It’s Super Bowl time. The ad community is lathering up for the “Oscars of the ad business.”
I’m setting my sights pretty low.
One person’s view, but Super Bowl ads lately have underwhelmed. I’m trying to remember one now. Oh yes, GoDaddy. Well, I don’t remember the ad, exactly. I do know what GoDaddy does, though, which puts me in the minority. Since they’ve been peddling soft porn Super Bowl spots I’ve purchased ten or so domain names. From Network Solutions.
Wait, I’m being unfair. It’s not really the Super Bowl. It’s advertising in general.
Talk to me about the great ad campaigns of all time.
What, the crowd-sourced, do-it-yourself snack work didn’t make the list? Nothing with chimps? How about the new light beer campaign launched on the Big Game last year (They did launch one, didn’t they? Don’t they always?) Wait, pop-culture-driven colas always have good work. Oh, right, they did a fundraiser instead. Or, maybe that was the year before.
Why are the all the truly great ad campaigns things of the past?
Because it’s too hard to measure their success. Here, have a look –
CEO: “So, that ad campaign you ran last year, how’d it do?”
CMO: “Great!”
CEO: “Really? How do you know?”
CMO: “Everyone loves it. Ad recall and brand image numbers were through the roof. We shattered our purchase intent norms. And sales rose 17%.”
CEO: “How do you know the sales increase came from the advertising?”
CMO: “Well, you can’t know for absolutely certain, but when all those other numbers go up and then sales go up, we feel pretty good that they’re related.”
CEO: “You feel? The guys from Google don’t feel anything. They know. They always know for an absolute fact how many people clicked and then purchased.”
CMO: “Yes, well, people can’t click on our TV ads to buy yogurt. At least not yet. And, even if they could, I’m not sure they would.”
CEO: “I need better than ‘I feel.’ The board could give a crap about how you ‘feel.’ I need to see the ROI on that campaign. We spent $40 million on it. How much more yogurt did we sell because of it?”
CMO: “It’s not like online advertising. We can’t just see some kind of definitive conversion ratio.”
CEO: “You’re fired.”
Trust me, the next CMO doesn’t try to make anyone “feel” anything. That’s why you can watch 100 commercials this week and not “feel” like buying a single product advertised.
What a bummer!
Meanwhile, rest assured people are getting promoted out of cubicles everywhere counting all those website hits and Facebook likes and Twitter mentions, scrutinizing conversion ratios and pay-per-click trends, and analyzing which mobile platforms yielded higher page view numbers.
You may have heard lately that online video sites like YouTube and Hulu are launching more original content.
Hard to resist, from their perspective.
Imagine having hundreds of millions of people come to your site every month to watch somebody else’s content. In YouTube’s case, that somebody else is you and your pet videos. On Hulu it’s re-runs of real programming.
Anyway, where were we…oh, yes, hundreds of millions of people. And the ad revenue that comes with them.
You know what this reminds me of?
Grocery stores.
All those people, all that money going to Kraft, General Mills and Coca-Cola. I’d like to have been the guy pitching the supermarket CEO with bar charts and this idea: “Let’s just sell our own soup and paper towels and keep a whole lot more of the money ourselves!”
If Hulu makes the shows that people watch on their site, they can keep all the ad revenue instead of paying the folks who own the reruns they’re airing now.
And, if the show’s any good, they can draw more people to their site since it probably won’t be available elsewhere. More people = more ad revenue. The irony is that if the show’s really, really good, it’ll probably end up on TV.
If being the operative word.
Quick, tell me your favorite original content, online-only show.
We’ve had, what, five years of decent enough bandwidth during which someone could have created a legitimate online national programming hit. I’m talking Glee, not College Humor (look it up). Why hasn’t it happened? It’s not for lack of audience. Everyone is online.
Here’s why: because it’s practically impossible to create a hit show. Just ask NBC, they’ve been trying for years. And, by try, I mean they pay boatloads for the best writers, directors, producers, and actors in the world. Then, they promote the hell out of every new show. And still, no Friends replacement.
Personally, though, I’m glad the online folks are going after original content. I think it will drive us to more of an iTunes content consumption model than the ridiculous album-like equation we have currently. Today we’re forced to buy 6000 channels and a gazillion programs every month, even though we only watch about ten of them. If Hulu or NetFlix or even Yahoo or AOL can make it so I only have to pay for the programming I watch, I’m better off by at least fifty bucks a month I figure.
Tough as it’ll be to create original content with mass appeal and audience online, one thing’s for sure: it’ll never happen if they don’t try.
