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picked from the cloud and assembled by hand
...the eternal battle of the free market economy, right?
I arrived back from Berlin to a torrent of phone calls and industry press articles about things like Wrigley's switch to smaller digital agencies from big digital agencies and Pepsi's relationship with TBWA and their other digital partners and enough articles about Digitas losing business that it felt like a web 1.0 cliff erosion had happened while I was gone.
There is a lot of speculation about what's going on in the world of digital and agencies and I think we have to step back a little and figure out why we think there will only be one winner (or type of agency solution) and why everyone else will be losers. It's not an "either/or" world anymore. We live in a time of "plus, and".
It's good bar gossip but not a great use of business time to bitch about independant digital shop vs. big agency digital. It's a moot point. Sometimes we deliver together, sometimes we both deliver apart. It's just about client choice and project needs at a certain point. We're all creative, we're all strategic, we're all worth hiring.
What I'm interested in at the moment is what is happening around the web 1.0 digital arm network agencies vs. the the new wins we're seeing out of the two types of agencies I've listed above. This week has made it clear that whether a client was choosing a digitally integrated agency option or an small independent option what they were doing was choosing creativity and insight over the "marching army" of digital skills.
Why? What's going on? Wasn't Digitas the big threat last year? Will it be next year? I'm not banking on it...well at least not to the degree that Publicis did. And I'm not sure I would have doubled down on it with Razorfish.
I think the switch is about brands looking for distinction.
Let's face it. Everyone can access the data if they choose to, and a lot of people can even understand it. That being true, I think it wouldn't be out of place to suggest that, although beneficial, this is the commodity part of our business. When digital was still in it's pioneering phase we used to fight for dollars by telling clients that "our work was accountable and measurable" and it is. I think there are some problems around relating clicks and views and engagement to purchase but I think we'll get there. But that's the table stakes of the work, right? It was what allowed clients to push into digital media when it was a bit of a wild west. When the distribution was so non-mass that you needed to assure your bosses that it had delivered something more targeted. It's not an invalid practice. But it's what media companies do. I think that these organizations traded something in their pursuit of efficiency and "capability" and "usability". They confused building the internet with creating advertising. I think they lost the plot.
Distinction in our business comes from an idea that is not logical and not obvious. Distinction comes from an insight and a strange twist called creativity. It's saying something that takes everyone slightly by surprise. I haven't seen that kind of thinking come out of the Big Networked Digial Agencies (let's call them BDDA). I haven't seen these agencies consistently have ideas that spark culture. I think the BDDA's are media/production hybrids that deliver mass but not appeal. I think the last 2 years of creative agencies, big and small, losing out on business because of these digital networks is coming to an end.
Maybe the BDDA's were transitionary. Maybe not. Maybe they're just for certain clients. Like Grey Advertising is for certain clients. Whatever the case, some brands are starting to look for something different.
The digital era consumer is multi-nuanced. Everyone is a hybrid something... advocat/pundit/coder/instigator/creative. I'm not sure why we expect the professional communications industry to be different.
This video is from the Boards Summit but it seemed relevant today. The reason for the long shot on Michael Treff while I am speaking is that I suspect someone thought he was the ventriloquist and I was the dummy. They were half right.
What a weird week...everything connected. Beatles to Rockband to Rubin to Johnny Cash with a side trip into Hey Jude topped and tailed with Tokyo. I don't think crossing the international date line is without it's side effects.
...and I promise, I won't say the word Beatles one more time this week.
Thanks Patrick ONeill who posted this to Facebook today. I think it was done by Danny Garcia.
http://danny-garcia.com/
Rick Rubin was in the LA office today visiting Lee Clow. I saw him walk down "main street" and literally froze in my tracks. I was taken right back to the beginning of my career at \TBWA.
It was the summer of 2007. I was wrestling with whether or not to accept an offer to join the company...and I was really torn. In my heart, I wanted to return to boutique agency life. Only a year prior, I had left a 2 year secondment in Detroit with Organic/BBDO to join Ty Montague at JWT after which I quickly decided that the Big American Agency world wasn't for me. I really felt the need to go back to working the way I had in London (a small team, more design led solutions, intimacy of interaction with a problem, start-up mentality teamwork). I was ready to turn down the offer and take the call of the wild when I read a great article by Lynn Hirschberg of the NYTimes. The date was September 2, 2007. The article was about Rick Rubin. It changed everything for me.
Rubin, the visionary behind Def Jam, had taken up the position of co-head of Columbia records, an old-school stalwart on Madison Avenue. He was reaching backward, not forward, to fix an industry in massive flux. Why? Because he loved music.If someone as great as Rubin could take one for the team, for the cause, so could I.
Steve Barnett, the man who split his job in two in order to make room for Rubin, was reported in the article as having a sign beside his desk (next to a Johnny Cash portrait) that said:"Your Faith Needs to Be Greater Than Your Fear"That phrase was tattooed on my arm in time to report for my first day of work at 488 Madison Avenue.
Rain is a funny thing in Manhattan. The subways are jammed, the cabs are impossible to get and walking is hard because the streets overflow with water. So, although it's dicey, I tend to ride my vespa more often in bad weather than in good. I've paid the price. Last week I went down in a battle between two taxis. I was innocent but caught in the shrapnel. I lost a mirror and a coat of paint. Today I was very careful. There is something I can only equate to pride in braving the elements to maintain my low emissions mobility promise to myself.
I was asked about Bob's Greenberg's assertion that stories have to become more like systems. I think that the nuance around this concept might be what's wrong with digital advertising right now. In the digital world, the stories are so bad/done/expected/uninspired. I would include in that thought stories like LonelyGirl 15, I would mark as exceptions to that the natural stories online told by people like Jonathan Harris and Miranda July. I believe in stories...I believe in systems. I don't believe that one is the same thing as the other. In tandem, they are beautiful.
I think that there is room for narrative AND room for Function/demo and even room for Social. It's just a more nuanced system than a single mechanism like Nike+. It's important that when we talk about value and system and platform we don't take the magic out of the equation. All of advertising can't be utility. It just can't. As a metaphor I'd say that TV didn't die...it just evolved into cable. I think that's the move we're after as we map stories over systems. I'd love to see nike+ develop a fictional narrative as a film style or a citizen journalism effort that grows into a platform like Runner's World "by-the-people". Nike+'s fundamental value to Nike is as a platform for engagement in "doing it". It's calling might be something so far beyond that. .
