This is Violence

Unfast Strategy

You know the rule about how you can pick on your younger brother, but no one else can? Yeah, this post is that.

The role of the strategist is hard enough without us making it harder on ourselves, so when I see this sort of thing going on, I immediately go into Honey Badger attack mode.

I will bite you if you mess with strategist. I will also bite you if you’re a bad strategist.

My input to developing a Fast Strategy app? Don’t.

Here’s the thing: if you’re a strategist, and you believe that what you do makes things better, or if you employ or work with a strategist, and you believe what they do is worthwhile, then you shouldn’t be looking for “fast” you should be looking for “better.”

I think, more than anything, this is a symptom of an industry that has little respect for strategy. What makes me sad is to see strategists play right into this. Marketing, in all it’s forms including advertising, is a culture that lionizes the tactician above all else. This is the root of the “think less, do more” mentality that is so pervasive. Anyone who isn’t writing copy, designing things or programming, is essentially interchangeable. What happens then is that everyone else has to fit their process into the mould set by creative directors, art directors and copywriters.

Thus - Fast Strategy.

It’s not that I think it’s necessary for a strategy to be long - some of my best work was a half-page. Nor do I think it’s needs be over-wrought, simple and understandable is always better. But I can’t think of what we gain by seeking to speed through the strategic process. It doesn’t make what we do any more respected, and actually just further commoditizes it.

Worse, most of the advice doled in Fast Strategy out isn’t strategic at all. Some of it is just plain bad.

Do not ever do this. Ever.

If there is one thing I would change in this industry that I think would instantly result in not just a better product, but in an actual better world, it’s the notion that “creative rules”. First of all, let’s be straight here: “creative” is art direction and copywriting. The implied notion that everything that is not design or copy isn’t creative is both factually wrong, and exemplary of the sort of ego-centric pyramid that runs advertising. But moving beyond that, if you’re going to hire a strategist, or bring a strategist into your project, shouldn’t their role be to develop the strategic framework that provides the basis for determining what good “creative” is in the first place? It’s hard to do that if you have to fit your strategy to existing design and copy.

At the same time, I think there is a way to take what I think is at the heart of this and make it more useful. Sometime when we’re working on a project and having a hard time articulating for ourselves the strategy that the data and our research is telling us, we’ll go ahead and just toss out some very executional ideas that feel directionally correct. We write all these down, and then spend some time trying to break down why they felt right into some abstract building blocks. Taking each concept and testing it against the data we have and the goals of the project. If it answers those questions well we ask why and how it was able to. What we’re left are the core strategic tenets any idea will need to be successful. Sometimes we keep the original concept, but just as often we toss it because understanding the framework it represented leads us to far better ideas. Execution can be a nice way to back into strategy, but you should never, ever, let it replace strategy.

This borders on a Hallmark card.

That said, it does feel good to take on the mantle of perpetual outsider, and sometimes it can be the right place to go. Running a very small shop, and often working for smallish clients, I find we regularly have to use asymmetrical approaches to complete effectively. What we don’t do, what’s really dangerous is taking on a stance that whatever the competition is doing is wrong. If they say “red”, it’s worth your time to understand why they’re saying “red” because “red” might actually be the right answer.

Instead I think this sentiment, which is rooted in fairly ancient strategic concepts, is better captured in understanding who you’re competing with and what they’re strengths are, and who you are and what your strengths are. If you stack up evenly, you might be better served attacking straight on. But if you’re small, or not as rich, or if you’re exploiting a smaller sub-section of a market, then yes take on the guerrilla mentality. But I can tell you from experience, if they go big and you go small without thinking about it, just to be different, you’re probably going to get squished.

If you do this you’re not a strategist. I don’t know what you are. A guesser with a skill set for post-hoc rationalization maybe?

The world is filled with people who don’t think and look where it’s gotten us. The very last thing this industry, or this planet for that matter, needs is anyone thinking less. This is especially true if you’re a strategist. Your job is to think. To think more and better and longer-term than everyone else on the team and if you’re not doing that then you’re not needed.

