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Why the path to great advertising is becoming impossible to navigate…

There’s a deep-seeded angst amongst creatives. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t feeling it too. A sense of sensing something. Something seemingly insurmountable.

Over last few years, I’ve watched countless colleagues leave the business. They go to a startup, take client-side jobs, and go to Apple, Google or Facebook. Some just say, “fuck it.” Based on the proliferation of articles in my Twitter circle, there seems to be a pretty universal theme - advertising’s not worth it anymore. Bernbach’s resignation letter shows up every couple weeks. Linds Redding’s bit in the SF Egoist was a big one. The article itself was insightful and damning. Then, the byline at the end…devastating. I lost an entire afternoon asking, “what the hell am I doing?”

George Parker blames the holding companies, which is part of it. Many more blame the always-on speed of digital. The quarterly desire for financial efficiency combined with instant measurement leave little room for considered thought. It doesn’t help that CMOs are job-hopping every couple years - the new one always wants to blow things up. But like everything creatives do, and everything that resonates with consumers, there’s something deeper going on in our subconscious. And those subconscious thoughts are what matter.

It’s pretty much proven most people don’t think much about brands. Our beloved “differentiation” doesn’t register with consumers at all.  Consumer decisions aren’t based on the rational stuff we put in ads. Sure, a crazy Black Friday door-buster might get attention, but it won’t do anything for your brand. The purchase decisions are subconscious, particularly on commodity products - and let’s face it, what hasn’t been commoditized? How often do you think about glass cleaner? You don’t. But somehow, when you go to the store, something deep in your brain kicks in and you pick the one you irrationally think is better. A few seconds every few months is about all the thought you’ll ever give to glass cleaner. But there’s something there.

That thing in the back of your mind, yeah, that’s the brand. Good brands decide what they are and demonstrate it consistently for years. It’s not how it’s “new and improved.” It’s not about the great new package. It’s not about any of that stuff. It’s a vague notion of what a brand stands for which has been developing for years in your subconscious. You’ve never actually thought about it.

Where does that work come from? It also comes from a subconscious place. Great ads, the ones people talk about, are never rational. (If you can name one great ad that did well in testing, I’m happy to learn.) They tap into something deep in our collective human-ness.

Einstein once said, “Creativity comes from waste.” And there’s something to that. It’s a deeply inefficient process - because it has to be. You take a bunch of rational input, then after banging on it for a while, going down lots of dead ends, you stop thinking about it for a bit, something snaps in your subconscious, and there it is. You connect your brands purpose with scene you saw in a movie. A product innovation reminds you of a turn of phrase from your grandmother. Some irrational ethereal connection. (I could go on for days, but a considerably better written version is Jonah Lehrer’s book Imagine: How Creativity Works.) But there’s the rub, we’ve pushed efficiency to the point where there’s no time for input.

There’s that old joke, “If you can’t come in on Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday.” We’ve never worked a 40 hour week. But we used to have more control over our time. If you were stuck, you’d go to a movie in the middle of the day. Or go for a long walk. Or, we could put it aside for a day or two and work on something else to clear our heads. Those days are long gone. We sit in 8 hours of meetings a day. Then, somehow, have to make stuff after hours all in the name of productivity. But the belief that working more hours leads to more productivity has been repeatedly proven false. We’ve squeezed efficiency on creative development to the point where there’s simply no way to sustainably come up with ideas. No time for input. No time to push it off to the subconscious. No time to step back and look at it.

Put that all together and you start getting at that thing bugging us. The immediacy of digital kills time to dig into those subconscious thoughts that’ll resonate with consumers. The margin pressures of public companies create additional pressures so we never have time to really get at it. We end up regurgitating the rational bullet-pointed list in the brief. And once you finally spend a year or two cranking stuff out, and starting feeling comfortable with the brand voice on a subconscious level, a new CMO comes in (or the account goes into review) and it starts all over again.

A sense of sensing…

And now I have to make people completely rethink 15+ years of behavior

That simple Zima banner ad on Hotwired.com so long ago, oh, the mess you left behind.

The first banners were little more than that - just a static image on a web page. Then, the animated GIF came along. First, we did the “Burma Shave” thing of three or four frames of copy, quickly learning best practices of keeping the logo and CTA on every frame to maintain our 10% click-thru rates (and no, that’s not a typo, it used to happen all the time).

Then the magic of Flash came along. Problem is, we didn’t adapt much. The IAB had standardized things and Flash banners became little more than slicker animated GIFs. Sure, they could expand, hold video, etc. But for the most part, they were still little animated GIF stories executed better.

Now, you’re lucky if you get .02% click thru. We’ve trained consumers that clicking on them often take you to a place you’d rather not be. It’s even worse for mobile banners ‘cos you tend to leave the app you’re in to launch god-only-knows-what. So, we simply avoid them.

The simultaneous arrival of tablets and HTML5 changes everything. Flash doesn’t work on the iPad, and HTML5 can make anything (including a 300x250 space) an experience better than most full-blown sites. We’ve seen the cool scrolly stuff, the parallax stuff, etc. But, we’ve trained consumers to not interact for the reasons mentioned above. And that’s going to be our challenge.

