Both are regular targets of ridicule as time-sinks, examples of wide spread vanity, and general creepiness; and while they may be all those things – worst inventions they are not. In fact, I think there is a lot we can learn from the popularity of each. In either case, rather than mocking these games and their fans we might be better served instead by looking at what they’re telling us about societies own short comings and how we as designers, developers and strategists can not only respond to them, but try to alleviate them.

Think about this from Jane McGonigal’s recent TED presentation

“We know that we are optimized, as human beings, to do hard meaningful work. And gamers are willing to work hard all the time, if they’re given the right work.”

Then consider Time’s take on Farmville – “more a series of mindless chores” than a game. To me, the real criticism lays at a society and industrial system so devoid of meaning or fulfillment that people get more out of tending a make believe farm.

Similarly, in describing Foursquare as “Just another tool tapping into a generation of narcissism” and creating “another layer onto a generation living virtually” I have to wonder if the author has ever actually played the game. In fact, Foursquare is an outstanding example of how a game can actually move people out into the physical world. After all, you can’t really play the game without going out into the world, and the more places you visit, the higher your score. If anything, it’s the pressure coming from brands and agencies trying to find an angle and those who ask “but how does it make money?” that have pushed Foursquare away from the core that made it popular in the first place. Instead of focusing on how to make the game play better, the Foursquare team has ended up focusing on how further enable coupons and business oriented reporting tools.

While it’s easy to poke fun at either of these or write them off as nothing more than mindless wastes of time, doing so misses the message in each. While businesses decry the loss of passion and dedication of their workforce, and brands fret about a lack of relevance, the solutions are staring us in the face.

What if though, instead of that next micro-site; you, your agency, and you client actually tapped into this need for meaningful work and provided the structure and toolset for people to do it? What if a brand project was able to motivate people in the way Farmville or Foursquare does, but for something more than digital farms?

Here is a small example of how Fight is trying this:

A while ago, one of Fight’s clients, Portland General Electric came to us with a challenge – how could they use the web to get people more information about energy efficiency? While we could have set them up with a Twitter account to send out efficiency tips, or a micro-site about wind farms we decided to go a different direction. We instead started a project called Operation Switch. The purpose of Switch is to give people simple missions – installing CFL light bulbs, or washing your laundry in cold water – that while individually small, have a huge benefit when done collectively. After the first mission, Switch participants managed to make changes that will result in 14,445 fewer pounds of CO2 in the atmosphere.

We’re still in the early stages of the game, and it’s likely that we’ll continue to tune things along the way, so far peoples response to being given work that means something and then shown the results of their work, is proving that the desire to act is there it’s just up to us to help make it happen.

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!

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.

As you can probably guess from the title, the goal of the session was get people thinking about a different way to look at how brands relate to their audience, how agencies can more consistently deliver better experiences to that audience, and how and why we should be thinking about the business of our clients.

It is, in a lot of ways, a presentation version of this post

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.

This line of “logic” typically centers around two basic concepts:
1) You can’t measure the ROI of T.V. or Billboards, or any number of other marketing efforts, so why are we worried about it for the web?
2) ROI is an outmoded, and what we should be looking at is some “brand new” RO_ fill in the blank. The current favorite is something called “Return on Engagement”. Ugh.

Now, this topic is a big part of why I helped found Fight, so maybe I’m a little more sensitive than others, but this is something that has affected every agency I’ve worked for, and every agency every one of my friends has worked for. My feeling is that as long as we, as an industry, wave our hands at this, we’re just going to keep fighting the battles with our clients that we always have. Until we embrace our role, and benefit, to the business of our clients, we’ll always be the ones with the shrinking budgets, forced to justify everything we do in some sort of aesthetic argument with people who may or may not have any understanding of what we do. Instead of looking at ROI as a limit to creative freedom, we should be embracing it as our single best path forward in expanding that freedom.

Looking at point 1) Can one measure the ROI of a billboard or a T.V. spot? Possibly. I would say probably. But lets say for the sake of argument that we can’t. What does that have to do with anything? Shouldn’t we be measuring the value of our work where ever we can? And besides, the web stands to be possibly the most important marketing tool available precisely because it can be so well measured. I have no idea why we’d ignore such a powerful aspect to this medium.

As for point 2) The fact of the matter is this: Every single thing our clients “invest” (or, for clarification, pay us) in, has some sort of “return”. The fact that aspects of this return may be hard to measure doesn’t mean it’s not there. Without knowing what to measure, and how to measure it though, we’re left just guessing if our work has any value. Worse, we can’t prove its value to our clients. The real problem here arises when agencies fail to ask questions of their clients at the start of projects. Is increased sales the reason your client came to you? Then you better be sure you design a program to increase sales, and then measure your results. Is “engagement” the most important thing to them? Then the return on their investment is a demonstration of increased engagement. Find out how to measure that.

Continuing to ignore the role of ROI in marketing, or worse, couching it some sort of pseudo-science, is not just a sign systemic laziness in our industry, it’s keeping us in the backseat when it comes to our role in business when we should helping to lead the way.