The confusion I think comes in when we replace engaging ones intuition at key moments for just going with your gut and explaining it later. There will be a point in every project when you have all the data in front of you, and you’ve researched and analyzed every bit of everything you can, when you’re going to be looked upon to make sense of it. At this moment you’re going to have to trust that you’ve been smart enough to minimize as many unknowns as possible and you’ll just have to let your instinct guide you those last couple steps. This is why being a strategist is a job, and why not everyone can do it. It’s why a collection of data points isn’t the same as an insight. But it doesn’t happen at the beginning of a project. Any one can prognosticate, and I believe we do that far too often in marketing. I think we’d be better served flipping this card on it’s head - find out every fact you can, THEN use your gut.

So there you have it, my input to Fast Strategy. None of it short, or fast, or absolute. None of it will fit into a pithy quote. But I think we’ve got enough single-serving thinking in our culture and I’m okay spending the time it takes to unravel my ball of twine instead of just setting it on fire.

The Daily

I wasn’t really planning on downloading The Daily - I don’t care much for Murdoch, or his news outlets, or the concept of The Daily - but given the amount of coverage it’s been getting, I figured should at least give it a spin if for no other reason than completeness.

Enough has already been written about the handful of successes and numerous failings of the app, and my experience didn’t deviate from those very far:
- It takes forever to load
- The carousel is slow, and not the correct interface
- Minus the panoramas, the entire thing is barely more than a PDF.

But really, in the larger scheme of things, these are all relatively minor or at least entirely fixable issues - especially when compared to what I feel is the true problem with The Daily: It’s a product designed to answer NewsCorp’s problems, not their reader’s.

Who’s the Customer Here?
Every product is designed for the people who pay for it - which is, weirdly, why so many products are designed so poorly. The general assumption is that products are designed for the people who use them, but more often than not products are designed for everyone other than those people. In the case of news publishing, the customer is advertisers and the product is readers - not news. In this way, newspapers and magazines have historically been designed to deliver people to advertisers.

The trouble I think Murdoch has run into with The Daily is same thing I think many news organizations are facing: for the first time their product is news, not subscribers, and they have no idea how to design for that.

They’re going to have to sell a lot of that product too - according to Wired, The Daily will need get about 420,000 subscribers to plunk down $40 a month just to break even.

$.99
Which brings me first to the issue of price. Certainly $.99 is cheap in absolute terms, and it’s a price that people have been willing to pay for anything from iPhone apps to music to digital movie rentals. My guess is that this is how Murdoch is looking at it too - if people will buy those things, certainly they’ll buy his thing too. But getting people to pay even this tiny amount faces two hurdles. The first is that while I’ll pay $.99 for an app or song, those items remain just as valuable after a year as they did the day I bought them. News on the other hand isn’t worth very much even the next day, let alone a year from now. The second hurdle is simply that I can get news for free already.

And, as Chris Anderson points out in Free, there is a long, long way to go to get from $0 to even $.01.

The concept of easy micro payments has seemed to be held up as a gateway to profitability for publishers for a long time and like I said - $.99 is cheap, no doubt. But the very first hurdle I think news organizations will need to get over is not the space between 5 cents, or 99 cents or 5 dollars. It’s the space between 0 and something. They must first prove there is anything worth paying for at all - a completely new and foreign challenge to them. Once you can prove that there is a discrete, unique product, and that has a value to people then you can begin looking at what it should cost. Then you can start to talk about monthly subscriptions.

Welcome to the Newspaper of the 21st Century
So what is that value? Is The Daily worth more $.0? Does The Daily create value by bringing something to my iPad that nothing else does?

The answer is obviously no.

There has never been a time when has been easier for people to get to relevant information than right now - again most of it for free. Some of this is ad supported sure, but so is The Daily, and it costs me money. Worse though for The Daily - or any news publication - is that a lot of what people read every day isn’t ad supported, it’s just people producing and aggregating content every day because they love doing it. Murdoch has said that he’ll spend $500,000 a week to run The Daily, which might sound like a lot, until you consider that his competition isn’t any other news app, but Safari, and the nearly unlimited number of people creating content on the web all day, everyday, forever. Viewed through this lens, The Daily’s only hope of winning based on content value would be create purely original content of uniquely high quality that spoke to readers in a way no one else is. So far, they’re not even close.

