The fight for the future of marketing spills out onto the streets

Further to Ad Age Editor, Jonah Bloom’s, remarks to the ANA last week about the current role of procurement in the marketing industry, the IAB’s CEO, Randall Rothenberg, has published a comprehensive review of how we got here, to the point where as an industry we are convulsed by the question, “Is Marketing a Strategic Resource or a Procured Commodity.”.

Back at Ad Age, Jeff Jones, a partner at ad agency McKinney chimes in on the need for marketing leadership. Says Mr. Jones:

“I’m frustrated by marketing being so misunderstood by so many, and I’m tired of reading articles placing all of the responsibility on the CMO.”

We should regard each of these items as part of the same awakening: marketing cannot be allowed to hit bottom. Within a consumer-driven world, marketing must have purview to engage consumers in a way that builds trust with consumers – which can mean something very different from using marketing for results in the short-term. 

FTC decides on a double standard for citizen journalists

As widely reported (but mostly slept-through) the FTC issued guidelines on October 5th subjecting bloggers to endorsement and testimonial rules that are different from traditional media. The IAB and it’s CEO, Randall Rothenberg, responded today (see links below).

Rothenberg’s open letter to FTC Chairman on his clog, quotes the FTC report, which says:

…that bloggers may be subject to different disclosure requirements than reviewers in traditional media. In general, under usual circumstances, the Commission does not consider reviews published in traditional media (i.e., where a newspaper, magazine, or television or radio station with independent editorial responsibility assigns an employee to review various products or services as part of his or her official duties, and then publishes those reviews) to be sponsored advertising messages. Accordingly, such reviews are not “endorsements” within the meaning of the Guides…

Never mind the financial pressures that traditional media is under that might tempt them to say a few kinds words about their sponsors. We accept that the Captains of traditional journalistic integrity will go down with the ships without uttering a false endorsement. 

Double standards are just wrong, however, as Rothenberg and the IAB fairly point out.

Twitter your Congressman.

Randall Rothenberg’s Clog

IAB release.

The Online Publishers Association: still driving with its foot on the brake.

The Online Publishers Association(OPA), the trade association representing the digital interests of mostly offline media companies, opted to set fire to the forest floor yesterday with the release of a study on brand advertising metrics that, by the time they finished, scorched the effectiveness of the entire Internet as a brand medium save for its 50, or so, members who served as the “proxy for content sites” in the study. That means all the other non-proxy content sites served by ad networks or sales representatives, plus portals – or, basically, the remainder of the Internet - were voted off the island by the report.

There are 400,000 words in the English language and there are seven you can’t say on television. What a ratio that is, the great George Carlin once observed. Add to it, now, that there are 10 billion web sites on the Internet and only 50 on which you can advertise your brand successfully.

They must be reeeally goood.

Unfortunately, this is a problem for anyone rooting for the Internet to get to $50 billion, which many people seem to be doing. If  brand advertisers can only hope to be successful on OPA web sites, the $50 billion means that, a) they will pay through the nose for advertising on the reeeally goood sites, and b) the rest of the Internet will be awash in so much fakevertising it will be like spilled oil on the beach. (Which Yahoo! already thinks is like spilled oil on the beach and is trying to clean up on its sites. Which is not what needs to happen if CPMS go to $250 on OPA sites and you need enough room for an environmental disaster to support the rest of the economy.)

This is what lashing out looks like. The OPA didn’t release a study yesterday; the OPA lashed out at the industry, which it feels conspires every day to wreck the value propositions of its members who are important, dedicated, hard-working, First Amendment freedom fighters that are sick and tired of being trampled by midgets. Honestly, I think they are just that frustrated. Every day it’s attack of the killer ants. Every day it’s a nightmare of compromises and conditions and unwelcome intrusions:

“Another Ad Network to see you, Sir.”

“The local residents have asked if they may hunt on the grounds tomorrow, Sir.”