Hey, once upon a time HBO just showed re-runs, too.
I love the song Strawberry Letter 23 by the Brothers Johnson but I had to buy the whole album to get it
Maybe the answer to the agency problem isn’t an agency. At least, not in the way we’ve always thought about them.
Agencies today are like albums in an iTunes world. But the talent and technology does exist to change the paradigm so clients get what they want more efficiently and cost-effectively.
On an album there were usually a few songs you really liked. But to hear them, you had to buy the whole album. You bought a lot of tracks you didn’t want so you could hear your favorites.
Now, of course, you just buy the songs you want.
And, you pay only ninety-nine cents for them, not nine bucks for the album. You get more of what you want for less. The record business, on the other hand, gets beaten to death.
Clients today need and want more songs but are kind of stuck buying albums.
Imagine being a client today. You need: tv, print, radio, out-of-home, online banners, paid search, organic search, mobile apps, mobile banners, mobile search, mobile text, a Facebook page, Twitter feeds, and a LinkedIn profile, not to mention qr codes, branded content, in-game advertising, product placement and, now that your MySpace page doesn’t matter and your boss gave up on a viral YouTube video, you also need a location-based check-in program and, for now at least, a Groupon deal.
As a client, where do you go for all that?
To agencies. And not just one or two of them.
And what, exactly do you get at each agency? Well, there’s the receptionist, the CEO, the CFO, the bookkeeper, the lawyer, the CMO, the account guy, the senior account guy, the intern, the strategist, the project manager, the planner, the comms channel guy, and, thankfully, some creatives , developers and designers who come up with ideas and make something for you to use.
You want a TV ad? Buy the ad agency album. Mobile app? That’s on a different album. How about search? Different album.
That’s a lot of albums. A lot of receptionists and bookkeepers and account guys and senior account guys and CEOs and CMOs and strategists you have to buy just to get the actual products and services you want.
As a client, wouldn’t it be nice to go to one place and get everything you want from one place?
Wait, I think I hear [fill in name of ad agency holding company CEO]: “We have everything you need in our portfolio of two thousand three hundred and forty-four companies, and we will provide you with a fully-integrated team of world-class talent in every possible discipline led by a single point of contact who can manage these resources even though they reside in sixteen different profit centers and four countries.”
No need to waste space here detailing the hideousness of this fantasy. Google “Enfatico.”
The people who actually produce the things that clients need are like songs. And, for the past 100 years, these people have worked mostly at agencies. They’ve been packaged in agency vinyl.
Right now, there is no iTunes for marketing and advertising solutions.
But, there could be. All you need are talented people un-tethered from agency anchors, and the right way to connect them with client needs and projects.
As for the former – the independent talent? That inventory’s growing every day. If you’re great at what you do and can make a good living enriching yourself and your own life rather than adding another million or two to [fill in name of ad agency holding company CEO again], then guess what?
The second part — creating the right way to connect these folks with client needs and projects — is not as fully formed.
Emphasis on the right way.
The genius of iTunes wasn’t the uncoupling of songs from albums and making them available as singles on an mp3 player. Kazaa and a host of others beat Apple to that by a few years. They also made us part with the better part of too many nights and some portion of our hard drives, thanks to a brutal user experience and rampant viruses.
Apple made it clean, easy and legal. They secured the delivery.
For the new agency model (environment? operating system?) to work, clients will need their form of secure delivery, too.
Specifically, they will need strategic, reliable and cohesive teams.
Maybe the agency of the future will be more like a producer or talent manager who provides clients with just the right, and right amount of, talent, and guarantees effective delivery. They’ll do this by dealing with a lot of contracts and admin and coordination you’ll never see – just like iTunes gets you the songs you want, never you mind how they make it happen.
Impossible? When was the last time you bought a CD…
Yes, thanks to social media, each of us distributes content to an audience. Or, more precisely, we distribute to an audience quickly and easily, en masse, at all times.
To be fair, we’ve always had audiences. It just took awhile, relatively speaking, to write them letters, or call them, or, back in the ‘90s, email them.
Now, I tweet something, you re-tweet it to your 75 or 7500 or 75,000 followers and, voila, distribution! Ditto for posting on Facebook.
Professionally, this is great news. Since you’re media now, companies want to find you, reach you and get you to pass along their messages to your audience.
My CFO likes this for a couple reasons.
First, there are A LOT of you. That’s always good.
And, second, you’re a lot easier to work with than real reporters at what we used to call “the media.”
I’m over-generalizing here, but, basically: you don’t fact check, you don’t mind that there’s clearly an angle, you don’t typically offer an alternative view, and you don’t have to ration space like those poor folks on the news or at the paper. That makes you a little, um, less discriminating.