So then, if the content isn’t unique, does The Daily bring it to me in more high quality way? As it stands, I’d say no. Sure, there are all the design and performance issues listed above - but there is something far worse going on with The Daily which is that I think their fundamental notion “high quality” is flawed. One thing that seems to be consistent across all the recent print publication apps is a strict adherence to the idea that what digital is missing is print. Or more specifically, print world aesthetics. In fact, in the opening pages of The Daily, they describe themselves as “The Newspaper of 21st Century” a statement I’d usually view as throwaway fluff but that in this case, I think it is actually how they see themselves - as finally bringing sensibilities of a newspaper to the untamed digital wilderness.

Instead, I’d say that “high quality” in the digital space is something entirely different, something that has less, or maybe nothing, to with the absolute material quality of site or app, and much more to do with how that thing expands the value of the content or people it’s connecting from the perspective of the reader.

In a time when information is faster, more connected and expansive than ever - The Daily seems to be taking a stand that information should be slower, less connected and more closed. In writing this article I have at least 10 browser windows open to articles about The Daily. Most of these were from links sent to me from friends, or that came across Twitter, or that I found in other articles. While this might be a nonstandard way of gathering info, it’s the nature of web for these bits of information and people to all be interlinked and available. The architecture of The Daily insists on operating entirely outside this ecosystem, I’m either in The Daily, or I’m out of it, a choice I believe goes back to a history of designing to deliver readers to advertisers.

This, I think, is the challenge for the The Daily, or any publication: to design a product that delivers some discreet, tangible value for their readers. Until they can do this, I think the questions about pricing or distribution models are irrelevant. It’s an unfamiliar problem for the news industry, and I for one have no idea what the answer is, or even if there is an answer.

Pernicious Blogging

You can’t tell someone their baby is ugly and expect them to smile back.
Similarly - you can’t tell an entire industry of people they’re terrible and except them to thank you for it.

So it’s really no surprise that Peter Merholz’s blog post “The Pernicious Effects of Advertising and Marketing Agencies Trying To Deliver User Experience Design” raised more than a few hackles. Last time I checked the post had generated over 70 comments - most of them in support of ad agencies - and at least 4 other response posts. I suppose this post makes 5. What’s weird though is that each time I sat down to write this post, I couldn’t figure out how to start. The reason?

I actually don’t disagree with a lot of what Peter says.

I’ve spent nearly my entire career working in agencies - an experience that I found dissatisfying enough that it drove me first to create this blog - largely devoted to critiquing agencies, and then to starting my own agency to address many of the very points Peter is making. But the thing is, when I read Peter’s post, I found myself going to my keyboard not to support him, but to call him a jerk.

It’s a strange position to be in, and frankly I don’t like it. I’ve always been a huge supporter of Adaptive Path - over the years I’ve gone to their UX Week conferences, sent co-workers and bosses to their UX Intensives and MX conferences. I’ve passed around their blog posts and videos and received just as many from colleagues. In my bag right now is an Adaptive Path notebook. I’ve always found their work insightful, thought provoking, and importantly - far reaching. Just as their MX conference’s seek to move UX thinking into the “C” level of organizations, I’ve always felt their ideas where the sort that you didn’t need to be a designer to take to heart. As a strategist, I never felt like UX was something that was intrinsic to design. In fact, a core tenet of Fight is that we help our clients by helping their customers.

So it was a little off putting when I read this:

“Many of these firms come at [UX] from an honest place. A desire to make the world a better place, and a recognition that improving user experiences can do that, even if only in a small way.

And then there are the advertising and marketing agencies.”

Uh, what?

“The thing is, these agencies do not come at user experience from an honest place. Ad agencies, in particular, are soulless holes, the precepts of whose business runs wholly contrary to good user experience practice.”

Wow.

“In a perverse way, I also find ad agencies to be instructive, because it’s one of those situations where the best thing to do is pretty much the opposite of how they practice.”

Okay, now you’re just trying to hurt my feelings.

There is, of course, more - which I’ve chose a few select cuts:

“When criticizing ad agencies, you have to begin at the core — advertising, as it is widely practiced, is an inherently unethical and, frankly, poisonous endeavor that sees people as sheep to be manipulated, that vaunts style over substance, and deems success to be winning awards.”

