I have just spent a splendid weekend in Scotland cycling with an old friend in an 80-mile race called the ‘Etape Caledonian’.
This friend, as well as being a ginger haired dynamo of a bike rider who cycled the legs off me around the glorious Scottish countryside, is also an ad-man who is much sharper than the carpet tacks spread around the cycle route by disgruntled locals.
We will come back to the carpet tacks later but I want to relate the content of just one of the several intriguing dinner time conversations my friend and I enjoyed about the state of our industry and the lemming-like stampede away from the traditional strengths that made London the creative centre of the best work in marketing communications.
My pedal-pounding pal had worked in some of the best creative agencies in the eighties and nineties such as JWT, WCRS and Wieden + Kennedy before setting up his own agency, 180, in Amsterdam. Between us, this is what we came to conclude over post-peloton haggis and chips. As I said, he is very smart so most of the good points here are his and most of the bad gags are mine:
Digital is Deceptive: Let us ignore, for the moment, the fact that we talk about digital as if it is a noun and not an adjective. Why are we so excited about ‘it’? Because it does have lots going for it. It is direct, it is downloaded, it is demanded by the consumer. It is interactive, it is interesting, it is infinite. It is cheap, it is cheerful and in a few cases it is cherished. But it is not the answer to everything even if it looks like it. Yes it is measurable, but we need to recalibrate the measurements we keep making. We all get so excited when Susan Boyle gets 100m downloads and rightly so. But she is one of hundreds of thousands of pieces of content uploaded this year and she stood out because of her exposure elsewhere. But boy, did she spread rapidly. I am always reminded of a brilliant fact Derek Morris told me in 2008. At that time, the most downloaded video of all time was ‘The Star Wars Kid’ (Google it) which had had over 970 million downloads since it first appeared in 2003. But in one week, in one TV programme, in one country, the cumulative advertising exposures totaled 830 million (ITV, Coronation Street, all broadcasts). Sure it is different and definitely the web-watchers would have been more engaged that the telly-babies but it does serve to remind you that for many marketers, scale is important and measuring one download rating on YouTube against another can be construed as arguing about who is the tallest dwarf round at Snow White’s house. So before we rush in, think carefully about what we are rushing towards.
Fragmentation is Frightening: A few years ago, we were all being taxed and tormented by the thought that TV audiences were fragmenting. It was getting harder and harder to build the reach that many of us needed. TV was not delivering in the way it used to do. That was definitely a fair criticism but we seem to have forgotten this particular worry when we decide to ‘go digital’. Talk about fragmentation! Some estimates reckon we are approaching 200 million websites in the world with more than 3 billion pages indexed. And we want our stuff to stand out. Sure it can be done but honestly, it is like trying to find needles in haystacks. There are so many needles out there that there will come a time when nobody wants to go roll in the hay anymore but in the meantime, our challenge is to make sure that when we go digital, our pin-*** is the most likely to be felt and remembered. So how do we take part, jump into the haystack but still stand out?
Evolution is Essential: This might sound like a polemic against the newest thinking – propagation, user modulated content, social mediation etc – but it isn’t. Of course we have to evolve and take advantage of the brilliant step change in the ability of technology and communication to connect people to us, to each other and to companies all over the world. This has been coming – and has been here – for a very long time. The Electronic Telegraph was launched 15 years ago, for heaven’s sake. Who would have thought that Sir Cliff Richard was such a visionary when he sang ‘power to all my friends, to the music that never ends’? Did he prophesy MySpace? Of course we need to embrace all things digital (using it as an adjective). The question is how? Because the more beer we drank and the more we talked the more we became convinced that digital provided the power to modern day communication solutions but it was not the solution itself. So what does that mean?
