Here is a great resource for planners when it comes to defining people’s desired response to advertising. Before you submit your work to the client, make sure your stuff doesn’t sound like this:
Things real people don’t say about advertising.
With the end of the year past, and the countless Top-10/100/etc. lists gone, the online media machine has turned to predictions for 2011 - offering ‘what’s next’ in terms of digital.
Over on Quora (a social network-style Q-and-A platform that is the latest hot thing in digital itself) there are questions like:
The beautiful thing for a site like Quora, is that the answers to this question will alway be interesting and evolving, since innovation never stops, and the future will go on and on. But if I can take my crystal ball down off the shelf for a moment, I would say that even for just the more immediate future, things will be plenty interesting:
These are examples of things to consider in terms of what’s on the near horizon, but any predictions should of course be tempered with the knowledge that the majority of digital marketing budgets in the near future will continue to be spent on slightly more traditional activities - good old Display and Search!
What trends do you see as about to go mainstream?
Ok, it’s off topic, but I find it very parodic of the faux emotions we are used to from crappy advertising stock photography. It’s hard to bear just looking at one key visual like this, but lined up like this, the parody of how we try to evoke emotion about low interest products becomes quickly evident. See the whole thing here:
In was is admittedly a pretty creative PR stunt in of itself, EuroRSCG created a software that creates advertising based on typical advertising parameters, such as category, product, and advertising objective.
Of course, EuroRSCG admits, it cannot replace humans, and that’s the whole point. However the prospect of this type of software is pretty scary, considering that templated and pre-formatted ads are more and more on the forefront anyway. It’s not as if generic advertising wasn’t already a reality.
Come to think of it, why not let computers do the generic advertising? Maybe this way real human creatives don’t get bogged down with the generic kind.
via Ronald The
I just read an interesting article from Augustine Fou over at ClickZ about Digital being at the root of modern advertising, and it seemed to resonate with some discussions we had been having in the Frankfurt office over the last few years.
The point is not that everything begins and ends with a website/banner/facebook page, but rather the cultural impact made by the rise of all our digital options for living. And it’s not that people live their lives online, but rather that people use digital ‘properties’ to do so much STUFF in their lives, even when they don’t think they’re ‘online’. You use digital technology when you pay for gas with a card. You use digital when you check the movie times on your phone. You use digital when you Google the actors in a TV program you’re watching. You use digital when you watch a screen in a store while you wait to check out. Your TV is as digital as most computers are. It’s kind of everywhere, and you relate to it and use it, even if you’re not actively searching for information about a product or service. Ultimately, there is more and more human behavior that is linked, or tracked, or enabled by digital properties. And due to the Request/Receive nature of digital properties, this behavior can be leveraged to understand needs and desires.
The value of this information about behavior (digital breadcrumbs left in our modern world) can’t be overemphasized. Integrating digital at the core of marketing activities allows for unprecedented analysis of data related to how people interact with digital properties, making the case for more efficient and effective work, especially when it is designed from the beginning to take advantage of human insights and behavior.
I’m not sure I buy that Digital is the center, but I prefer to think of it as a key element of the modern human landscape, rather than a channel, for sure.
Via: Stephane Grunenwald @sgrunenwald on Twitter
This is an old BBC documentary from 1967 about New York ad man Steve Frankfurt. I had the pleasure to work in his agency Frankfurt Balkind, when he had just left for new endeavours and only met him once. Anyway, this documentary is an amazing piece of advertising history, or nostalgia (depending of where you’re coming from). Apart from being a trip back in time, it lends itself greatly for some awesome quotes you might wanna use in your next client presentation. 
Thanks Andreas Combüchen for sharing!
Not really news to most of us, but don’t y’all love to say “I told you so”: On his recent Ad Age Post Garrick Schmitt goes into the theory that User Experience Professional (and some other smartypants) have been preaching for the last 15 years or so: experiences, not messages are what brands should focus on.
For example, 65% of U.S. consumers report a digital experience changing their perception about a brand (either positively or negatively) and 97% of that group report that the same experience ultimately influenced whether or not they went on to purchase a product from that brand. In a nutshell, experience matters. A lot.
Schmitt mentions Red Bull, Virgin America, Uniqlo and Guinness as great examples of brands that spend their money in creating a qualitative difference in people’s lives that ultimately make a bigger impact than expensive advertising messages.
I can’t help feel like having to say “Duh,” but then again, anyone who so convincingly preaches to marketers is a brother-in-arms to me.
Ultimately, it comes down to creating acts (not ads) that are based on people and their behavior, defining a human purpose for the brand, allows people to participate, and in so doing, makes the brand popular (at Leo, we love alliterations). Being able to plan and create for experiences (functional and emotional ones alike) is the key business to be in.
When I first saw this guest writer article on TechCrunch by yesterday by Eric Clemons, I thought “That content is like, so web1.0, no need to comment on it.” Then, when I looked again today, the article had gotten 200 more comments, and I thought “What the dickens? This type of statement still gets people going? Why?”
Basically Eric Clemons gives a few well-deduced, even if obvious reasons why the Advertising is failing.
None of this is really news, is it? Seriously, in the 15 or so years I’ve been in this field I never thought the opposite of the above points. It’s always been about brands providing people with meaningful value exchanges and experiences, not mere messaging blather. Brand messaging, if anything, can just be an add-on to an experience that enables a human behavior. So, as a result, what professionals in this space must do is to use creativity to do things for or with people (brand experience), not just come up with ways to say things (advertising).
But looking at the comments on this here techcrunch article, it seemed like I had to check my ideology at the door, once again, and be reminded, once again, that even industry professionals still believe that making advertising alone is valid. In fact, some people commented in ways that basically told Mr. Clemons to shove off with his whiny little liberal nerd voice and one even threatened to bash his head in!
This was surprising to me, as TechCrunch isn’t exactly a mainstream advertising gazette with “Ad Men” fossils milling about, talking about “Big Campaigns”, “That blonde in Cannes who really liked my winning 30s spot” or whatever people apocrypally usually do who work for the failing business model called “Mass media advertising agency” and do nothing to change it (btw, I yet have to meet one of those people, they MUST be sowhere).
Why I believe the whole thing got heated unnecessarily, is that Mr. Clemons predicted the death of advertising (like many did before) in a way that was a bit polarizing, in order to make a point. If the point is that you can’t just message at people and treat them as passive recipients, but instead need to deliver experiences that make a qualitative difference in their lives, I think most people would say: “Yeah, got it, thanks!” But even if you heed this advice and you help brands understand and enable human behavior and create acts instead of just ads: it still doesn’t mean you won’t see any messaging anymore. When you do something for or with people, it is worth talking about, too. The only difference should be: instead of giving your brand a reason to buy, you focus on giving it a reason to exist, i.e. a purpose in the context of people’s lives.
I think if you tried to get the commentators of the article to subscribe to that notion, it wouldn’t become so much about advertising and whether or not messaging will die, but rather what one commentator described as “the natural evolution of advertising”. But then again, it wouldn’t have made for a controversial article with the potential to get Mr. Clemons that much publicity (which btw, in spanish and french is the same word as “advertising”).
Found this on PaulinePauline’s flickr stream. It’s an advertisement in bath rooms for a dating site. Walking into a bathroom and seeing a full-sized perspectivally correct, naked lady should be pretty arresting. Or something like that…