“The gentleman in the portal next door has asked if he might borrow some Grey Poupon.”

No one is confused about the OPA’s mission: countless years and considerable wealth and innovation went into building the global media franchises that the OPA mostly represents, and keeping them secure amidst the torrent of new media brought on by the Internet is an important and worthwhile assignment. They should be beacons. But we must live in the real world and the real world online isn’t confined to a city block. It isn’t a gated community. It just isn’t. Look up.

The OPA should be the representative for all quality content online including content touched by ad networks and rep firms. It needs to get over the “branded” content thing and identify with millions of consumers online that have abiding relationships (some might call these brand relationships) with plenty of sites the OPA has never heard of. The IAB is wisely reaching-out at a critical time to long tail, independent publishers. The OPA should be ahead of it. The OPA, informed by the centuries-old mission of its founders - themselves small, independent media pioneers – should be the principal steward of online content and quality and a fierce advocate for publishers, big and small, that work hard to create meaningful destinations for consumers. The OPA should be filled with empathy, not petty rivalry.

If so, the OPA’s study yesterday might have offered cover to brand advertisers desiring to allocate more money online in response to all the signs that proclaim that’s where the people are! Instead, the OPA said “No. Mine,” and helped keep the brand advertising promise of the Internet down. In the process, for the day at least, the shift of brand dollars regarded as essential to the future of the industry was postponed. Again.

“Rational arguments enclosed in emotional envelopes.”

Further to some of the thoughts yesterday in this space about the creative shift taking place in the advertising business and its impact on the quality of advertising up for awards at Cannes this year, is the Viewpoint from Hernan Lopez, President of .Fox Networks, in the Global Issue of Advertising Age this week. Lopez calls for a creative revolution in interactive advertising, echoing sentiments already expressed by others such as Randall Rothenberg of the IAB in the U.S.

These are all threads of the same story-line: good creative must come next in New Media. The people require it. The new generation of consumers has made the move to online and advertising must respond with messages that reflect the sophistication of the users and the environment. People are ready and waiting. Old commercials formats are drying-up creatively as attention shifts to new platforms.

Hernan Lopez leans on some of the findings of advertising veterans and researchers, Erwin Ephron and John Philip Jones, to make his points. Both have agreed in their studies over the years that the quality of the creative is the most significant contributor to the success of TV commercials. More recently, Mr. Jones distilled the ingredients of effective advertising down to “rational arguments enclosed in emotional envelopes.”

Creating emotional envelopes is the critical concept here. In a broadcast environment we do it with sight, sound and motion. Online we need to think more like we do in print and use the environment to help create the emotional envelopes.

Lopez laments that we have missed creative opportunities online given our fixation with things like click-through rates. Quite right. Our formative creative years online have been invested in action rates to the detriment of building bridges between our advertising messages and the reason people visit the web. Internet advertising has been lacking emotional context despite being surrounded by it.  

Fortunately, we are gathering ourselves around the need for creative answers. Unfortunately, the answer we are sometimes tempted to give is to make online advertising more like television by relying on video. Video feels like home, I suppose, offering emotional context to those of us in advertising business. But, consumers keep resisting this initiative by communicating through their proxies, the web publishers, that video is disruptive.

In the end, I think we’ll discover that the Internet is not a place for “commercials.” Sight, sound and motion works in the context of television because television is sight, sound and motion. The Internet, on the other hand, is about – well, come to think of it - emotional envelopes. 

We can make a strong new beginning, creatively, by tucking our messages neatly into those.

A Manifesto on Interactive Creativity

IAB CEO, Randall Rothenberg, has given us an exceptional treatise on the current state of advertising creativity online: http://www.randallrothenberg.com/2009/02/heartbeats-and-mouseclicks-manifesto-on.html

Randall’s column is not simply about the business of producing great looking ads, however; it is about recognizing and extracting advertising value online.

It’s a great read. Well done, Randall.