The death of creativity? Getting there.

"Google represents between 50%-90% of display volume (QPS) being purchased by DSPs, ad networks and agency trading desks on a RTB basis. Incremental QPS volume comes from the SSPs (Admeld, Pubmatic, Rubicon), Microsoft (new to the game via Appnexus), Contextweb, OpenX and a few others."

If your read the above and are thinking WTF?, you are not alone. You need to know though, 'cause change is coming to marketing in a big way. This change is being driven by data, analytics and performance captured by companies such as Annalect, MarketShare, Google and others. 

Remember the old advertising quip, "50% of my advertising works, I just don't know which 50%"? Today there is, for the first time, a very real prospect that marketeers will know what 99% of their tactics are delivering, minutiltely and precisely. We are entering a new era of accountability which has  profound implications for creativity, instinct, and imagination.

So what is going on? Three factors are converging:

1) Comprehensive Data Across Media

Already the sheer tonnage of data being generated via the digital, social and mobile channels provides marketeers a window into consumers interests and behaviors. Traditional media is also joining the digital data party, with tablet editions of magazines, wired TV set top-boxes, electronic outdoor billboards, digital radio and more all enriching the picture. Throw in actual retail sales, both on and offline, and the host of other data points clients are collecting, and a new end game is in sight - comprehensive, fused and organizable data spanning every waking moment of consumers lives.

2) Audience Tracking 

As these streams of data are flowing in, more and more they are matched up to actual people. Yes, that sounds creepy, but for marketeers it is useful. Again, the end game of these improvements in matching media metrics with individuals is the better targeting and relevance of communications - think Tom Cruise in Minority Report.

3) Speed Speed, Speed

RTB, as quoted above, is for 'Real Time Bidding'. Today, Exchanges are completing the 7 or 8 steps necessary to serve a customized ad in under a quarter of a second! Why bother with what happened in post-campaign reports weeks or months after the fact, find out what is happening now! This is the promise of live advertising.

What does all this mean?

Medium term a huge amount of guess work is being removed from the advertising conversation. As an industry, agencies have benefited from the unknowns. We have been inefficient simply because it could never be proved what was working or what was not. In the debate between art and science, art could hold its own as the science was flawed. I see a day soon where the science has the proof needed to refute the intuition of art. 

The Death of Creativity?

No, it is not the death of creativity. Models, statistics and past-performance can not predict for the game-changing ideas. However, it is getting closer. The sad truth is the majority of our work is not game-changing. It is incremental and more-of-the-same. In this new era coming, the brute processing power of data is going to offer a better solution than real people most of the time.

Winners and Losers

This sort of depends on how you view things. Media shops are going to lose a lot of media planners and buyers - a lot! In their place will be a smaller number of data-jocks and analytics gurus. So, smarter organizations, but I think much smaller in terms of actual people.

Creative agencies are going to lose more influence and control. A lot of creative is going to become modular, constituent parts that algorithms can meld together instantaneously. There will be less great work overall.

Clients are going to have more productive work. That will be a win for them. They may not have as much fun getting there, but the CFO will not care about that.

Advertising as an industry will win. It will be more credible, more scientific and better received in board rooms. It will probably also be a lot less fun though as well.

The web is less free - good!

Back in 2009 Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, published "Free:How Today's Smartest Businesses Profit by Giving Something for Nothing". His general thesis was that the web and digitization was radically changing the dynamic of pricing, and that consumers were being so conditioned by free, that there was no choice but to embrace free as a starting point. (Malcolm Gladwell wrote a pretty savage critique back in the day which was kind of delicious in its nasty-ness). 


I met recently with people from the NYT which got me thinking about Mr Anderson's book. 


The digital world, I believe, is not becoming more free. The NYT in erecting its pay-wall joins the WSJ, FT and Times of London, in becoming non-free. If these experiments continue to be positive, expect more and more journalism brands to follow these leaders. 


