Food for thought: The spy who sold out
Forgiving a pretty face
Facebook to agencies: how will people share your story?
Is “The Pitch” an accurate reflection of our industry?
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You are not digital
“When I’ve had my fun I will give my inventions to everybody. That way everyone can be super, and when everyone is super…no one will be.” - Syndrome (paraphrased)
Trevor is a young designer in his early 20s (I believe). He designs characters, logos, traditional media, and interactive. Trevor is a phenomenal illustrator. Trevor works at Henderson Bas as a designer. He does not code sites for a living. But he could.
At age 14, Trevor built a website with a forum so he could play Counter-Strike (an addictive first-person shooter game) with his circle of online friends. Experiences like these, coupled with inherent understanding of the online world, mean that Trevor has second nature familiarity with PHP and front-end HTML. Possibly as much as someone twice his age entering the interactive workforce. Knowing, understanding, and engaging with the digital and social spaces is almost instinctual to those currently growing up in a developed country.
This shift has profound consequences to the current generation of digital professionals. Knowing the ins and outs of Facebook is common knowledge for 14-year-olds. Building, skinning, and maintaining CMS systems (such as WordPress) is something commonly done by young mothers.
To my mind, this begs one question: “What defines a digital professional when their skillset has become ubiquitous?”
The answer needs to be experience and expertise. It is up to those of us in the digital profession to take things to the next level. We need to invent new techniques and channels in the digital space. We need to take the knowledge we hold and apply it to the analog world. We need to think beyond the computer, or smart-phone screen, and apply that unique form of binary logic problem-solving to larger brand and global issues.
What we are striving to learn now will be common knowledge to the next generation. To remain relevant, we need to ensure that we have the creativity and insight to stay two steps ahead of ubiquity. Just as carpentry and building turned from an art form to a skilled trade, so too will the digital profession move from a theory-based creative profession to a skilled trade.
And while I would like to consider myself and my colleagues partial artists, in accordance with Marshall McLuhan’s comment that “advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.” Innovation is key if we want to keep it that way in the 21st.
Is it “know who” over “know how”?
It’s often said that advertising is a business of relationships. You know what I’m talking about. It’s not always what you know, but who you know that really matters. This is especially true about getting on pitches. Tell me it doesn’t help when you know the brand manager running the pitch. Right?
Same is true about when you’re trying to get a job in advertising. I know I personally shook the trees with everyone I knew who had even the remote possibility of knowing somebody who knew someone who worked in advertising. I guess it worked for me.
It also worked for Alex Bogusky.
I was reading the latest issue of Fast Company yesterday. And was amazed to find out that Alex got his big break at Crispen Porter because his dad was friends with Chuck Porter. (Maybe I’m late to the game on that tidbit.) But it did make me wonder. What would Alex’s career have been like without that contact? Would he be the advertising god he is? Would he be a household name? Don’t get me wrong; he would have been a superstar regardless. I just wonder to what degree.
Controversial questions to be sure. But it just reinforces even further that “it’s who you know” in advertising that can make or break your career.
Books are dead and other myths
Books are dead.
We’ve all heard it, or perhaps even said it, but the truth is this statement is as wrong as that photo of Carrot Top working out. (You know which one I’m talking about.) Books are far from dead. In fact, there are many bright minds out there working to find new ways to create even richer user experiences with them. Like the hybrid book by Mobile Art Lab in Japan that adds a new level to traditional storybooks. Simply drop in an iPhone and voilà! A great new way for parents to connect with their children:
Then there’s “Out Of The Box,” a hybrid book designed for Samsung to help the technologically challenged learn how to use their phone. (Where was this when my dad got his cell?)
This new breed of book is where traditional and interactive media truly converge. And the evolution has only just begun.
So… still think the digital age will see the death of the book?
Signs of the times
The face of ads in downtown Buffalo as of last Friday. Better than a vinyl? Not sure. But 20 years in they still look cool.
Advertising is undead
A recent article on Tech Crunch boldly proclaims: “Advertising will fail.” Written by Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the main argument hinges on the idea that the Internet’s participatory nature is fundamentally undermining what we know as advertising.
