Jed Hallam

First things first; I LOVE Fast Company, it’s an incredible magazine that consistently produces brilliant work.

Now we’ve got that out of the way, I’ll detail why Fast Company’s article on The Future of Advertising is wrong.

In case you cannot be bothered to read the next 1,500 words of angry diatribe, here’s the spark notes of my take on the article;

1.  It sets out to scare marketers into thinking the world has changed and they’ve missed the bus, and the bus after that one too. They haven’t.

2.  There’s a definite tone of ‘brands are scared, and they should be’ with an unhealthy sprinkling of ‘digital should be free’. Wrong again.

3.  There are a few paragraphs that suggest that soon robots will be doing our creative jobs. Honestly.

4.  The final few hundred words are actually pretty good – pointing towards two emerging models.

5.  Then I talk a bit about Iain Tait’s column for NMA yesterday.

Please refrain from jerking your knees

The article opens by talking about how Hyper Island (Swedish super digital school) is making waves on Madison Avenue by ‘training’ old school executives how to embrace this ‘brave new world’.

So far, pretty standard fare really.  ‘Social media’ workshops are very popular.

Except discontent with explaining how Madison Avenue is trying to upskill, Fast Company opts for the digital ‘war-mongery’ path and jumps from behind the online curtain shouting ‘boo’ at passing marketers.

“these days (experience) is more of a liability. They’re all well aware that coding is now prized over copywriting”

Really? This is the equivalent of saying ‘hey, that guy builds billboards, we don’t need a copywriter, he can write the copy from now on!’.

This is where it begins to get a bit silly.

There are a whole bunch of quotes from executives that are scared of digital, which is fine, except they’re all a bit daft. This one is my favourite:

“I left my cushy job at a global agency. Actually, I didn’t leave; I was pushed out.”

Aside from the fact that they’ve been ‘pushed out’ for not wanting to learn about new technology and communications channels – if your job is cushy, you’re doing it wrong.

I think one of my main issues with the article is that it suggests that ‘digital’ (which is being used as a pseudonym for ‘social media’ I presume) is new. Digital agencies have been building digital platforms for more than twenty years now. OK, so let’s presume they do specifically mean social media, in which case, that’s been going on for at least ten years. There’s a very simple way of summing up what has changed;

Social media is people speaking to other people using technology, online.

Advertising and marketing has a history of crafting message for niches, this is no different. Other than that the niche is smaller (and in a lot of cases, the niche is actually a single person).

Then we’re hit with this little beauty… “Marketing in the future (will be) like sex. Only the losers will have to pay for it.”.

Work online shouldn’t be about the ‘cheap economy’ it should be about providing real value to brands and consumers – connecting the two like never before. Earned media is hard to earn – otherwise every agency would do it.

Brands need to be brave

Yes, many clients are in a tailspin but why is this? Because articles like this push the fact that ‘digital’ is scary – they don’t know who to trust and they’re not signing any AOR deals until they find an agency that gives them cold hard facts and numbers. And rightly so. In the same way that you wouldn’t give an agency that has no clients your biggest campaign!

Then the conversation turns to ‘the agency of the future’ – the crowd-sourcing agency. Apparently it’s now possible to give a ‘crowd-sourcing agency’ $40,000 and they’ll give you a number of spots (obviously produced by ‘the crowd’) and then each spot will be “syndicated on 20 web platforms for tracking, testing, sentiment analysis, and wide distribution”.

The flippancy with which this; “syndicated on 20 web platforms for tracking, testing, sentiment analysis, and wide distribution” is tossed away is incredible.

‘Seeding’ – ridiculously hard with understanding the network properly

‘Tracking’ – expensive to do right, but massively valuable if you understand it

‘Testing’ – excuse me?! Once it’s on the web you cannot do a product recall!

‘Sentiment analysis’ – read here and here.

‘Wide distribution’ – not for $40,000 all in you won’t.

Yep, all the web is about is creating something really flashy. It will seed itself. It’s like Danielle Sacks doesn’t realise that the problems that she’s highlighting are inherent in the way that these types of agency market themselves – cheap and easy. No, no, no.

Then we start to get into the business model side of things… Apparently a cutting edge old school agency would have a ‘heavy overhead’ whereas the new breed of agencies are more lean and ‘focused on new ideas’ and apparently take 20-40% of the fee and give the remaining money to ‘the crowd’.

So hold on, the agency takes between 20-40%? So it’s overheads (effectively) account for 60-80%? That sounds like the traditional model. In fact that IS the traditional model.

Robots aren’t taking over the world

We then get a few hundred words on how the job of the planner, the media buyer and the creative are being farmed out to automated services (I’m surprised they didn’t say robots, to be honest).

Digital is moving us AWAY from mass-marketing and one size fits all approaches. Will automated services create individual marketing strategies for people online? Will they understand how to communicate in a human way with people? How to go the extra mile to make sure that a customer is enthused about your product?

Robots. Pfft.

There are two plausible models emerging

The last few hundred words of the article are actually really good. Sacks starts to talk about how there are two emerging models of agency;

1.  Holding agencies changing the P&L format and encouraging agencies to collaborate to create fully integrated (digital and traditional) campaigns (which I LOVE) (look at Vivaki, or Mullen)

2.  Smaller agencies setting up with a wider remit than just ‘public relations’ or ‘advertising’ but ‘problem solving’. Places like Co and IDEO, where the focus is business improvement rather than selling an advert. Building something for value, not for targets.

Traditionally an agency is structured to create the best of it’s speciality – be that create a great advert or provide some great market research – but what’s missed far too often is the bigger picture. Let’s all remember the basics; we get paid by brands to help them sell more of their stuff. That’s it. It’s. Just. That. Simple.

Let’s set something straight once and for all

In another article published a few days back, Iain Tait made a great point when he slammed people who use the term ‘Post-Digital’. Two points leap off the screen;

The term ‘post-digital’ would suggest that we’ve hit critical mass on digital and now online is totally integrated into the lives of the world. It’s integrated into the lives of some people in the world. Not all.

There are more than 3 billion people with mobile phones. That’s (give or take a few million) roughly half the global population. The amount of people with an Internet connection is just under 2 billion. And the vast majority of those are using it at dial-up speeds – not quite fast enough to load up a YouTube video of your CEO or a flash website dedicated to your new toilet brush.

Let’s set something straight once and for all.

From a consumer perspective: the advances in technology and the increasing deference to brands means that people are more likely to discuss, promote and complain about things online.

From a brand perspective: because of advances in technology we can now connect with consumers on a different level, but to do this effectively we need to think about what we say and how we say it. Good brands have always done this anyway.

As Iain says, “in your 20 seconds of easy-to-say, impossible-to-implement blathering you’ve just happily trashed the fundamental principles of the internet and created perhaps the worst, most pointless user-experience in the history of anything”.  Well Sacks managed to stretch that 20 seconds out into 5,700 words.

New technology means advances in communications and media, but lets not overegg the pudding. Yes ‘digital’ or ‘social’ media and engagement involves learning new things, but if your brand can answer these three questions (that I’ve carefully stolen from Greg Galle of C2 / Creative Capital) you should be ok;

Who are you?

What do you do?

and

Why does it matter?

And you know how to talk to your audience, then you’re going to be just fine. Keep calm and carry on.

Good ideas communicated well from a good brand will make for good sales. It isn’t rocket science, honestly.

The only people that should be scared are brands that can’t answer these three questions – if you’re brand is more style than substance than you’re going to get caught out. But then you were always going to get caught out eventually, technology just… Speeds things up.

There’s also an excellent collection of all of the ‘future of advertising’ articles Fast Company has published on AdverLab