Well – this came out today. I’m always hesitant to reference surveys where I don’t know the methodology, but it does seem to suggest that Adidas’ consistent, multimodal approach is outpacing Nike’s single event.

“Half the game in buzz is ‘fanning the flames’. The Adidas football facebook page, for instance, is now up to over a million fans and they are dropping new content several times a day, all while the average post is generating upwards of 100 comments. At the end of the day, brands need to keep the buzz ball in the air as long as possible – sponsored or otherwise,”
- Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president of digital strategy at Nielsen.

Too often advertising gets confused with marketing, and the result are efforts that focus on single spikes of awareness rather than long-term affinity. Making a commercial like Write the Future is incredibly expensive and while it generated a lot of buzz early on, without support, there are just too many other things happening all the time for it to remain front of mind.

More over, this style of marketing lacks any ability to react or adjust. WK and Nike took a big gamble that least ONE of the players in the commercial making it deep into the World Cup, now it would seem they’re stuck with a commercial that is irrelevant. You’d think both WK and Nike would have learned their lesson after the Kobe/Lebron playoff commercials.

I wonder how much better that budget could have been spent developing projects to actually connect with fans regardless of the outcome of the games rather than a mini-movie. It’s not that great advertising isn’t important, but it’s not a replacement for being there, interacting with your customers and creating the kinds of experiences that can last over time.

Here is how I responded:

I think the author is well intentioned, and in a lot of ways, dead on about the issues of advertising online. My issue is that I don’t think fixing advertising is going to be what ultimately helps brands online.

My view is that advertising isn’t just a tactical approach, it’s also a way of thinking. It has fundamental notions of how the marketplace works and how brands relate to their customers. Advertising is about punctuating one narrative stream with another, something that doesn’t exist online. There is no stream online. Agencies, I think, often underestimate the power of the hyperlink. It defines the way people conceptualize the web, and it’s non-linear.

The web has fundamentally changed this brand/customer relationship though, and presented brands with opportunity to not just talk about themselves, but to actually provide a real and meaningful experience rather than just the promise of an experience at some later time. If a brand wants to know what the future is, or an agency for that matter, it’s not contained in the mindset of advertising, rather it’s in the world of product and service design.

There is a reason restaurants don’t advertise their food IN THEIR OWN RESTAURANTS. So much better to give them a great meal with great service once they’re already there. The web is a brands restaurant, the people are there. Give them something to love.

You can listen to part one here. And Part two here. For you convenience, I made sure to annoyingly tap on the table in both, so you don’t have to worry about missing that.

Bret has interviewed some other really interesting people (most with far more pleasant voices than mine), so while you’re there, you should check some of the other interviews out.

All that said, there is a reason I got into this. I love brands, and I love advertising. It’s this love that makes me so aware of how much more culturally important I think advertising used to be. Allowing for the possibility that I have an unhealthy relationship with this industry, I pulled some examples I love that I think demonstrate this.

First – two classics. The first one is very likely why I got into advertising in the first place.

I think this one may be one of the more perfect commercials I’ve ever seen.

But it’s not all nostalgia. Here are a couple from around 2006 and 2008 respectively.

When I was watching these again this morning, I realized a few things about them. First, each one I think uses the medium pretty much perfectly. When I was in college I took a short story writing class and the professor described the method of short story writing not as shorting a longer story, but as telling the entire story by fully rendering one single moment to become a metaphor for the entire narrative. I think each of these does that perfectly. They’re each 30 second spots, but each one is a complete story told through one single element or theme.

Second, each them is unrepentantly ernest. I was listing to the Talk of the Nation interview with Bob Garfield a couple weeks ago where he was talking about what he called “advertisings worship at the alter of comedy” and it struck me how true this is. Maybe it’s just a matter of taste, but I miss when an agency and brand where not afraid to say “yes, this is culturally important.”

Looking back now, it occurs to me how balls-y these ads actually where. Comparing them to something like the current Nike MVP ads, there is a safety and a distance in the humor. For me, there is something wonderful about the ads above that take the risk of saying “yes, sports matter, Nike matters.” They wore their convictions on their sleeves and in doing so took on a level of noble vulnerability.

So there you have it, proof I don’t hate advertising.

As a bonus, Ishtar makes an appearance!

