Good Problems and the Core Thought

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As many of you know, I'm a big believer that the better the problem, the more likely you are to get to work that works. Wrongheaded problems leave us in a ditch. Boring problems invite uninspired solutions. And when you only ask advertising questions, unsurprisingly - you get lots of advertising answers. The best of the best understand the value in taking the time to get the question right. 

With that, here's a presentation I did to get the point across the girls and boys of Twist a few months back. Hopefully you'll find some value in it, too.

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Thinking and Selling

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Andrew left this gem of a statement within the lead-in to Rob Campbell's feedback for the APSotW. Worth pulling out and letting it breathe a bit.

"I sometimes think that the so called, 'cooler' more creative agencies do themselves a disservice by not exposing the utter mania for rigorous, watertight thinking. All the great work you see isn't just a result of a mania for doing great creative work, it's about taking care of the detail. Take the famous Old Spice work. It's probably as creative and provocative as an integrated campaign gets, but don't forget it was done for P&G - one the most notoriously formulaic, risk averse clients there is. You don't get any work through clients like that, especially work like this without proven rigorous thinking."

I've always felt like this is the great untold story of some of the best work out there. Not just the final product, but all the other stuff that allows it to happen. Anyway - never really saw that mentioned with all the praise for the Old Spice campaign. Thought it was interesting. 

The Creative Brief Research Project

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The DVR is Good for TV Advertising (rates)

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Television set

To hear the NY Times tell it, the "DVR, Once TV’s Mortal Foe, Helps Ratings.” Well no shit.

"The reason is not simply that more households own DVRs — 33 percent compared with 28 percent at this point in 2008 — helping some marginal shows become hits. It is also that more people seem content to sit through the commercials than networks once thought."

And they go on to say:

“Against almost every expectation, nearly half of all people watching delayed shows are still slouching on their couches watching messages about movies, cars and beer. According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year.”

Well now I’ve heard almost everything. Nearly half the audience isn’t fast-forwarding through the commercials, and this is what success looks like.

You might also take a look at the Tivo numbers I posted earlier, too. Good indication that the more people like a show, the more likely they are to record it and watch later. Those also tend to be the shows with highest rates of commercial fast-forwarding.

I guess when you’re looking over at your shoulder at the boys and girls in the newspaper industry, you’ll take anything you can get.

Life Lessons of an Ad Man

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Thegreatamericantrain
Brilliant TED talk from Rory Sutherland, one that may make ad men walk a little taller after watching.

From the TED Blog,

"He's here to speak about value, about value that you can't always see. In the world if advertising, Sutherland explains, they realize that many problems in life can be changed by tinkering with perception rather than reality. For example, when given the problem of making a train ride more pleasant, engineers come up with a solution to make it shorter, one that costs millions. He says, take not even half that budget and hire supermodels to walk the cars with Chateau Petrus. People will ask that you make the journey longer."

Only problem is that I'm not real sure he's really talking about advertising at all, but more so experiences that change perceptions. The train metaphor is great, but it discounts what the vast majority of real-life ad agencies would see as step 2, which would most often be a splashy ad buy touting how great it is to ride without traffic or how much work you could accomplish without worrying about the driving bit.

Either way, there aren't many left that can still capture the romanticism of the advertising world quite like that, and I'd hardly call Rory your run of the mill advertiser, so maybe I should just shut up and applaud.

photo via James "Busdriver" Scott

A Series of Thoughts on the Agency

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Loveyourcommerce  

I spent way too long writing this long-winded piece of bullshit about ad agencies and whatnot, but I was already bored by the end. So here are a few points, maybe I'll talk more about them later.

Being good at making ads doesn’t make you good enough, and communications strategy has become far too tactical. Creating value through more remarkable action is where we should be headed.

We need to be better at finding proxies for customer relationships, considering these relationships need to feel much more human and most companies don’t have the human capital to deliver to scale.

We need to invest much more heavily in understanding what is actually important and wean ourselves off the useless metrics that we keep based on our often faulty notion that bad research is better than no research.

If agencies continue to be shit at collecting and interpreting data, they should be disintermediated from media purchasing entirely until they can be both objective and knowledgeable. Conversely, we shouldn’t buy from media outlets unless they’re making investments to upgrade their understanding of customer behavior. Google shouldn’t be the only one realizing how much information is locked away in those set top boxes.

Communication dollars should be valued in terms of investment, not only short-term spikes.

Agencies will only get the flexibility and respect they need when they become willing to bet on their own success. This means both acting more like a venture capitalist and becoming more comfortable with new product development.

The big idea is still important. Just as important as all those little ideas. No need to proclaim the death of either.

Each communication should be forced to deliver a singular message, just not the same singular message as every other communications device. We should be busy piecing together puzzles not hammering pegs.

There isn’t any such thing as a digital life. Just life, digitally enhanced. And digital agencies, just like traditional ad shops before them, should start understanding and capitalizing on that much more quickly.

photo via pareerica

ad:tech Presents: Internet Advertising & the Rebirth of the Model T

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Modelt ad What made the Model T great might also have been what killed it.

