire structure both physically and culturally has evolved to support this, from the make up of project teams, to the relationships with clients, to the award shows. The precognitive creative director, the image of the art director and the copy writer sitting around late into the night until the perfect idea is hatched, the pressure of the pitch, the reveal of the single amazing idea; these moments are mythic and they have been repeated season after season, year after year for decades. But this high risk/high payoff endeavor also requires fixed targets and the ability to master techniques. It becomes almost impossibly difficult to justify investing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, the reputation of the agency and ultimately the client’s brand on a concept whose technological or social underpinnings may be irrelevant before the concept is even executed. This is why T.V. is to advertising what the web never has or could be: For 60 years the fundamental nature of the medium has remained fixed, allowing people and agencies to become masters of its manipulation rather than having to re-learn the fundamentals every 6 weeks. The ownership of the medium extended past the creative execution to ad buying and even to defining the measurements of success. It’s this history that drives articles targeting agencies with titles like “10 tactics for success in social media”, “How to measure ROI on the web” or “Whats the Next Hot Thing Online?” It’s the need for solid and stable jumping off point, the need to have mastered the fundamental framework and have it reduced to simple, repeatable process.

For the most part, none of this really exists with web projects. This is evident in the content of those articles and the fact that article by article, week by week, it would seem the rules and advice constantly change. And of course, they do. The web is, by the most generous estimate maybe 15 years old, still in its primordial state, undulating, cracking and rebuilding. This might offer some hope that as it matures as a medium, it may gain the stability of something like T.V., but I think this is unlikely. Practically speaking, without something like the FCC, there is simply no organizing force to create stabilization. But more importantly I think it’s unlikely because, going back to the attempts at defining Twitter, the first task in stabilizing something is to define it, and rather than moving towards definition, the web is racing faster and faster away from it. As connectivity become more ubiquitous, the web as a concept is actually broadening so far it’s now beginning to consume other mediums. Take Hulu, for example. What part of that is the web and what part is T.V.? Or XBox’s platform for networked gaming, which currently also allows for the streaming of movies, and will soon include the ability to browse movies as well as integration into Facebook and Twitter. Or, consider for a moment that as this connectivity shrinks the distance between us it will also force us to acknowledge that for most of the world, the interface of the web isn’t through a laptop, but through a cellphone. And finally, we must reconcile the fact that they very notion of “laptop”, “cellphone” and “T.V.” are changing right in front of us.

Going back to our initial question, it’s easy then to understand why Flickr didn’t come out of an agency. Rather than the single big idea or the snappy slogan, Flickr is the result of a constant collaboration with members. Rather than a fixed structure, Flickr is a reaction to the ever changing technical and cultural landscape of the web that surrounds it. Rather than the vision of a single Creative Director or copywriter, Flickr represents the work of user experience designers, interface designers, analytics experts and developers of all stripes. Rather than seasonal campaign, Flickr is the result of years of consistent development and refinement. It lacks nearly every characteristic that would be recognizable to an agency. But, how valuable would have it been to Kodak? How might it have changed their relationship with their customers? If value on the web is about the experience, what’s the value to a brand to own an experience like Flickr? If attention is the only scarce commodity online, what is that attention worth?

There will probably always be a need for advertising. The sheer ubiquity of the web though will require brands to rethink their value to their customers and reconcile their place online. If the agencies of today want a part of brands finding that place, and I would argue if they want to continue to stay in business, there will have to be more than an evolution, there will have to be a revolution. Agencies will not only have to reinvent the way they see themselves, but the way they see the world, the way they relate to their client and to dramatically broaden their understanding of why they exist at all. Our notion of hierarchy will have to change. Our concept of how a project lives and grows will have to change. Even our idea of what a project is or can be will change. The web breaks down so many of the structures weve built, and the same flattened landscape that our clients will have to deal with faces us as well, a failure to come to terms with this will ultimatly threaten the existance of what we call an agency. It’s a lion speaking to us, and our survival depends on not just hearing it, but finding some way to understand it.