We can now do so much more than before. We can create rich experiences. We’re effectively back in the experiential micro-site business again - the micro-micro-site. But undoing all our past sins will take a while.

Machine Readable World - How the uncanny valley just might save civilization.

If you’ve followed the miscellaneous crap I write about, you’ll know I’m fascinated with how technology interfaces with the evolutionary motivations baked into our DNA. And this is no different.

One of the earliest observations I had as a kid was the natural tendency we have to see faces in randomness. We see faces in clouds. In the patterns in carpet. In acoustical tile ceilings. It’s part of being human. Because virtually everything that could be a predator has two eyes, a nose and a mouth (there’s a Star Trek Next Generation episode that explains that one). The ability to see the lion’s face in the jungle was an evolutionary advantage passed on to all of us. If you’re ancestors didn’t have this basic skill, you wouldn’t be here. Survival traits passed down. Simple.

And that’s the way it was for the first 45,000 of the 50,000 years of humanity.

But, then civilization of the last few thousand years began to mess this up. The domestication of animals and development of agriculture gave us something to protect from others. We built villages, formed tribes, and eventually kingdoms and countries to protect/defend what we had. Our perception skills had to be honed to recognize people who were different from us, not part of our tribe. Skin color, facial features, and eventually flags became what defined friend or foe.This unleashed one of the most powerful forces (good and bad) in human history, cooperation for the tribe. Monuments have been built, wars fought, etc.

But, now it’s down to what brand of shoes you wear. For us to rally around something for the benefit of humanity, we have to broaden our sense of tribe back to the “human vs predator” level. And despite the hard-wiring, there is no evolutionary advantage anymore to identify simply as “human”. One of the biggest drivers of modern consumer culture is based on division. “Segmentation” of the modern marketing culture has sliced and diced us to ridiculous proportions. Our us vs them DNA is no longer about humans vs predators, but the silliness of jocks vs geeks, red vs blue, christian vs islam, goths vs metal-heads.

However, a new “threat” has appeared and its cognitive abilities are way beyond ours. The new “machine-readable world” is changing things. Computers are reading all the text on the internet and analyzing. They can understand human speech. With IBM’s stunt on Jeopardy, it’s apparent they can interpret some pretty nuanced stuff. And, they can see, recognize people, cars, microbes, etc. They understand our world, but we (the vast majority anyway) don’t understand theirs.

We’ve seen how people react to advanced Japanese robots and the freak out over the all-knowing world of big data. Will the uncanny valley take us to a new level of perception? Will we begin to notice the constantly observing world around us, yet most of us don’t understand? If so, will we see it as an evolutionary threat?

I’m not afraid of technology, I’m what’s considered the “digital elite”. BUT, knowing what I know about big data, location, databases, etc., I’m probably more consciously aware of what’s going on around me. And it does make me uneasy. Will everyone else begin to sense it? If so, could that shared unease be the thing which allows us to see all of humanity as part of one tribe again?

Big data is here, and only creatives can save us from what many want to do with it.

When desktop publishing arrived on every PC, there was talk of the death of graphic design. The templates came pre-loaded on your machine so “anyone can do it.” Yet, 20 years later, graphic designers are more in-demand than ever before. Today, rumblings are beginning about how Big Data is going to reduce the importance of creative people.

Unless you’ve been in a cave, you’ve been hearing about the impact of Big Data. How it’s going to drive efficiency, personalization, etc. There have been numerous articles, including this one from Steve Lohr at the NYTimes. There are quotes like, “decisions will increasingly be based on data and analysis rather than on experience and intuition.” And corporations are eating it up. They see efficiencies in their media buys. Massive levels of personalization in their CRM programs. And there seems to be a misguided belief that all of this will somehow automate itself someday.

Some commentators have started to look at the darker side. Joseph Turow’s written a book about the lack of transparency of Big data, there’s a great excerpt from his Atlantic article here. Turow is looking at how consumers have no idea this is being done to them, how they have no control over it, etc. But the much more dangerous issue is the impending data discrimination that’s already begun. Content providers are , “performing a highly controversial form of social profiling and discrimination by customizing our media content on the basis of marketing reputations we don’t even know we have.” For example, the Google results I get are different than yours, even though we may have typed the same thing into the search box. As a friend of mine stated, “the web is a lot smaller to me now.”

And that is my biggest worry. As optimization progresses with content farms cranking out articles and videos targeted specifically to you, and “news” sites “optimize” which articles you see, we’re doing more than eliminating the serendipity of discovering something you didn’t know you were interested in, we’re effectively destroying everything that could be counted as a shared culture.

The fragmentation of media which started with cable and is now dramatically accelerating with big data optimization, is dividing us even more. The most obvious example is the red-state / blue-state divide in the US. I’m never forced to confront an opinion that I don’t agree with. I can limit my television to only networks and shows that reinforce my beliefs. I choose which sites to visit to get my “news”, and even on those sites, they’re customizing content to only show me things I believe. But politics is only the beginning. Virtually everything that could remotely be defined as “culture” is being sliced and diced so that you’re never challenged with anything new or unknown.