I agree that the Internet is participatory, however Clemons’s base premise is flawed. Here it is:
“Advertising is using sponsored commercial messages to build a brand and paying to locate these messages where they will be observed by potential customers performing other activities; these messages describe a product or service, its price or fundamental attributes, where it can be found, its explicit advantages, or the implicit benefits from its use.”
Clearly, Prof. Clemons has not read “The digital why,” where I argued that in the digital space, you need to create value for the consumer to interact with your brand.
Advertising is not dead. It’s not dying. It’s in a state of evolution. Advertising will endure. Here’s why:
1) Advertising is full of smart people.
Adverting is not an industry for the dim-witted. Every day, regardless of your specific role in this business, you are faced with a unique set of problems and challenges. Every day you need to come up with strategic and creative solutions to these issues. Advertising counts among its numbers some of the world’s greatest linguists, artists, strategists, and technologists. All of them explore and learn about the channels available to them, and use them in new and exciting ways. One of these smart people is Dondy Razon. Dondy is ACD at Nurun, here in Toronto. One of the things he is doing is changing the focus of the advertising they do for their customers:
“What if we made ideas that make life easier, that teach and inspire, that give people control of what they experience?”
We call it digital platforms, he calls it digital utility. Which brings me to my second point …
2) Advertising is not just TV anymore.
Good advertisers and agencies know that the Internet is participatory. Armed with that knowledge, they come up with solutions that fit.
Social media is being used by brands to have meaningful conversations with their customers. In that venue they can get instant feedback, and promote their products and services in increasingly human and genuine ways.
Other advertisers create branded content, like the Old Spice guy. Smart marketers are starting to realize that on the net, advertising doesn’t subsidize entertainment – it is the entertainment.
Digital utilities/platforms support a product, service or brand in a way that is useful to the consumer. Nike+, for example, is a run-tracking program that lives online. With a pair of Nike shoes and a $30 Apple sensor you can track almost all relevant information about your runs, and share it with other runners in the community. It is an incredibly robust tool that has one final objective: to sell more shoes.
3) Channels don’t die, they evolve.
When radio came out, print was supposed to die. When TV came out, radio was supposed to die. When the inter-webs were born, TV was supposed to die. The reality is with every new medium, or adjustment to a medium, new tools become available to advertisers. Advertising, being full of smart people, will find new and exciting ways to use all of these channels to solve the business problems of the brands they represent. And it will work.
I’ve seen quite a few articles and videos talking about the end of advertising. Most of them are based on false premises. Here’s another one: “The Information Management program at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania teaches outdated concepts.” Therefore, Prof. Clemons is grossly misinformed.
We are the medium and the message
Don’t hate me for quoting Marshall McLuhan before noon. I know it’s one of those unspoken rules, like “don’t call before 9 a.m. on a Saturday,” or “don’t microwave fish at work.”
I was thinking about Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man the other day, the seminal McLuhan work that has driven cultural theory students to Advil for decades. When McLuhan said “the medium is the message,” he was defining how the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.
Getting nightmare flashbacks of those college electives yet? I’ll get to my point now.
I work in the interactive industry, a playground of tools, web apps and devices that frame our relationship with the rest of the world. Every hour, we are introduced to more. These applications act as the medium by which we voluntarily inundate ourselves with messages. We shape them to optimize how much we can get, how quickly, and from where. We are not simply receiving messages through the medium – we are customizing our capacity for receiving as many as possible.
This is especially true with social networking. If 500 million Facebook users are any indication, we’re building our media to indulge our need for messages about ourselves. I’d argue that Facebook isn’t the medium anymore, it’s the people that drive the Facebook ship forward. In some ways, we’re the medium that was so famously described by Marshall McLuhan.
How much more can we push the mechanisms to drive content into people’s minds and actions? McLuhan also said “invention is the mother of necessities.” If that’s the case, then we’re piloting ourselves into an age where constant access to information – and to each other – is a psychological necessity. How many other avenues are available to us to learn from each other, sell each other, or stalk each other?
If “each other” is the medium and the message, how much more can we interact with each other without impacting how we interact with each other offline?
Now where’s my iPhone? I have to condense this post into 140 characters.
