Before the Internet Works on Its Creative Problem, Advertising Needs to Work on Its Confidence Problem

It is Advertising Week in New York and the agenda for members of the online advertising community is “branding” and “creative.” In his report for Adweek, veteran new media observer Brian Morrissey writes:

“As the advertising world descends on Manhattan this week for Advertising Week, the watchword for most is digital. Yet despite the lip service paid that the future of the industry is written in bits and bytes, the Internet after 15-plus years has still not proven itself as a branding medium.”

And he quotes IAB CEO, Randall Rothenberg, who says,

“We need to concede that going back 15 years, without meaning to or thinking about it, we fundamentally created the medium to be a direct-response medium.”

As leader of the internet’s trade association, Randall Rothenberg has been fabulously effective at confronting its demons and moving the industry forward. But, “without meaning to or thinking about it” is only partly true in regards to the 15 year drift away from brand and into direct response-dom. Yes, we didn’t mean to and we didn’t think about it, but 15 years ago we were positive nonetheless: advertising was broken and online was going to “fix” it. The difference between brand and direct response didn’t enter into it. Advertising, period, was a tired business and its heroes, the brand strategists and creatives, were to become relics of a by-gone age. Relics, purged by the New Media classes.

In his article, Brian Morrissey quotes Jeff Levick, President of Global Advertising and Strategy at Aol, which is stepping-up as a champion of today’s creative online initiative. Says Jeff:

“If we really want to fix brand advertising online, we have to go directly to the creative community. We have to understand the limitations of today’s unit that drives them crazy.”

I don’t know what drives the creative community crazy these days. I do know there was always plenty to drive them crazy in the past: the limitations of print and 30-second spots, Account Executives, outdoor billboards, bus shelters, packaging, copy testing, focus groups and budgets among a few. Every time I drive past a highway billboard at 70 miles an hour, however, I marvel at how creative and branding manages to break through the limitations of a cruel commercial world.

But, yes, time to fight back and push back on the creative envelope. Let it happen. Absolutely, positively, overnight. More and better and bigger if required. Get behind it and push. Stand in front and salute. It may be a cruel commercial world, but nothing helps makes it a little brighter than great creative.

But let’s be clear, advertising creative is not the problem. Advertising confidence is the problem. Believing is the problem. And, as anyone will tell you that sells for a living, before you can sell you must believe.

The Internet Conference Silly Season is Here

While I was sitting on a panel at a conference in New York last week hob-knobbing with other Internet wizards someone forwarded me Ari Rosenberg’s Online Publishing Insider piece that starts out:

“Here we go again. Web advertising executives from companies that make money from the sale of advertising, without producing the content generating the ad impressions sold, will perch themselves on conference stages this month and tell everyone sitting below that what they are now selling is “it” – — the panacea to more effective advertising. Raise your hand if you have heard this one before?”

Ari would have had his hand up at this conference all afternoon. There was plenty of demand-side-real-time-target-audience-bidding talk going around, which is – as he points out – the new “it.”Most of it is phooey, except for one thing: it’s cheaper than the alternative.

The alternative is media planning that attempts to engage the audience. That means planning based on content, which is expensive.

Demand-side-real-time-target-audience-bidding relies on media planning inputs. It is programming. Content targeting relies on media planning discovery. Discovery is always more expensive except when it’s serendipitous, but that’s not planning.

With my own hand up I made the point at this conference that there is zero evidence the Internet has changed the way consumers respond to advertising, except that they may dislike it more. If so, it is the result of all the inputting; i.e. the innumerable advertising messages let loose online and set to “stun” or “follow.”

With the fall conference season underway, maybe “it” would be wise to listen to Ari:

“So before you take the stage or take a seat in front of a potential client, regardless of what kind of advertising solutions you sell, tone it down so your offerings can be heard as they are likely intended — as an innovative and unique complement to an overall media and marketing communication plan.

“No one has the single answer to the question of what works in advertising — nor should they ever sound like they do.” 

Ad Age Reports on the Exodus of Ad Agency Creatives. Out of Old, Comes New.

Over at Ad Age, Matthew Creamer took a deep dive into the exodus of creative talent from the ad agency world. Creamer writes:

“Since the beginning of the year, a veritable Cannes jury worth of senior creative talent has shrugged off the leashes of big agency networks for their own start-ups or for creative pursuits outside the ad industry.”