When homogeny of mass culture set in, we could always rely on the power of the internet to put something new, interesting and/or challenging in front of us. But we’re rushing headfirst to use the technology of the internet to effectively undermine its inherent promise. The genie is out of the bottle. It can’t be put back. However, I do believe there is hope.

In the midst of all this technology and optimization, there has also been dramatic rise in interest in behavioral economics. Mass awareness began with Freakonomics, which I worried was a one-off. But in virtually every airport, you can now find a copy of “Thinking Fast and Slow.” I apologize for the shorthand, but we’ve finally begun to realize that the vast majority of purchasing decisions are wildly irrational, and often emotional in nature. At the end of the day, human beings are wonderfully flawed. We can throw all the logical reasons in the world at them about why our product is best, but they’ll still make decisions based on some sort of short-cut emotional response.

There is going to be a HUGE amount of pressure to simply fill in the matrix of big data customization. And the easiest thing for a creative is to simply do what’s asked of us. So, there is the trick. Despite all the logical marketing machines we build for media efficiency, creatives still have to tap into the wildly wonderfully irrational things that make us human beings. We have so much more power in that which connects us vs. all the ways big data wants to divide us. The creatives (and agencies) that figure out how to leverage the shared humanity on top of the big data efficiency will rule the day.

Advertising: We are the 2-5%.

A couple people asked me why the Chrysler “Halftime in America” was my favorite SB spot. Well, here goes…

The median household income in America is still under $50k. AND, the average car on the road is now over 10 years old. If you’re in that household, you’ve also experience this economy first-hand. Either you, or someone in your close circle, has been unemployed for an extended amount of time. Your car’s paid for, and you may even have a few grand put away for a down payment. BUT, what do you do?

You can trade in that paid-off car and some cash and get a 4-year-old Camry or Accord. OR, you can buy a new Jeep/Chrysler/Dodge with a five year commitment. Are you that sure of your job?

The only way in hell you’re gonna buy that new car is if you believe that America (and American cars, by default) is poised for a comeback. ‘Cos if you don’t in your heart of hearts believe “Fuck yeah, America”, you’re gonna go for the used Camry.

And after that spot, I think we all said (even if it was in the back of your mind), “Fuck yeah, America.”

A great Droga quote

“I care about our contribution to our industry. Certainly the quality and effectiveness of our thinking is our primary concern, but I also want us to help move our industry forward. Advertising is an industry under duress. People compromise for a buck and take short cuts for short term gains. In fact I would say no industry has worked harder at being lazy. But we believe our industry is far better and more important than it is given credit for.” 

A quote from Ben Kingsley about Hollywood. Sounds like what we’ve been bitching about in advertising for the last 10 years.

“I think that once you start to make crucial decisions by committee and each member of that committee is extremely anxious about his or her job, then you’re not going to have the right decisions made. You’re going to have decisions that are fear-based, you are going to have decisions based on what they think they should say, or what they think their boss needs to hear, rather than going out on a limb and being actually creative.”

If you can’t make it, you shouldn’t be selling it.

I saw an ad for The Leatherman tool on late night TV. It reminded me of a quote a good friend of mine said about them - “If I can’t fix it with this, I shouldn’t be fixing it.”

Yesterday morning, I was in a meeting with one of the teams bouncing around an idea we wanted to take into a client meeting. Two hours later, one of our developers walked into my office and put his phone on my desk with a fully operational prototype. Knowing I have dozens of guys like that in my organization struck me.

With the “race to the middle”, “media-agnostic” and other such buzzwords for agencies nowadays, there are an amazing number of companies selling things they have no idea how to actually make. Sure, everyone uses outside vendors for specialty services, or for staffing overflow. But if you can’t actually make something completely in-house, you really shouldn’t be trying to sell it.

I’m sure I could do a little research and give a moderately compelling presentation on the construction of a nuclear power plant, but you certainly wouldn’t want me building it.

The Forgotten Consumer

Years ago, I used to think junior creatives simply didn’t know how to present. Though often true, the past five years or so have taught me even many seasoned professionals don’t get it either. The explosion of digital, CRM, and more data than you know what to do with has agencies spending entirely too much time trying to prove they’re smart in client meetings vs. selling in ideas. It’s a curse that paralyzes agency people from all departments.

The basic understanding seemingly missing is that clients are consumers as well. Like all of us, they’re human. Susceptible to the same irrational emotional decisions we all make. The same behavioral economics issues facing our client’s consumers affect the client as well. Paralysis of choice when showing the complexity of a fully-integrated campaign. The power of defaults when it comes to getting them to break out of category standards. Our natural aversion to dealing with money. Etc.

We’re constantly telling our clients we need to “tell a story” and “start a conversation” to get consumers to care about their brand and product. We know it’s the only way consumers bombarded with messaging will listen to us. We really need to work on taking that advice ourselves.