The enemy in the ad
Proofreading at an advertising agency is a lot like re-enacting the civil war with live ammunition. We’re among friends: we’ve watched each other marry and have children, and together we’ve experienced some of our most memorable times. Regardless, we can’t ignore the sinking feeling that one day we’ll kill each other. Thus, in case the worst should happen, consider this my final memoir.
Writing this is hard for me, you must understand, just as it is hard for anyone to boil down their craft into the thick balsamic reduction of a blog entry. At the beginning of my journey so many years ago, I pulled my red pen from the sacred stone and took up arms against typographic demons much for the same reasons other proofreaders do, not for this obvious fame and wealth, but rather for the love of the hunt itself. But the public is a ravenous, bloodthirsty mistress, and she wants to read about the dangers of proofreading.
You see, there’s a tremendous back-and-forth between proofreaders and studio artists, and proofreaders and producers, and proofreaders and art directors, and proofreaders and proofreaders. Really, we’re everyone’s worst nightmare, because no matter what we do, we’ve already made an enemy. A proof with too many mark-ups causes headaches because it delays production and affects the client’s bottom line. One with too few mark-ups causes headaches because everything has gone to hell and our superiors have to argue about whether or not waterboarding us would be in violation of the Geneva Convention.
Ultimately, it’s less painful to err on the side of caution.
That doesn’t make it easier. Ask any normal person what an advertisement is made of and they might give the obvious answer: black ink, aged moon dust and four glorious colours of powdered and rendered unicorn. But to a proofreader, those basic ingredients form complex elements to be examined. We see copy, images, a headline, and a line of legal so long that few have reached its end without descending into madness. Some say you’d have to be mad to try.
These complicated ads are a proofreader’s bread and butter. When we’re not toasting and eating them, we’re meticulously filtering out spelling and grammatical errors, checking sizes and bleeds and signing document after document in search of the fabled “perfect proof.” If we could stare at the same half-page ad all day, every day for weeks, poring over each character of every word and each pixel of every image until we were certain that there could not possibly be anything wrong with it, we would. But very few agencies are willing to hire a live-in proofreader. And those that are willing don’t have very comfortable beds.
So, eventually, we have to admit that even for divinely appointed proofreaders, perfection is unattainable, and we must hand off the ad for approval. We’ve done what we can to please the client, flirted with perfection and rode the razor’s edge between man-like passion and machine-like precision.
But we must beware; all is not well, because from that point on, we are stained with it. Like Lady Macbeth, nothing will cleanse us of what we have seen and done. Errors will occasionally happen. And we are responsible.
Short of ritual suicide, there really is nothing we can do to pay penance. As tempting as hemlock might be, the best we can do is learn from our mistakes and ensure they never happen again. We’ll continue in this way until, inevitably, we will learn everything there is to know about everything, and then we’ll simply disappear into a cloud of particulate matter that nobody really feels comfortable inhaling.
It’s a long journey, a trial-by-fire, but that is the nature of proofreading — the art of tracking and trapping and executing errors. Some people say they’ve never seen an error in the wild; others argue that they may not even exist. Trust me, my friends, the errors are out there. I’ve seen them. Waiting.
And we can’t let the errors win.
Best of July
Hot marketing posts for a hot summer. For your convenience, a selection of the best of July on Big Orange Slide:
How to get ahead in advertising: Part 2 – Q&A with Harvey Carroll
Grip’s President answers 11 questions on career, client presentations, schmoozing and success.
Photoshop til you drop – by Warren Haas
Are we retouching our brands into oblivion? Haas makes the case for a return to more naturalistic campaign photography.
The death of movie posters – by Jacoub Bondre
The always incendiary Jacoub Bondre on the prevalence of floating head movie posters.
Are we interacting with our interactive media? – by Jacob Karsemeyer
What can interactive advertising learn from toys and video games? Plenty, including the ability to hold users’ attentions over long periods of time.
Remember to smile – by Vlad Dascalu
Three rules for making the most of your advertising internship, with some surprising insights about who might be in the room at your next brainstorm.
Population: You – by Michelle Davey
What makes London, Ontario the de facto testing ground for new brands? Native Londoner Michelle Davey digs in to the data.
