It’s not just an online creative problem.

Nice interview by Rich Cherecwich in iMedia today with Lars Bastholm, Creative Director at AKQA, to discuss “What’s crushing creativity?”, which refers specifically to creativity online, although I don’t know why the question shouldn’t be put to creativity offline. A :30 commercial may feel substantially more satisfying to a marketer compared to a 728 x 90 leaderboard, but it’s of no greater value if it’s not memorable. And there’s very little memorable advertising breaking-through these days, if you ask me as a consumer.

As it happens, I think Lars Bastholm speaks about a broader problem when he says: “…it’s not that you can’t do something fun with banners. It’s that we’ve effectively managed to kill them by plastering them everywhere and making rigid rules for what you can do in order to maximize sales, not actual consumer satisfaction or consumer enjoyment of the marketing we’re doing.”

Really, how different is this lament from the one we would make about any commercial media? The only difference online might be the extent to which we should be additionally mournful for having failed to act with any restraint early on before “plastering” the market with ads that don’t have much more to say than, “Click Me!” It’s not like we didn’t know, thanks to the remote control and VCR, that consumers were having issues with advertising.

Testing, testing social networks

You have to hand it to P&G; for most of the 15 years, or so, of the commercial Internet the company has been in a constant state of discovery in order to learn how to exploit online to its marketing advantage. Beginning with its Sunny Delight “Sun Bottle Hunt” web contest in the mid-90s and including the FAST Summit it sponsored in 1998, P&G has exerted its role as the world’s premier marketer in order to make sense of online advertising, for the benefit of all of us.

They were at it again yesterday according to a report picked-up by IAB’s Smartbrief on Cincinnati.com (which is part of the Enquirer - and which, by the way, does a nice job in its tag line of positioning Cincinnati.com as “Powered by you and the Enquirer and Community Press.” Good consumer-centric-media kind of stuff.) when they invited 40 leaders of social networking companies to headquarters to engage in a little experimenting.  Working with P&G marketing executives the test was to try and sell as many t-shirts as possible over four hours relying on social networking tools. The winner sold 600 shirts at $20 each.

Hmmm.

If they haven’t, I recommend P&G run another experiment - perhaps the same experiment - but with actual consumers, not social network executives. At last week’s 4As meeting in New Orleans there were three consumer panels, maybe 24 individuals in all, divided into demographic buckets – young adults, baby boomers and just women. It was a great initiative on the part of the 4As, long over-due. With so much lip service paid to consumer control it was the first major marketing conference I’d attended at which consumers actually got to speak, live.

The young adults panel was appropriately hip and conversant. The subsequent panels of boomers and women probably made the toes curl of most of the people in the room. In the advertising business, we get comfortable thinking about our target audiences as thin and attractive, with white teeth living in households over $75K. These panels will have disabused many of that notion. Which doesn’t reflect poorly on the panelists. To the contrary, they became more real - a fact that hopefully sank in with some of the marketers and media-types who smirked quietly and rolled their eyes during the sessions. Those panelists were at Wal-Mart later that day buying products.

But, with regards to reality, the one media behavior attribute each panel seemed to share was scepticism towards social networking. One person on the young adults panel when asked about Facebook even responded, “What’s that?” A “sweet” grandmother type on the boomers panel uses MySpace to track her grandchildren. I recall only one of the panelists across all three panels showing much affinity for advertising in a social context when he discussed picking-up on a recommendation for designer blue jeans with a price point of something like $200. And he acknowledged, sure, at $200 who isn’t going to speak-up about a pair of jeans. The simple truth is that newspapers had a better outing across the three panels that day than social networking. So, it might make sense for P&G to run the experiment again with a different control group.