The bad thing about a dictatorship is that once the leader looses it, the whole thing starts to come undone. And they always lose it. There’s always something, some person, some event, that starts to place seeds of doubt and in the end, that single point of vision becomes a tyrannical mess of paranoia and irrational behavior. It’s clear Jobs hates Google. Not in a competitive way, but in some deep, personal and increasingly irrational way. For a guy who seems to have never made much of a bad decision, this target fixation has seemed over the last months to begin to take him off his game.

iAd is, for me, the first real manifestation of this unraveling.

Thursday morning, I tried to get out of the house early so I could stop by Voodoo doughnuts on my way into the office. One of the advantages of having your own agency is that you can declare any day that Steve Jobs is on stage as a company holiday. I had made it known early in the week that we’d be taking the morning off and taking over the conference room to project various tech blogs, eat doughnuts, and talk about Apple magic as it happened. For most of the presentation, for 6 “tent poles”, thats exactly what we did. Then came tent pole 7, iAd.

Here is my fundamental problem with iAd: It’s make no sense from a brand strategy point of view. It’s irrational, and philosophically counter to nearly every previous decision Apple has made under Jobs. To be clear, it’s not crazy in the way that most people will ever notice, after all, most of us have spent the last 15 years being trained to expect display advertising as just a way of life. But advertising is fundamentally user hostile. That’s the core nature of it, it’s why it works. It makes you stop whatever you were doing and look at something else that you didnt choose to. While it probably seems histrionic to take something so seemingly small and blow it up to this size, I do believe this marks a fundamental change in motivation for Jobs and Apple.

What Id like to do is agree with people like John Gruber that Apples motivations are to preserve the overall user experience of the iPhone, and honestly up until iPhone 4, that has always been what I believed. But iAd negates that premise on fundamental level. This is the first time I can think of Apple has chosen to make money at the direct expense of it’s customers product experience. People can, and have, argued for a long time that those of us supporting Apple and its draconian control of it’s platforms we’re just begging for this to happen. But I think it’s critical to consider that until iAd, the goal was to create a specific notion of quality user experience. For many of people, it wasn’t the experience they wanted, but that it was customer focused is hard to deny.

Of course there are already ads in applications so it could be argued that iAd doesn’t really change much. Or, to Jobs’ point in the presentation, this is a chance to make those ads better. This line of reasoning doesn’t seem to hold water though either. For a company allegedly so focused on preservation of good user experience that they’re willing to through Adobe under a bus, why would they invest so heavily in making intrinsic to the iPhone experience a system that would invite what is arguably the worst aspect of user experience on the web into their device? I can’t think of a reason. But the real difference here is that with iAd, Apple has actual financial motivation to have the iPhone/App UX degraded. Previously, Apple could take no position on in App advertising, but now, with a 30% cut of each ad, the more ads that go out, the better Apple does.

One could argue that Apple introducing iAd is better for their customers in that it allows more developers more opportunity to create applications and make a living off them. And this is true. But if Apples motivation were bring more developers into the fold, why on the same day they announce iAd would they choose to proactively lock out Flash as a development platform. Gruber’s take on this, as it has been from the start, is the Flash is simply not capable of producing a user experience at a level Apple feels is on par with the overall device. Fair enough. But if UX is the central issue, it’s hard argue that in app advertising, ads Apple will not be vetting, produce any better UX than Flash. After all, iAd gives huge amounts of iPhone user experience control to ad agencies, people with no track record of being able to produce anything other than bad UX and no motivation, monetarily or otherwise, to do anything other than throw away work.

Rather than spending their time and resources to update the App Store, something thats been asked for from nearly day one, iAd seems to be an investment by Apple in a race to the bottom. Tying application developers’ livelihood to the same display ad system that has left huge parts of the content creation industry on the web in shambles. Why not instead invest in making structural updates to the actual purchasing process to help elevate the developers doing the best work, and then help them find a way to actually charge a living wage for their work? Why not take the same, revolutionary approach Apple always has and find a way to free developers from having to find ad real-estate in their applications so they can focus on continuing to make their, and Apple’s, products even better?

The only logical answer is clear: To beat Google.

But given that a company whose name has always been tied to changing the game, such an investment in playing someone else’s game leaves me wondering: does Apple have the cultural and organizational underpinnings to manage a system that is both open to outside development and the clear frontrunner in a category, while maintaining their history of a clear focus on user experience? If iAd is any indication, the answer is no.

With Mac, Apple has always been able to be the contrarian second place. Making huge profits while catering to a smaller, but vastly more loyal base of fans. The iPod on the other hand is clearly the industry leading platform, but it’s closed. Apple has always had top to bottom control of everything that goes it save for the music. iPhone is something different though. It’s neither the plucky niche product of Mac, nor the highly controlled iPod.