Alas, you know that too-good-to-be-true feeling?
Like when the Redskins win their first couple games. Or your mobile ad gets a 1.64% click-through rate (trust me, it’s a big number in the world of banner ad click-through rates).
That’s the sense I have about working the global public on behalf of companies, brands, politicians, movies and whatnot. And for the same reason.
It’s early.
And it’s too easy to publish. We don’t have to think and we don’t have to work. We see something, we click a few buttons, we’ve distributed. It’s like finding a new voice.
My two-year-old just found his. Enough said?
Honestly, I don’t know how much noise we can handle before we turn on the Internet’s version of noise-canceling earphones.
For now, I’m reminded of a Talking Heads’ line in “Psycho Killer:” “You’re talking a lot, but you’re not saying anything.”
That came out in 1977. Before social media. Before the Internet. Before “reply all.”
To what were they referring? The 6 o’clock news?
Maybe the signal-to-noise imbalance is as old a concept as sound itself. Maybe it’s just human nature to communicate to the extent possible, like gas fills space.
Brace yourself. Social media is a big space.
In which case, John Lennon may be our best guide. He wrote “Julia” in 1968, borrowing from a 1926 Khalil Gibran line. In it, he confesses, “Half of what I say is meaningless.”
There’s been a lot said lately about what Yahoo! has done wrong. Here’s something they’re doing right!
Yesterday, they introduced what they’re calling the Yahoo Living Ad unit for tablets. Finally, someone is creating ad units that not only take advantage of what digital has to offer (rich, storytelling experiences AND interactivity), but that people will actually see. The ad only comes in two sizes: full page and 1/3-page.
Yahoo! had this to say about the new ad units: “Living Ads combine the interactivity of digital with the emotional engagement of broadcast, inviting consumers into a uniquely immersive brand experience. “
Under the heading Deeper Branding Opportunities they say the ads “create a highly tactile experience. The ads use video to increase engagement, as well as capitalize on the motion-sensing capabilities of tablets. The creative interacts with the consumer, making the ads (HERE’S MY FAVORITE PART –>) virtually impossible to ignore.”
And hats off to the talented folks over at Alexx Henry Studios for bringing this to life. It won’t be long before the ads are better than the content on which they are placed.
Way to go Yahoo! I know you’re in a bit of survival mode right now, so here’s to hoping the Living Ad is very aptly named.
I especially like strong, freshly-brewed coffee. I seek it out and pay extra for it. I have a favorite kind, but I generally consume a mix over the course of a week. A different brand here, an espresso there, a cappucino after dinner.
But flavored coffee does nothing for me, especially hazelnut. I never buy it.
Strange, isn’t it? Just one variation on the theme and I go from active in the category to absent.
Now, let’s talk about banner advertising. Again.
Imagine you sell hazelnut coffee, and that most of the world shares my disdain for it. What do you do? You lower the price, of course. And still you have boatloads of unsold beans.
Well, you think, there are SO MANY places on earth to sell hazelnut coffee, I just need to make it more available! And so, you put hazelnut coffee stands and hazelnut espresso machines and special 3-D holographic augmented reality hazelnut coffee experiences on every empty street corner you can find. In fact, you litter the world with hazelnut coffee. With all this new supply, hazelnut coffee prices drop even more. Rents are not met on many corners. Some return to selling shish kebabs.
And then, Eureka! An algorithm! It tells you exactly what time of day, which street corner and which sales pitch will most likely yield a sale. You have found marketing nirvana: the right message to the right person at the right time. This being math, an entire industry grows to predict the likelihood of purchase and to negotiate the best rates on all those street corners.
And, at the end of it all, you have even more unsold hazelnut beans getting sold for even less money. How can this possibly be?
Because people don’t like hazelnut coffee.
It doesn’t work for them.
That’s how brands feel about banner advertising, and rightly so.
I was at another data conference recently. Some very smart and even some quite wealthy people spent a couple hours going over a chart like this one to explain how banner advertising is bought and sold today (source: Progress Partners):
Wow! Does it have to be this complicated? Well, yes and no. While the online ad industry (not including search) continues to push a basic product (banner ads) that customers (brands) don’t want, then, yes. It actually is quite complicated to try to get people who don’t want what you’re selling to buy it anyway.
But do brands hate all advertising? Absolutely not.
They just hate to be ignored.
And that’s exactly what they get with today’s banner ads. Like hazelnut does for me and coffee, banner ads offer brands a variation on advertising they abhor.