And he adds:

“Longtime agency watchers will say this kind of churn has always been part of agency life, but to dismiss the trend as part of some cycle is ignoring some key questions that agencies need to answer. After all, the pressure on these companies’ business model is intense.”

The pressure on the business model, of course, goes back a long way – about 30 years, when traditionally private ad agencies started selling themselves to public holding companies. I can remember sitting around a pool in suburban Connecticut in the late 80s chatting with a fellow I’d known since I was a boy. I’d grown-up to work in advertising. He’d grown up to work in investment banking.

Dancer Fitzgerald Sample (DFS) had been sold recently to Saatchi & Saatchi, which came after a merger or two with other agencies, Backer and Spielvogel and Compton. Or something likes that; I forget the order. I had worked at DFS, but moved on. My friend was explaining:

“You see,” he said, “The people at these companies – these ad agencies – that have built them through the 50s and 60s and 70s, they want to retire, and they own more stock in the companies than the companies can afford to pay them. They have to sell.” And the holding companies, of course, will have to keep buying.

For me, that conversation by the pool all those years ago has satisfactorily explained everything about the ad agency business since, including now, because it made it inevitable that the cycle would re-boot and the green shoots of numerous new agencies would begin to appear when big got too big, as big always does.

Many commenters to Matthew’s article observe the canvas on which these ad agencies will create their work will be different and substantially more technical. Sure, I guess. Media is always evolving. The prior generation of creators started in print. Broadcast – very technical – made them rich and famous. They managed. There is no reason to think digital can’t do the same for their heirs. In point of fact, as an ironical twist of fate, it may be – oh, heck, it will be – the rise of digital media, once seen as poison to ad agencies, that fertilizes a new generation Dusenberrys and Rineys.

That should be fun.

NYU Professor Jay Rosen Offers Advice to an Incoming Class of Journalism Students. He Should Offer the Same Advice to Advertising Students.

MediaBistro’s Morning News Feed points to the remarks NYU journalism professor, Jay Rosen, made to the incoming class of students at Sciences Po école du journalisme in Paris on September 2, 2010. His address, to “The Journalists Formerly known as the Media: My Advice to the Next Generation,” is a great read back over 250 years of cultural upheaval that begat the rise of professional journalism. Now, after 150 years of thinking and acting (and making money) one way, the so-called professional media class is being told to re-invent itself. In summary, Professor Rosen says:

“Seeing people as masses is the art in which the mass media, and professional media people, specialized during their profitable 150-year run (1850 to 2000). But now we can see that this was actually an interval, a phase, during which the tools for reaching the public were placed in increasingly concentrated hands. Professional journalism, which dates from the 1920s, has lived its entire life during this phase, but let me say it again: this is what your generation has a chance to break free from. The journalists formerly known as the media can make the break by learning to specialize in a different art: seeing people as a public, empowered to make media themselves.”

Rosen offers 10 pieces of advice (in bold print, below) to the incoming class of journalists to help them “break free” from the last media interval. It is advice that with a little work and some license we can make work equally for advertisers. Indeed, if we can’t make it work for advertisers something in the new media equation is broken. 

1. Replace readers, viewers, listeners and consumers with the term “users.” “Users” is precisely the term for advertising audiences online. Why not consolidate audience terms in the same way as Rosen proposes as a step towards making advertising truly cross-platform.

2. Remember: the users know more than you do. A point Rosen borrows from media writer/reporter/commentator Dan Gillmor who recognized that the aggregate knowledge of his users is greater than his own. It is equally true of users as consumers. As the legendary David Ogilvy said, “The consumer isn’t a moron. She is your wife.”

3. There’s been a power shift; the mutualization of journalism is here. There has always been a mutualization of advertising and marketing. Word of mouth is still the most potent advertising vehicle. The difference now is that media itself has become mutualized.

 4. Describe the world in a way that helps people participate in it. Also from David Ogilvy: “When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.”

5. Anyone can doesn’t mean everyone will. Jay Rosen refers to the one percent rule, coined possibly by the Guardian in the U.K., that suggests for every 100 users online, one will create, 10 will interact and the rest – 89% – will simply lurk. It is a formula that easily describes user behavior in response to advertising. It is nearly inviolable as advertising law. Accordingly, stop regarding digital new media in purely response-driven terms.

6. The journalist is just a heightened case of an informed citizen, not a special class. Journalists are paid to ask questions which any smart citizen can do, says Professor Rosen, admonishing the incoming class to steer clear of any notion that the public needs them more than they need the public. Do users need advertising?  No, as far as users are concerned they don’t need advertising and would happily seek to destroy it. There is no quid pro quo between advertisers and consumers. Break free from that idea.

