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.”

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.