As with us, what we thought made the internet great may be the thing that kills it, too. Or at least kills the traditional way of using it. Cars didn't stop progressing with the death of the Model T, nor did Ford and this shift won't kill this platform either (quite obviously).

As for the Model T - many have speculated that the lack of choice, in color among other things, was what ultimately moved the car from novelty to history. But what most don't know is that originally, Ford did actually offer color choice, but sacrificed that choice to the more quickly-drying black coat that made the revolutionary assembly line work those few seconds faster.

And now - as "social media" takes its place in internet lore, we forget that the internet was created to be inherently social. The fundamental structure of the world wide web is the sharing of one link with another. One computer, and thus one person or group linked to another.

But as we started to figure out how to use this thing, kicked the tires and whatnot - it came to resemble something else entirely. Another distribution point for the world's information. And it was then that most of us were introduced. So most of us saw it that way, too.

And as the internet became far more important as an outlet for advertising dollars, this was further reinforced. We made banners and websites like print ads, transferred tv spots to pre-roll with little more than a file reformatting. And advertising took its role, less communicative, and thoroughly broadcasted. A messenger to many receivers.'

Continue reading at the Madison Avenue Journal...

Long Live Television Part 75

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We've certainly seen our fair sharing of hemming and hawing about the new Nielsen study, which declared that 99% of video viewing happened on a television set. Long live TV, peeps.

So a few points:

Television emilyyday SEVEN - Is this really so shocking, anyway? How much video do you watch online? It's easy for me to hook the mac to the hdtv and watch hulu on the big screen, but I still don't do it all that often - and I never did it pre-mac because it's damn near impossible on the pc. And why would I watch long-form content on my computer if I can watch it on TV - AND play on my computer at the same time?

THREE - While TV viewing is increasing, so is everything else. The younger you get, the more you "multi-task." And multi-tasking seems to mean not necessarily focusing on multiple things, but many things, one at a time. So if you watch TV, then text or play on your computer during the ad breaks, obviously the ad becomes that much less effective. And frankly, so does the stuff between the ads.

FOUR – The sample size is 300 people. Just something to keep in mind.

But I would consider the shuffling over this to be a symptom of the same old advertising myopia. Our success doesn't depend on the watching part alone, and what happens after the ad is just as important as whether or not they see it (or pay attention to it) at all.

And while we may be watching more TV than we were 15 years ago, the action we take after the ad is vastly different. We don't just go to the store, we go to google. We go to amazon. We comparison shop and ask our friends, far more easily than we could just a couple years ago.

Cheering a couple television studies is in many ways beside the point. No, television isn't dead. Nor is the TV ad - but our ability to use it in a vacuum is at least taking its last breaths. Just like the ability of a bad movie to make it past the first weekend by avoiding reviews. Or Microsoft's ability to sell a just okay music player by spending 100 million dollars.

TV didn't die, but the absoluteness of Television did. So before you go back to thinking everything is okay, you may want to consider that it's never been about the medium, but the people. And they have changed.

(pic via emilyyday)

UPDATE: I immediately went from writing this to feeling like we've had this argument so many times that I immediately wanted to rip this post down. But that would probably void some sort of bloggy social contract. So - yeah - my apologies and all that.

The Stimulus Bailout Crisis Bank Deathray Plan #2

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It's hard not to love the trend towards better data visualization; all those complicated stories made much easier to understand.

But really I just wanted to bitch about the ridiculous number of advertisers now "feeling our pain" with their very own "bailout" special or "stimulus package." Seriously, people are freaking out. It's scary out there, and the last thing we need is to have this financial death spiral beaten into our brains. The cable news channels do that plenty.

Oh yeah, I just lost my job and my house, my wife just left me to go live with her mother because she doesn't want to live out of the back of my van, but phew! - Mitsubishi has their bailout plan! Everything will be okay!

Anyway - complaining over - here's how we got here. Don't be too depressed. It's our patriotic duty to spend, so go buy yourself something nice. Maybe a new pair of jeans or an HDTV to lighten the mood?

The Only Top 5 that Matters

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Here's my top 5 from last night's Super Bowl commercials. Mine is the only ad tracker that matters.

You'll also notice that there are two number 2's and no number one. Believe, that was intentional. No one deserved it. I also usually don't go for the blow 'em up sort of stuff and I've never seen a Jason Statham movie, but that spot was particularly clever as far as car commercials go, and strategically spot on. A dagger to Lexus, the Benz, etc.

5. Pedigree - Dog

4. Pepsi - Pepsuber

3. Hulu - The Baldwin Alien

2. Cheetos - Spoiled Girl


2. Audi - The Chase


Honorable Mention - Cars.com - David Abernathy

We'll throw an honorable mention to the Cars.com spot. Great all the way up to the end when they stuck in the advertiser. Felt like the spot was written for someone else. Put this one in the category of cool idea that probably won't sell cars.