In Apple’s seemingly desperate effort to control this rapidly expanding system, the strains on the dictatorial system are becoming evident, and it’s not clear Apple has the systems in place to stay sane. In fact, it would seem this new found position has resulted in increased paranoia and a fixation on beating specific competitors in specific ways rather than making revolutionary advancements. That they would try to lump iAd in with other user focused features is either completely disingenuous, or evidence of increasing detachment from reality. For whatever reason, Jobs has decided his mission now is to beat Google first, beat Adobe second, everything else comes third, including Apple user experience.

This isn’t to say that Apple will stop making good products, they’ll likely continue to for a long while. But as a post-Jobs Apple moves nearer, the questions of what drives the company without him become more important. iAd is a strong signifier of the kind of brand confusion that I think is beginning to emerge, and without Jobs in place, the “do what it takes to make money” path is now just viable as the “make great products” one. We’ve all seen “money at any cost” Apple of the 90′s, and it wasn’t pretty.

The good news is this: if you do manage to punch the monkey, you’ll win an iPad.

There seems to be a lot of concern recently that

A) Advertising is in crisis, and
B) That nerds, MBAs, bean-counters, data, numbers and/or strategists are to blame

While I agree there is reason to worry, I’m quite certain the underlying problem has nothing to do with nerds, or MBA’s, strategists or…numbers. Rather I believe the core problem is rooted in a culture of complacency within the creative leadership of agencies themselves.

I can’t talk about creative leadership without thinking about Bill Bernbach. It’s sadly ironic to me that many of the creative directors who came to advertising largely because of the thinking that came out of the creative revolution are the very same who now seem to not be able to see the forest for the trees in this new era. It seems important to remember now that in the 1960′s and 70′s, T.V. wasn’t just a new technology for entertainment and advertising, it fundamentally changed society. Bernbach realized this, and saw that ideas and methodologies that had worked for so long in advertising were no longer relevant. I think the same thing is happening now, though possibly in an even more profound way. The fact of the matter is, the web and network connected devices are new technology, but they have also changed society in deep and permanent ways. Ideas and methodologies that used to work, simply don’t anymore, and any hope of remaining relevant will require a revolutionary new way of looking at things.

While it’s easy to point the finger at the new comers for the lack of big thinking, it’s been my experience that most agencies and most CD’s are so singularly focused on one notion of what “big thinking” can look like they’ve painted themselves into a corner and have yet to produce a single piece of socially important work online. As I did months ago, I have to repeat Andrew Keller’s question “Why didn’t Kodak’s agency come up with Flickr?” I could add “Why didn’t Coors’ agency come up with Foursquare?” Why have agencies relegated themselves to reacting to the creative, paradigm shifting thinking of others instead of producing it themselves? Over the last 15 years, brands have looked to agencies and their creative firepower to keep them relevant, and with frighteningly few exceptions, they’ve uniformly failed.

In his AdAge article, Tom Hinkes laments “Marketing departments used to be the creative engines powering successful corporations.” His solution to get back to this is for us to “Use the Force”

I’m not comfortable leaving the future of this industry to something George Lucas made up.

Instead, I submit that the solution is for us to actually be the “creative engines” again. To push ourselves to ask bigger questions than the next campaign, the next slogan, the next commercial, the next micro-site. We should be pushing ourselves to not just fill the medium, but to define it. To do this, will require more than just one point of view. Yes, great CD’s, AD’s and copywriters remain critical, but the problems are too complex for just this team. Instead, by bringing in “nerds” and by leveraging, rather than fighting data, we can tell the stories of the success of our work in terms “bean-counters” can care about. Instead of saying “trust us”, we have the opportunity now to actually prove the value of our work on a number of different levels. But more importantly, by broadening our definition of “creative” and by bringing strong analytical, customer research, strategic and business minds to the table at the very beginning of projects, and doing so not simply in support of the “creative team”, our work can actually become important again.

Ultimately, if we’re going to survive, it will be critical that we bring to bear the one thing that still differentiates great agencies: the ability to organize many people of different skill sets around one vision. The fact is this: the current system isn’t working and the reality is that the march of technology is make things more complex, not less. So while big thinking is critical, it’s just as critical to come to terms with the fact the big thinking doesn’t lie solely in the hands of “creatives.”