7. Your authority starts with, “I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.” For journalists authority starts with, “I’m a witness to what’s happening and you’re not.” For advertisers authority starts with the strength of their product or service. “I can provide what you need or want.” Advertisers with authority make and keep promises.

8. Somehow, you need to listen to demand and give people what they have no way to demand. People will pay attention to what you think they need to know if they believe you are listening to them at other times. Mass media – nearly by definition - corrupted the listening skills of advertisers, who continue to try and dominate the conversation online. Advertising intrusiveness is not a virtue.

9. If your bid to be trusted, don’t take the View From Nowhere; instead, tell people where you’re coming from. Be transparent.

10.  Breathe deeply of what DeTocqueville said: “Newspapers make associations and associations make newspapers.” Explains Professor Rosen:

“Alexis De Tocqueville, a Frenchman, visited the United States in the 1830s. Among the observations he made was: “newspapers make associations and associations make newspapers.” What I think he meant was: wherever people have a common interest and wish to discuss it, there lies an opportunity for a smart journalist.”

Ditto: wherever people have a common interest and wish to discuss it there lies an opportunity for smart advertisers.

Wired Magazine: Bored With the Web

In the current conversation about the Web vs. the Internet, the template for which is the second in a “series” of articles published by Wired Magazine over the last decade about the death of the Web (“The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet”), there is a subtle thread to the argument damning the Web that depicts it as a place of empty and pointless wandering. Michael Wolff, who co-authored the Wired piece with Wired Editor, Chris Anderson, writes: 

 “Facebook became a parallel world to the Web, an experience that was vastly different and arguably more fulfilling and compelling and that consumed the time previously spent idly drifting from site to site.” 

The same notion pops-up in John Gaffney’s DigiRant on August 25^th, “Death of The Long Tail.” He writes. 

“Casting around for new blogs, commerce deals and other content should be compressed. The Long tail gets shorter.”

And he adds,

 “If we’re all gaming and yapping, why would we try to discover anything that can’t be emailed or posted on Facebook? We won’t.”

I never “surfed” the Web, which is to say it was never my idea of fun to wander from place to place in search of a sudden discovery I could share with my friends. Not that I haven’t been trapped falling down the rabbit hole many times on a linear path to nowhere. But the Web has never been an app to me, a carnival ride, or a box of chocolates with a “Cool Site of the Day” in the center. The Web has been about creativity and expression, along with destination and purpose, the second two of which have always been the things to qualify the media and advertising opportunity.

So this notion of replacing idle drifting on the Web with the more fulfilling experience of applications such as Facebook is a disconnect, unless you’re a relentless new media drifter. In which case, the app world offers an assuredly better drifting experience – and Facebook the consummate drifting environment (with Foursquare not far behind).

I have 366 friends on Facebook (a total that probably inflates the number of friends I really have). If I were a searcher (or technology editor) like Chris Anderson I might browse Facebook over breakfast. I don’t. Admittedly, it may be because I don’t exploit the tool in the way it could be exploited, but the musings of the 20 – 30 people (out of 366) that account for most of the idle bits and bites of my Facebook environment are – well – they make me more inclined to watch the morning cable news show over breakfast.

I accept all the evidence of app intrusion in our lives that is fundamentally reshaping how we communicate with each other and consume media. I own an iPad and a Blackberry. I agree with Doug Weaver, however, who wrote in his blog, The Drift:

“The future is all about “and.”  We’ll be navigating and building on a world that’s filled with web pages and apps and social media communities and video and…..  Wired (for whom I worked in 1994-95) is tossing us a red herring in saying that all the meaningful financial action will shift into applications and closed environments.  It’s a false choice.”

It is made more false by the points that get made by Anderson and Wolff in the Wired piece, but never connected. Says Anderson:

“The wide-open Web of peer production, the so-called generative Web where everyone is free to create what they want, continues to thrive, driven by the nonmonetary incentives of expression, attention, reputation and the like.”  

In so saying, Anderson makes the media case for the Web: “expression, attention, reputation and the like.” Wolff chimes in elsewhere:

 “ …What the Web has lacked in its determination to turn itself into a full-fledged media format is anybody who knew anything about media. Likewise, on the media side there wasn’t anybody who knew anything about technology. This has been a fundamental and aching disconnect: There was no sublime integration of content and systems, of experience and functionality – no clever, subtle, Machiavellian overarching design able to create that codependent relationship between audience, producer and marketer.”