“Ad agencies, by their nature, see people first and foremost as consumers, or, as Jerry Michalski once said, “a gullet who lives only to gulp products and crap cash.” Advertising and marketing perspectives give priority to the client over the clients’ customers, to the degree that it’s acceptable for advertisers to encourage people to behave against their own interests if that’s what serves the client.”

“As clients realize that their problems exist across multiple channels and platforms that should work together (web, mobile, retail, collateral), it’s common that they look to their ad agencies to help them deliver services across these channels. However, when you approach it from the viewpoint of marketing, where “the brand” is the top priority, you’re designing from the inside-out, and the results is a superficial gloss, where brand standards and visual identity are consistent, but there’s no appreciation for how users actually behave in these different contexts, and there’s no attempt to coordinate internal client teams to work in concert.”

I could go through each of these and point how Fight isn’t like that, or how Peter’s lack actual knowledge of how advertising works is apparent throughout, but others have already done that. And ultimately it’s these response posts - or more specifically the ease at which they flow - that is really what pisses me off about his post. In an effort to make a point, Peter goes for cheap shots that are so histrionic and over the top that they ultimately undermine any actual argument. Any agency can reply simply “we’re not like that” and move on without needing to address the larger, actually important and actually real problem that sits at the center of Peter’s article.

Because they aren’t like that. Because no place is.

There is no agency where soulless creeps sit in dark offices strategizing about how they’re going to screw over their employees, clients and customers all at once. There is no agency where they talk about customers as cattle that crap cash. Sure, there are assholes - but there are assholes in every industry. The Glengarry Glen Ross world Peter paints though is so facile and so easy to discount that it removes nearly any pretense of a seriousness from the post. Which is a shame.

What could have been a meaningful outsiders observation on the state of advertising instead resorted to the type of hack-ish, hyperbolic rhetoric he’s ostensibly fighting against. And this is the real failing of the post, because the industry is sick. The culture is dysfunctional, and it does need to change. But the thing is, there are so many of us out there trying every single day to make that change. People who believe that there is a way help our clients put their products into the marketplace in different, helpful, and meaningful ways. People who believe in not adding to the cultural pollution that affects so much of marketing, but instead want to make the very products and services Peter is now claiming we cannot. In doing so, he’s just added another front to our war: myopic advertising d-bags on one side, and now myopic high-horse design firms on the other.

Marketing - and even advertising - isn’t going away. As long as there is commerce, companies will need ways to contextualize their products. They will need to differentiate their products. They will need to communicate with their customers. Do things need to change? Of course, and many agencies won’t make that change and they’ll perish. But some of them will change, and more importantly, new agencies and new thinking will come into being. We could use a little support.

In the end Peter’s post demonstrates, with troubling efficiency, the very lack of insight, lack of critical thinking, and lack of knowledge that he accuses ad agencies of pedaling. All on a blog set up to advertise his companies core offering - insight, critical thinking and knowledge. Worse, it shows that what I believe to be one the core problem facing the agency world - the dogmatic belief that good ideas have a certain form, come only from certain places, and that only certain people are capable of having them - is present at Adaptive Path too.

And that’s just sad.

Yo Dawg, I heard You Like Winning Elections… or What Democrats Could Learn from Xzibit

If you read nearly any paper, or watched any sort of T.V. news, or went to pretty much any news or political website in the last 36 hours, you probably read something like this from David Brooks:

“…I doubt the health care bill will survive in anything like its current form. It was and is tremendously unpopular. The Republicans ran on repeal. They got a clear mandate to repeal the thing.”

There has been a lot of talk about this election providing a mandate to Republicans and being a referendum on everything from “Big Government” to “the Stimulus” to “Obamacare” to “Taxes” to just about everything else under the sun.

But here is the thing - I don’t think any of that is true.

“Big Government”? What does that mean? Big where? Big how? “The Stimulus”? I have to wonder what percent of Americans could explain even the basic premise of what “the Stimulus” is. The same is true of “Obamacare.” If anything was made clear during the debate on the issue over the summer it was this: no one knew what it was, but people were pissed about it. And “taxes”? No one wants to pay them, but almost no one, including the newly elected legislators, can begin to put together any type of coherent plan of services to cut to pay for those tax cuts.

Instead, the only clear mandate to me seems to be this: memes work.