Looking broadly across the web, you can see brands with significant digital footprints such as Netflix, Ning and Apple, all making a ton of money by charging upfront for it. Netflix is 100% paid, Ning flipped to a paid model a year ago (and has more than doubled its customers), and Apple charges top dollar for everything. Even Google, a bastion of free, has been experimenting with charging for content, such as movies on YouTube.


What really seems to matter then? Well, another old maxim applies perhaps: content is king! For all the billions of videos on YouTube, how many do people really want to watch? HBO, Pixar, Random House, the WSJ, these brands provide content worth paying for and they are reaping the rewards. How you migrate customers from free to paid is tough, but clearly not implausible or impossible.


Brands will continue to experiment with pricing, offering free samples and the like, but as the web/digital has become pervasive, perhaps business as normal might become more normal. The world has changed, but we humans are still who we are. A new normal would be nice. In this view, good cotent offering good value will sell. In fact, brands will have even more ways to sell their output than ever before.


Josh


p.s. Is it ironic that the digital version of the book Free costs $9.99?

Walking into Jeff Goodby's office - proximity matters

[This post was inspired by this quote from S. Shyam Sundar, a director of the Media Effects Research Lab at Pennsylvania State University. “Physical proximity plays a big role in terms of building relationships.” ]

Here at GS&P, we believe in the integration of everyone around ideas. This particularly applies to my discipline of media. Ten years ago, media revolved around 5 media - TV, Print, Outdoor, Radio and Other (such as direct mail, or stunts). Your media decision was basically a modeling exercise, how much investment into each one of the standard and finite choices was the correct one? Hence, media was only ever needed during the last 5 mins of a presentation. (Yes, this is overly simplified, but honestly, not by much).

Today, media choices are almost infinite. Certainly, no one has enough money to solely buy awareness and engagement. Clients need brilliant analysis and consideration of how their brand communication ideas can live across touch-points, how people will discover it, engage it and share it. Most of the time, thanks to social media, you cannot even assume that a consumers first interaction with your brand idea will be via a kick-off TV spot or print ad. More likely they will stumble across it via a friends reactive tweet or status up-date; marketing is no longer linear.

This is where proximity matters. For Creatives, parsing through hundreds of rough ideas, having access to smart Communication Strategy thinkers, (what we call the evolution of Media Planners at GS&P), is a massive advantage. Communication Strategists at GS&P, (and other integrated agencies I assume), will work with teams directly, in their offices, in the corridors and elevators of our building, to explore together the potential of ideas. How can we orchestrate that idea so that it takes on a life of its own inspiring action far beyond the borders of paid media.

Physically, I can walk into Jeff's office at any moment, or he into mine, and we can work through stuff. Right then, right there, not in an official meeting, or conference call spanning time-zones. This proximity and iteration actually speeds things up. We get through and to good ideas faster. It saves clients money.

As an agency we have tried all sorts of methods for breaking down proximity, both internally and with partners. When it all boils down through, it is impossible to escape our nature as social creatures. We all work better when we are in the same room.

Time, or lack of it, and how that is not much of an excuse

It has been over a year since my last post. How feeble of me. I am generally busy with kids, work and life. However I know plenty of people who are equally busy and still generate stunningly smart content all the time. I do not think time, and the lack of it is a good enough excuse.

Commitment to thinking and making time to write seems to be the critical factor. It takes energy to produce actual content versus just reacting and posting in under 140 characters.

Clearly I need to work on that commitment. We shall see. No promises, but I have read that public declarations are more powerful in changing behavior than mental promises kept secret. I am going to try again to publish more regularly.

Josh

KFC mumbo-jumbo

I will confess, I have a major soft spot for KFC. No, I have not tried the Double Down, (I do value my cholesterol level), but when someone says fried chicken to me, I think KFC.

Saw this recent sub-section on an Ad Age piece about yet another re-launch announcing yet another new tag-line for KFC, "So Good".

" Mr. Benito said the tagline is the result of the combined efforts of Ogilvy, Sydney; Bartle Bogle Hegarty, London; and DraftFCB, Chicago. The tagline emerged in focus groups, when lapsed customers tasted the product and said, "It's so good." But in addition to tapping nostalgia, it also provides an umbrella that works for promoting grilled chicken, crispy fried strips or a value meal.