The Modern Model: Laurence Green at Fallon told me a great line from Brian Eno about “A big here and a long now”. Laurence had taken that and made it comparative and talked about a “bigger here and a longer now” that was being enabled by the digital connected revolution. Laurence is clever and my friend Guy is definitely cut from the same cloth. He took that thought and started talking about the way the new world and the old world surely work best together. How, in communications, do we create a ‘Bigger Here’? How did Susan Boyle do it? How did Fallon do it with Cadburys and Sony? And how did they go on to create a ‘Longer Now’? I suspect we have to apologise to Mr. Eno (and maybe Mr. Green) because he was talking at a much deeper level than how to plan your communications exposure, (he was talking about the need to shift cultural perceptions of time and space), but Guy went on to elegantly state something that I have been espousing ever since I worked on Sony “Paint” with, what was then, an unconvinced Fallon. You start the fire with the biggest bonfire possible and then fan the flames with the most efficient tools you can use. In other words, for many campaigns, build it big on TV then make it live online. We still need reach and frequency but we do not need to build them in the same way as we used to. So build big and then blow long.
Trust in the Traditional: But how do you do that in this day and age? You expect me to say TV and posters and print, don’t you? But that would just be dumb based on what I said above. You pick the thing that is right for the job whatever that happens to be. It could be TV but it could also be packaging or posters or PR or print or personnel or pop music … and they are just things beginning with ‘p’. You pick whatever works. But it is not as simple as that. In a diatribe reminiscent of being in a pub with David Hackworthy, Guy went on to declaim the current passion for thinking the channel is more important than the charm. Making something brilliant, something beautiful, something brave and something right for a brand is still a magnificent fusion of strategy and creativity. The ability to look at the hard facts, identify the opportunity and then make a leap of inspiration to turn it into something simply compelling. And you know what, at the heart of doing that are the craft skills that those big, old-fashioned behemoth agencies helped shape and develop and still champion today. They are not the only ones who do it, of course, but they are sometimes out-gunned by more nimble agencies that can build visions based on ether and electricity but not founded on solid ground. The agency of the future has to find a way of bringing the best of the traditional world and make it fit for the fantastic opportunities that the digital age is opening up for communication. Clay Shirky in Media Guardian talked about the web being more important that the printing press and maybe being the first true medium. He is right but let us not forget that just like the old days of printing, it still takes talent to make something that is both engaging and effective. So put some trust back in the traditional skills of the last century and apply them to this current landscape.
Integration is in the Second Act: So imagine you do that? You work out where something needs to get big and you work out how to make it go long and then you engineer it to happen through brilliantly compelling content, what next? Next is getting it to work together, to make it integrate, to become as one campaign. Not disjointed bits competing with each other to be more important but joined-up bits collaborating to make something work. This is so much easier said than done because usually, as well as bits competing you have agency businesses. The smart agencies are waking up to a more co-operative approach to answering clients’ needs and the smarter clients are rewarding them for this. It remains to be seen whether the agency of the future can make both bits work – the traditional skills of craft and the modern craft of integration. Specialist agencies will rise up that are capable of doing this but the challenge is for the agencies of old – and that means the digital agencies of today as well as the advertising agencies of the eighties – to rise from the ashes and invent the new model for tomorrow.
So there you are, a charter for the modern traditional agency dreamed up by two old men in Lycra but beautifully demonstrated by one or two disgruntled Townsfolk of Tayside.
If they had set the challenge to communicate their issues to a current communications agency, they might have been persuaded to make an online film, inform the local press, invite some user generated content and expose their message to 10,000 people in their combined Facebook groups.
Instead, they worked out the most compelling medium - experiential marketing - and with a bagful of carpet tacks and a willful intent they exposed their message to millions. It made the national news, it was front page on The Scotsman and by the time Guy and I had made it back to the bike shop to buy new inner tubes, it had made it onto the BBC website and was printed out in the shop for us all to read.
Traditional thinking harnessing the modern means of distribution for faster, deeper, wider effect. I don't appreciate or endorse what they did but it is salutary to think about the way they did it.