By way of example, I submit this:

Let’s say you want to convey the obsurdity of combined objects? Like say a sandwich with the meat is held in place with more meat. The “Yo Dawg” meme is what you’re looking for. While early renditions assumed the basic structure

yo dawg, I herd you like X, so I put an X in your Y so you can VERB while you VERB

and looked like this:

The meme became so ubiquitous that it now can be truncated to simply “yo dawg” and still have the point understood. Example:

So then - what’s the difference between 2010 and 2008 for Democrats? And what does Xzibit have to do with any of this? While I suppose it’s possible that all of a sudden Americans have become a lot more focused on the intricacies of macro economic policy and voted Democrats based on that, I suspect is has a lot more to do with this:

In 2008 artist Shepard Fairey created this poster which instantly became an icon not just of the Obama campaign, but all of his supporters. Like “Yo Dawg”, this image, along with Obama’s twin slogans of “Change” and “Yes We Can”, became shorthand for conveying what were relatively complex and often not completely understood concepts. Against the war? “Change.” Against the war in Iraq but maybe not the war in Afghanistan? “Change.” Upset with the corrupting influence of lobbyists on the legislative process? “Yes We Can.” It doesn’t really matter that the imagery or the slogans are imperfect in conveying their meaning, in fact, that ultimately adds to their effectiveness. It does this by allowing people to agree (or disagree) with basic premise of a given point while silently, often unconsciously, adding their own specifics to it to make it perfect for them.

At my company Fight, we call this “the 80% rule.” It goes like this: If you’re trying to convey a difficult to grasp thought or concept, you’re better off having your statement be eighty percent right and simple, than one-hundred percent right and complex. Put another way, Apple includes “Multitasking” as a key feature of iOS on their website but it was only at their developers conference that Job’s explained the concept of “fast app switching” or as John Gruber put it:

“Apps don’t run in windows, they run on the full screen. So when you leave one app and switch to another in iPhone OS 4, the GUI — the visual interface — is not going to continue updating in the background. What will happen, if the app is updated to support the new OS 4 APIs (which, I expect, all actively-maintained apps will be), is that the app will stay in memory but stop processing. Switch back and it’ll start processing again, right where it left off.”

Yo dawg, we heard you like multitasking.

Which takes us to 2010. Gone were the icons. Gone we’re the slogans. In their place were nuanced explanations of how healthcare reform actually works. Tortured reflections on the size and timing of the stimulus package. And Kerry-esque stump speeches about how candidates were for either before they were against both. (a meme in its own right)

Meanwhile Republicans were running tried and true platforms of “small government” and new ones like “end Obamacare”, all under the flag of the “Tea Party”, which clearly not so much a coherent group as much as it is a catch-all concept for generalized anger at Obama and Democrats.

Putting a fine point on the role of good campaigning as opposed to good legislating is that no one really likes Republicans either:

“Democrats have a 10-point favorability gap: 43 percent of voters have a positive opinion of the party, while 53 percent aren’t thrilled. The Republican Party also gets a thumbs-down from 53 percent of the nation’s voters, with just 41 percent saying they’re happy with the GOP.”

Of course, none of this is anything new. It’s a basic tenet of advertising, which I suppose is perhaps why it’s troubling to look our political process this way. We’d like to think that the goal of any democracy is an educated voter base making rational choices based on a full set of data. But just as the idea of the “rational consumer” was thrown out the window a long time ago, so too should the “rational voter”. We’re irrational beings by nature, and the situation is compounded by an increasingly complex and global world. It would seem these days that true understanding of any issue is more often than not the purview of specialists within an administration rather than by anyone we see on T.V. Given this, how we can we expect someone with a day job to fully grasp the implications of reforming something as complex as the American health system.

Instead, if Democrats (or any party) want a chance to govern, they should learn from 2008. We call them “campaigns” for a reason, and as intellectually objectionable as it may seem, they’re about selling a concept not the intricate process. They’re about taking what are incredibly complex ideas and reducing them down to a meaning that people can “get”.

Bernbach said it like this:

“The truth isn’t the truth until people believe you, and they can’t believe you if they don’t know what you’re saying, and they can’t know what you’re saying if they don’t listen to you, and they won’t listen to you if you’re not interesting, and you won’t be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly.”

