Maybe I'm a little late to the party on this one, but this feels a little like a big budget remake of the click through rate. As in, information that encourages us to make decisions that might be unrelated to what we actually should be learning from it. Or better said, it allows us to think we're gaining knowledge when all we're gaining is information. (Of course, maybe I should shut up until I read the book)
UPDATE: This is actually fairly interesting, though...
Here's a pat on the back for Huntington after the brilliantly captured tmobile spot for the Life's for Sharing campaign. Taking a fair bit of inspiration from Improv Everywhere's Frozen Grand Central, this stunt/spot is just about bursting at the seems with pure joy. Love it. Adding to the "of the people" vibe is the hectic 'shoot on Thursday, air on Friday' schedule. Check out the YouTube channel for behind the scenes and teaser video.
Just saw this spot for Esurance come across the telly. Although I appreciate the intent to publicize a relatively unknown band, it may be a little obtuse to the importance of the discovery process. The hope, I presume, is that the audience, elated by the new find, dubs Esurance with a cool credit.
"Every effort to break through the clutter is just more clutter. Ultimately, if you don’t have clean, plain borders and backdrops for your ads, if you don’t have that blank space, that commons, that virgin territory, you have a very hard time making yourself heard. The most obvious metaphor is a room full of people, all screaming to be heard. What this really means, finally, is that advertising is asphyxiating itself."
Sounds about right, no? Although the documentary is about 4 years old, the argument presented seems roughly the same as we're having today, except with fewer references to social media, of course. Which on some level makes today's argument seem a little stale. But maybe that has more to do with Frontline's depiction of advertising folks. You'll probably feel a little dirty after watching this.
As a side note, check out the PBS library of content for some cool stuff. There isn't shit on TV this time of year, so if you want to get all learned up, this is probably a good place to start. You might also check out The Merchants of Cool if you'd like to get a gander at a short-haired Malcom Gladwell.
To find our purpose, ours and our audience’s, we must create movements. That means using our influence to create a social good. We win by all of us winning.
A planner walks in the room, sits down across the table from a team of disinterested creatives. She sternly ruffles through her papers to find her just completed creative brief.
Gavin points to Adrian Ho's brilliant presentation on the relationship between failure, action and where advertising is headed. Or at least where advertising dollars are headed.
The fantastic Gareth Kay reinforced a few thoughts on the collective agency future with his presentation "Planning needs some planning."
From GK:
"My contention is that if a planners job is to make sure the work works (as I believe it is) then we're in big trouble. All the data suggests advertising, more often than not, does not meet its goals and doesn't change behavior. We've done little to address this. We chase new media channels but we don't challenge how we think communication works..."
Now you could argue a couple minor things, but where there is little disagreement (from me, anyway) is what to do next. We must find our point of view and our social purpose, and get there by being defined not simply by what we say about ourselves, but all the awesome things we do.
A couple posts ago, I made a quick aside on good failure. Basically, I think there are two kinds, often confused when maybe they should be conflated. He struggled with mental tasks normal people find easy. When he read a novel, he would instantly memorize every word by heart, but miss the entire plot. Metaphors and poetry - though they clung to his brain like Velcro - were incomprehensible. He couldn't even use the phone because he found it hard to recognize a person's voice "when it changes its intonation...and it does that 20 or 30 times a day."
1. Shotgun - the "do tons of things and cross your fingers" approach
2. Scientific - the iterative "i made no mistake but learned one more thing not to do" approach.
And as I said, I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. We're not scientific enough to embrace the iterative approach all the way. And the shotgun approach doesn't really satisfy the need for fiscal discipline that most companies have. Either way, failure is difficult, so some level of hedging is probably needed.
A few reasons why:
1. The comfort of reach and frequency - While returns are clearly diminishing on any traditional ad buy, we are pretty good with arriving at a rough rate of return. At least it's more knowable than if you don't have those two metrics. Without reach, we're sort of working without a net.
2. The hand wringing, blinding focus on the avoidance of failure - Jonah Lehrer has a post up today about people that remember everything, as in, can forget nothing. Sounds pretty awesome at first, until you read a little further and find that most of them go nuts, often after having difficulty with simple tasks we are able to complete without thought. It's excruciating.
Which is the way most companies react to failure. They hash and rehash. It paralyzes them for future experimentation, and often causes them to walk away completely after casting the entire thing as something that "just doesn't work." No question we need to do our best to find answers, but we need to be scientific enough to gain the knowledge, while forgetful enough to, as we say in Texas, get back on the saddle.
3. The Luck factor - Frankly, some things were because we just got lucky. We happened to be in the right place at the right time. So for all the picking apart and recap that's possible, it'll never lead us all the way to a replicable solution. In fact, it could keep us chasing after something that's passed. And the inherent luck in some solutions is just unknowable with any level of assuredness.
Bottom line: We are shifting into a culture that favors doing over saying. We know this. And we know doing things creates a situation in which success only comes when we cause a reaction, not simply an impression; reach is unforecastable and frequency matters little. So if you're looking for a pre-destined ROI, you're in the wrong game.
And while scientific failure may be great to help get passed failure avoidance, it may be an obstacle to assessing the luck factor. The shotgun approach is awesome in the name of experimentation, but it sure doesn't make anyone feel all that comfortable. So in that middle ground rests good failure.