You see, brands can’t stomach invisibility. Unfortunately, for the banner industry at least, invisibility is their signature flavor.
Tell me again about your favorite banner ad? Or, about ANY banner ad? Take invisibility out of online advertising and brands will flock to them.
In other words, lose the hazelnut. That will simplify things greatly.
Two guys at Rensselaer Polytech Institute get seriously hooked on mushrooms. They just can’t stop thinking about how fungal mycelium bonds wood chips together. Inspired, they work on new ways to use mycelium as a resin.
Four million dollars in grants later, Eben and Gavin are building their second manufacturing plant in the northeast and planning a third in Texas so their mushroom-based, foam-replacing packing material doesn’t have to ride the train from NY to one of their big customers, as in Dell. Steelcase buys their stuff by the trainload, too.
Did I say manufacturing plant? Looked more like a bakery to me, seeing Gavin’s prez yesterday in Vegas (he was a keynote speaker at the National 4R Conference sponsored by the US Chamber of Commerce – @chamberbclc). Racks and racks of pans (think L-shaped bundt cakes).
Five days on the rack, no sun, hardly any energy at all, and, presto! No more office furniture dinged in shipping and no more foam packing material.
Two things really struck me, beyond the sheer awe that mushrooms can do this and that two guys figured it out: 1) the role of public money in getting this company off the ground (or, from under the bed, as Gavin tells us — the mushrooms needed darkness and they didn’t have a lab); and 2) the role of nature as manufacturer.
I have a bias against government subsidies. Using taxpayer money to artificially create demand and markets strikes me as, well, unsustainable.
But this mushrooming business altered my position, if not my reality. Yes, the EPA gave these guys some money. As in, you and I gave these guys some money. Would Kleiner Perkins have funded them? Maybe, though the social media, casual-gaming play isn’t jumping out at me here (Mushroomville?).
I didn’t ask Gavin if he would have taken private equity to get started. I didn’t get that vibe from him. He used the word “bootstrap” a lot.
Are we better off now that Ecovative Design exists? Environmentally, I’d say yes. This stuff practically makes itself, breaks down in soil in 30 days, and replaces a fossil fuel-derived staple. Since we pay the EPA to help make us better off, environmentally, that’s my bridge to OK for using public money to help these guys get off the ground. It’s a new bridge and for now it hangs on the difference between stimulating supply and creating demand.
Now, if there’s something seemingly unnatural about how Ecovative Design got its early financing, there’s little but nature turning their mushrooms into dent-free desks and servers.
Here’s the recipe, lifted from their site: “We actually grow EcoCradle™ using mycelium, a fungal network of threadlike cells. This mycelium grows around agricultural by-products like buckwheat husks, oat hulls, or cotton burrs to any shape we make. In 5 – 7 days, in the dark, with no watering, and no petrochemical inputs, the mycelium envelops the by-products, binding them into a strong and beautiful packaging part.”
Strong and beautiful, indeed. Hey! Turn out the lights and shut off the water! Rare commands in the product manufacturing business.
Smells like a good balance sheet coming off those racks, too.
Every March I teach five 30-minute classes to 8th graders during career day for the Fresh Air Fund in NYC. I always start the same way: tell me about your favorite ads. Hands shoot up. This year:
Then I ask what they do more: watch TV or go online. They do plenty of both, but online wins.
And where do you spend most of your time online? Used to be two or three sites. It’s all Facebook now.
So, I ask, tell me about your favorite ads on Facebook.
Have you ever asked a newly-minted teenager about yen-to-dollar ratios? Because then you’d know the look I’m talking about.
Then, just to drive it home, I ask how much it costs them to spend all that time on Facebook. This is in their wheelhouse. “Nothin’.”
And, finally, for the true test, I ask: Why is it you spend so much time online and you have no trouble remembering all these TV ads, but you can’t remember a single ad on Facebook?
This girl looked at me like I’d just asked for the time of day and replied just as plainly: “Because on TV they MAKE you watch the ads and on Facebook they’re just these little square boxes off to the side that are so easy to ignore.”
“Liposuction!” It turns out one kid did recall a Facebook ad after all. He couldn’t remember the brand.
That’s pretty much it in a nutshell.
But, just to belabor the point, here’s eMarketer’s CEO saying it in a March 29, 2011 report:
“TV advertising is on course to return to prerecession levels,” said eMarketer CEO and co-founder Geoff Ramsey. “While the growth of online advertising has been robust, it hasn’t stopped brand advertisers from keeping the bulk of their budgets flowing through TV sets.”