These are all actual lines I’ve heard, just this week, in support of ignoring the role of ROI in establishing the effectiveness of brand efforts in the social media space. There are hundreds of others. Ignoring for a second the completely arbitrary and increasing flawed notion that “social media” is distinct from the web in general at this point, each of these examples continues to point to the exuberant ignorance so many of “social media experts” flaunt on a nearly daily basis when talking about their own work and value.

A couple points I’d like to make:

1) Each one of these is used as though it were rhetorical, when in fact, businesses make judgements on these types of questions every single day. Every restaurant owner has to pay ACTUAL dollars to maintain their washroom. This is one aspect of their “I”nvestment in their business. In “R”eturn they hope this invest plays a part in people dining at their establishment. If this restaurant owner wanted to find a more solid dollar value of this investment, she could easily just block off the restroom and see the effect on her business. Whats the ROI on mowing the lawn? Ask Nike how much they spend maintaining the grounds of their WHQ campus. Then ask them how much of a factor that campus is on retention for them. Want to know the ROI on putting your pants on? Try going to work one morning without pants. Then try paying your rent once you’ve been fired. Thats ROI.

My point is this: it’s fun and cute to toss these pithy lines around, but it might be worth your time to make sure they’re based in some semblance of reality first. Your own inability to see the value in these things only proves YOU can’t measure it, it doesn’t mean there isn’t value.

2) I’d be inclined to let the purveyors of this flawed logic hang their own careers expect for this: when you devalue your work, you devalue mine too. While YOU may have to wave your hands at the notion that YOUR work has any measurable return, I don’t. But when you pedal this baloney, you make the hill steeper for all of us.

Please stop.

I not only believe the work Fight does contributes positively to the bottom line of our clients, we work very hard to prove it. When you say things like “Whats the ROI of putting on pants?” you’re basically equating the work I do to something literally any one can and does do every single day. The logical conclusion a client could draw from this is that brand activities on the social web are something that you should do, but not really consider, or worry about, or invest in. Like pants. Im not sure then how this leads to needing specialists. I don’t need to hire a special person to put my pants on me each day. If helping brands succeed on the web is the same thing, why would hire any one to help me with that?

I don’t know. Something.

The whole thing seems very conceptually messy and comes off like the whining of the prima donnas I think most people believe make up the ad industry.

Setting aside for a moment the really just terrible way the message has been tactically implemented, the over arching complaint I think does the opposite of what it set out to do. After spending the last 20 years commodifying the industry, and increasingly obfuscating the actual value of their work, agencies seem somehow surprised that their clients would treat them like…commodities of unverified value. Then, instead of hunkering down and actually trying to change the way they do business, instead of demonstrating clearly their unique and irreplaceable value to their clients, they pull a “we’re taking our ball and going home” routine.

But only for a week. Because goddamn if agencies just have 0 ability to think past the next campaign. Then, just to pour salt on the wound, they break up their complaint letter into 26 fragments, and post it all IN FLASH.

TEXT.
IN FLASH.

Way to show your clients you understand how to work online.

Here is my message back to these agencies:
You made this bed. You devised a business model 30 years ago and have been sitting on it ever since. You say you’re the gateway to the customer, you say you’re creative vision, the “design thinking”; but all you’ve been pedaling is your self-aggrandizing, T.V. based narrative for as long as any one can remember. You are, in fact, an uncreative dinosaur of an industry and this is what happens.

David Walker was on The Daily Show a couple nights back and while the topic of the interview was macro level economics, he got into an exchange with Jon Stewart that felt familiar to me. The above quote was in response to Stewart paraphrasing Walkers book asking

“what is the purpose of this plan? Do we have any metrics and goals that these can achieve?”

I think this gets to what’s missing in the strategic planning of many agencies and marketing groups. It’s easy to come up with lots of interesting ideas, but what’s the reason for them? Every time I hear about a Facebook strategy, or a Twitter strategy, I wonder if any one asked “why?” What are the goals the Facebook strategy is trying to achieve and are those the right goals to be striving for? Once you have those goals, what are the metrics you’re using to show you’re reaching your goals.

It’s sad how often I see analysis brought in after the project is finished to help show that it worked, that it was the right project to do. In reality we should be bringing this thinking in at the very start. Bringing analytical reasoning at the start of a project may get us more quickly to asking “I know we said ‘Facebook strategy’, but what does success there mean, and what does it get us? How do we measure it?”

Asking this upfront not only helps prove value to the client, it makes the rest of the project a lot easier to run. Everyone knows what the goals are and why. Designers can design to them, programmers can build to them, debates can be settled based on project goals rather than personal arguments, and everyone can bring their insights to the table and push the project in the same direction.