About the lack of people who knew anything about media in the evolution of this industry I couldn’t agree more; but Chris Anderson has made the case for the integration of content and systems - freeing everyone to create what they want - and it “continues to thrive.” Wolff says, “The new business model is to try and let the content – the product as it were – eclipse the technology.”

Yes and the model thrives.

In the end, for anyone that does understand media, it is never idle, which is why, also for anyone that understands media, social networking still makes them scratch their heads. But, Wired Magazine is a technology publication and, accordingly, its producers and readers are restless adopters in constant pursuit of the killer app. Fair enough.

For the rest, for the media-types, “aching” for their turn at the helm in this brave new world Chris Anderson offers this elixir:

“But the Web is now 18 years old. It has reached adulthood. An entire generation has grown up in front of a browser. The exploration of a new world has turned to business as usual. We get the Web. It’s part of our life. And we just want to use the services that make our life better. Our appetite for discovery slows as our familiarity with the status quo grows.”

Drink this, and the Web becomes like TV and Radio before it: the status quo - which is, in media land, the killer app.

American Express Reports On Shopper Behavior (Operative Word: “Behavior”)

Here’s a companion piece to yesterday’s blog, Privacy Business. From MediaPost’s Marketing Daily comes the news that American Express has wrapped-up a study of four billion transactions across 90 million cards to glean the shopping behavior (operative word: “behavior”) of card holders. Some of what the report says they know (operative word: “know”):

1. Gender

2. Age

3. Purchases - where and how much

And, of course, they have the names, addresses and telephone numbers of everyone in the study; but that’s beside the point, which is that AMEX has aggregated some very useful behavior information (operative word: “behavior”), and it wasn’t until I was half-way through the article engrossed and thinking, “Well, that’s interesting”, and “Gee, how about that”, that it washed over me: wait…isn’t this, like, the online privacy issue in a credit card bottle? These are consumer behavior segments we’re talking about here, are they not!?

Oh yes they are.

Peering closer at the article I reached my hand in and felt around. “Please don’t bite me,” I thought, ready to recoil in an instant should anything slippery clamp hold of my wrist, pull me in or try to steal my wallet.

Guess what? Nothing. Not even a nibble.

Privacy business

Cory Treffiletti has been reading the small print in the Privacy Policy of his auto financing company, which he shares in his Online Spin column at MediaPost. It says:

“The types of personal information we collect and share depend on the product or service you have with us.  This information can include: Social Security number and income, payment history and purchase history, credit history and assets.”

And also:

“Reasons we share your personal information – for our everyday business purposes, for our marketing purposes, for joint marketing with other companies, for our affiliates’ everyday business purposes, for our affiliates to market to you.  Can you limit this sharing?  No.”

As Cory points out, and as discussed in this space in the past, the online privacy discussion can seem terribly unbalanced at times. In a side-by-side comparison with the detailed personal information harvested in a variety of other business transactions - from magazine subscriptions to grocery check-out - the quality of data captured by online ad delivery seems positively benign.

Does the imbalance exist because we think consumers give explicit permission to capture personal information to the supermarket and their data partners, such as Catalina Marketing,  when they swipe their frequent shopper card?  What gives Cory’s auto finance company the right to share his Social Security number with marketing partners? The fact that he borrowed their money and was required to surrender his Social Security number in the process? 

There is an increasing amount of talk about the economics of privacy, and many people are pointing out that in an information-driven world privacy will be expensive. Yes, well, clearly privacy is already about money and already expensive: auto lenders are able to trade in sensitive personal information depending “on the product or service you have.”  You can stay off the grid, but only if you can afford to pay cash for your vehicle.

It follows that if we think advertising is a less explicit (and less expensive) arrangement between consumer and marketer, then we may be thinking that marketers should not be entitled to the detailed personal information that transfers to them offline through their explicit customer interactions. An online advertising exposure should be proportionately less personal and useful only in aggregate, which sounds, of course, like an apt description of the process today. 

Unless, of course, you don’t agree that advertising is a less explicit arrangement with consumers or that the cost of information is correspondingly lower. If there was no advertising and consumers had to foot the bill for all the world’s information there would be a) less of it, and b) it would be substantially more expensive. Information might even revert to the privileged classes.

In any case, I will go home tonight and read the privacy statement on our auto lease.