The chain is, moreover, shifting its focus from a "demographic to a psychographic," Mr. Benito said. Eating a bucket of chicken has always been a group activity, he said, so now KFC is reaching out to "socially connected people who are trans-generational." That means a teen on Facebook or her mother who reads blogs." "

 I don't know where to begin on unpacking this. Work born out of committee perhaps? The social aspect of a bucket of chicken? Trans-generational? Oy-vey!

You know what, pushing a chain as big as KFC can't always be easy. I hope this 5th new direction for KFC in 5 years works out, but reading this article, I am not hopeful.

I'm off to try and find a Tower Zinger Burger, still the greatest fast food invention ever.

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Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY

One output of the global economic crisis has been the willingness of desperate media owners to approve previously unthinkable media buys. Case in point: A few weeks back the Los Angeles Times allowed the movie Alice in Wonderland to take over the entire front page of the newspaper. Not a cover wrap—the actual news content of the paper for that day was obscured by Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. This buy makes it pretty clear that if you’ve got the cash, anything goes.

Last year another movie, Star Trek, persuaded ABC to let the Starship Enterprise make a flyby through the opening credits of the TV show Lost. From a traditional buying perspective, sneaking into the opening credits of a show is unheard of. (J.J. Abrams has clout for sure).

GLASS HALF FULL?

So, is this new openness by media owners a good thing? Unfortunately, more often than not it is probably bad for our business. 

At a macro level the encroachment of advertising everywhere has a detrimental effect on people’s liking and trust of advertising. The more surfaces we slap ads on, the more consumers seek to filter out all marketing.

Perhaps more corrosive, though, is the long-term impact on media brands themselves. Harper’s Bazaar magazine recently ran a lavish 40-page story featuring the same four celebrities who were also fronting a major new Estée Lauder campaign. The “story” was indistinguishable from regular Lauder advertising. (Lauder ran ads featuring the same models in the issue as well.)  What does it say about the Harper’s brand and its credibility when its content is so clearly for sale? As the walls between ads and content get ever more porous, the negative sentiment for advertising is dragging down the quality content that attracted advertisers in the first place.

NOT GETTING BETTER

Unfortunately, the push for ever more places to insert ads is not going to let up anytime soon. The media-buying side of the house tends to equate buying a new space with being creative and innovative. The moment a new technology appears, media teams seek to exploit it as an ad medium. (We’ve already had ads on the Kindle, and we would bet a lot of money that a bunch of agencies are now working on how they can insert advertising into the iPad).

Within the Communication Strategy group at GSP, we don’t believe that finding new ways to irritatingly interrupt people’s days is good innovation. Poor disruption only increases negative consumer reaction. If The Los Angeles Times keeps selling its front page as they did last week, the newspaper will lose subscribers.

THE BIG ISSUE

The critical question we need to ask when considering out-of-the-box placements is not can we buy something, but should we? 

We always want to enable positive brand interactions, something that engages and preferably enhances the consumer experience. We also know that consumers are not stupid. If the strategic link, the reason why the brand in question does what it does, is crystal clear and enhances the experience, consumers will welcome it. As ever, we all have to remember that the only opinions that really matter are consumers’.

GOOD INNOVATION

An example of a good disruption/innovation? From the GSP portfolio, for the launch of Wario Land: Shake It! (a Wii game), we achieved a world-first by having the action within our YouTube video spill over into the rest of the YouTube page. Never been done before, surprising and categorically tied to the concept of the game. Consumers loved it. ( http://www.youtube.com/wariolandshakeit2008 )

So, for Alice in Wonderland, what might have been a smarter solution? What if all the front-page stories had, instead of being obscured by Johnny Depp, actually been rewritten by his character of the Mad Hatter? Might that have been entertaining and witty, offering something of value to the reader that they might even share with others?

FINAL WORD

As we generate incredible media ideas, as much as we always want to say “yes we can” to pull them off, we also need to check that consumers will respond with a “glad you did.”