Ad Agencies and the iAd Promise Land

I saw this today from Ben Malbon:

What Ben is hopeful for is the prospect of relevance for online display advertising discussed in Edward Boches’ article.

You should go read the post, but the basic premiss - as it has been all along with iAds - is that digital advertising is finally going to come into it’s own now that Apple is in the game.

But there is a structural problem to Edward’s argument, and it’s a problem that has been consistent from nearly every ad person I’ve heard speak about the promise of iAds, which is that fundamental problem with online display advertising lays in the creative execution of it.

That’s not true.

“…Apple is hoping that iAds deliver a quantum leap in advertising story telling as they have the potential to combine the cinematic beauty of great TV advertising (visceral imagery, animation, special effects), the interactive nature of the web (games, choices, navigation), the sharing and involvement of social media, and the tactile (digitally speaking) sensation of turning pages.”

That’s Edward’s quote, but the thinking isn’t unique to him. Here is the problem with this line of rationale though: all those things - the “visceral imagery”, the “animation”, the “games, choices, navigation”, the (ugh) “turning pages” - these have all been at our creative disposal for years. There is nothing technically or creatively new with iAds. Once you take that away - what we’re left with is Apple’s moderation of the ads and the minimal novelty of an ad in an application, on your phone.

But more succinctly from Edward

“Display doesn’t work because the creative sucks and the options are limited.

No, it’s not. And no they’re not.

But lets lay that aside for the moment. I think what ad agencies are really hoping for is something, anything, that will let them keep doing and thinking what they’ve always done and thought. And that’s what Apple is selling them.

I’ve written about this so many times even I’m bored with it - but the cultural underpinnings of contemporary advertising are so strongly tied to the concept of broadcast narrative story telling that I don’t believe they can collectively imagine a world where this doesn’t work. This is laid bare in one of Edward’s comments after his post:

“Could iAds be the Super Bowl spots of the digital age?”

And this isn’t to pick on Edward, but just to point out how fully contained within the world of “the copy writer and the AD create a narrative, the customer consumes that narrative” advertising culture is. Even the metaphors are about T.V.

But the internet, and the way people want to use it, is showing us that it’s a non-narrative, product based system. People install applications, or go to websites because it provides some value to them. How many millions of web sites are there? And there are already what, 250,000 application just on the iPhone? Yet, all I have is 24 hours each day to split between everything have to do and everything I want to. And every day, there is another site, and another application, but the same 24 hours.

My question - given that, why would I spend even one second watching a banner ad, let alone minutes interacting with it? If I want entertainment on my phone, I’ll watch a movie on Netflix, or I’ll play a video game. If I need to accomplish something - the last thing I want to see is your advertisement.

So here is my advice - if you’re working for a brand right now, doing something on the internet, make something that is useful for their customers. Make something that makes them relevant online. Make something that, when their customers give you 1 or 5 or 10 minutes out of their 24 hours, leaves them better off.

Don’t make them turn digital pages to watch your T.V. ad.

More on Asymmetry and the Web

If you haven’t seen it yet, Jay Rosen has an excellent run down of some of the journalistic implications of the newest Wikileaks story around the release of the Afghanistan War Logs.

The whole thing is really interesting and you should read it all, but one of the most interesting for me was his fourth point:

“4. If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to “location” it says: Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world’s first stateless news organization. I can’t think of any prior examples of that. (Dave Winer in the comments: “The blogosphere is a stateless news organization.”) Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system. That’s what so odd about the White House crying, “They didn’t even contact us!”

Appealing to national traditions of fair play in the conduct of news reporting misunderstands what Wikileaks is about: the release of information without regard for national interest. In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new. Just as the Internet has no terrestrial address or central office, neither does Wikileaks.”

I’ve written a couple other times about the asymmetrical nature of the web, but what I find interesting about this is that it show a possible direction for the relationship between traditional, physical organizations and the more abstract digital ones.

How any organization bound by traditional rules of law and codes of conduct operates in a world where organizations not bound by these same rules become increasingly powerful is critical I think. In this case it’s journalism, but the same could apply to any brand.

And then what?

Remember a few weeks ago when Nike dropped their commercial for the World Cup and it was the best commercial ever? And then remember when everyone was pointing to the survey showing that Nike and swooped in and stolen all the World Cup buzz from Adidas?

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.