I love the Darth Vader VW commercial that just aired (click above to play). It reminds me of what’s great about advertising when done well. Hey, I just used the word “love” in the same sentence as “VW.” What do you suppose that’s worth?
Not much, according to America’s best-known ad critic.
Imagine, you create an ad that 10 million people ooh-and-ahh over online before it actually hits the Superbowl. Then, you get panned by Mr. Advertising with, of all things, the go-to creative-killing quip from junk mail firms everywhere: “show me how it sells.” [VW Finds Viral Force With Cute Ad, but So What?]
Seriously?
First, isn’t it a little early for “show me the money?” I mean, it wasn’t exactly a two-fer-one pitch.
But what really rattles my light saber is that digitalmania – what our critic calls the “brave new world” – has so castrated creativity.
We are so fixated on data and technology — features and innovation, counters and clickers – we don’t see nearly enough work like this anymore. You know, clever, touching advertising that actually creates a positive emotion and attachment. What we might call desire.
Small wonder, really, if this is what you get from the judge: “If you’re peddling entertainment instead of products, cultivating smiles not constituents, the Brave New World will be just as easy to squander resources in as the cowardly old one.”
In other words, the VW spot was a waste of money because it didn’t feature enough of the product. Because what the world really needs is another boring-ass car commercial with interior 360s, mountain roads, horsepower stats and Motor Trend calipers.
I love digital. I think it’s the most important and powerful thing we’ll see in marketing in my lifetime. But, like every force, it has a dark side.
You checked out the ads on TV these days? Or, like, for the last couple years?
I guess by definition I’m asking folks over the age of 15. Ask the younger crowd what they watch and see how “idiot” is spelled with just a gaze in reply, unless you’re asking about the last Glee episode. Facebook’s a verb now, like Google.
Anyway, back to the commercials.
They just seem a lot more…boring, and I think it’s because the real hero lately is the product.
Even the world’s biggest soap maker constantly talks about innovation. 3M is re-organizing sand crystals on sand paper. GMC truck ads look like schematics highlighting all the technology. The latest Apple Air spots are, well, like all the other Apple spots for all their other products, minus the hip soundtrack: dripping drop-dead gorgeous shots of the product itself. Tech porn. Go to the Gatorade homepage and you’ll see new versions, formulas and packages for what was once referred to as “Gatorade.” Droid ads are Droid does.
In fact, the pace of product innovation today is mind blowing and ad-land is using a camera more than its imagination to tell the world all about it.
It wasn’t always so. Anyone who ever connected with (the old version of) Young & Rubicam remembers brand studies through the BAV lens (Brand Asset Valuator). I don’t remember the complete pledge we swore at most client meetings, but it went something like: “relevant differentiation, relevant differentiation, relevant differentiation.” In other words, find something that’s different about you that your customers care about, and say that.
Well, that was often harder than it sounds. Parity was on good terms with most brands at the time.
We had the Jello biz. 7-UP. MetLife. KFC. Advil. Guess how many “new” versions of those products emerged every year? Like, zero. Maybe one. So, we and all our pals at all the other agencies had to get people to buy more of our clients’ stuff the old fashioned way. We had to make things up. Leo Burnett famously said if you don’t have something to say, sing it. So we sang our hearts out, thirty-seconds at a time.
It was great. And the people who could dream up the best stories and bring them to life were crowned, rightly, the agency rock stars. They created real magic. They made us want to go to Sears. Eat Jell-o. Use AT&T. Usually, without saying a word about what was actually IN the product, or what made it unique in any tangible, physical way.
But think about products today. You can’t possibly keep up with all the brand extensions and innovations lately. For every new version of your favorite cookie, soda or cigarette, there’re five or ten for tech gadgets. We’ve seen how many iPhone versions since it launched three years ago? (At least 4). You checked out the menu at McDs lately? There’s probably a vegan section somewhere. And who knows what version of Facebook we’re on.
In contrast, it took over 60 years to go from Coke to Diet Coke.
Now, talk to me about great Coke commercials.
Mean Joe Green? Yes. Lawyers suing for patent infringement (Coke Zero)? Not quite.
Today’s “relevant differentiation” is coming right from the products. 3-D TVs. Plug-in cars. Trans-fat-less, carb-less, alcohol-less beer.
Thinking back on what Leo said, I guess this means agencies today actually having something to say.
Pity, at least where advertising is concerned. If FedEx starts touting new planes and faster-than-the-speed-of-sound conveyor belts, I might have to join the 15-year-olds and turn off the TV altogether.
You checked out the ads on TV these days? Or, like, for the last couple years?
