For those of you who think advertising’s gotten worse……. March 9, 2006
I present this:
Marketing in Accelerated Culture March 6, 2006
This will be a record for us. The Longest YGG Blog Entry of All Time. But it’s well worth it. This is an article written by Jay Pattisall, who’s the brand strategist at Modernista!, one of the hip modern agencies overturning the old giants. This is an intriguing read for those involved in marketing, advertising, or even consumers who think they understand pop culture. The original article can be found on Ihaveanidea.org here, and I appologize for exhausting the scrolling muscle in your index finger, but I assure you that you’ll enjoy it, in an analytical way.
The Changing Of The Guard?
The 21st Century economy, it seems, has a strange sense of irony. The former dot-com miscreants are now the darlings of Wall Street, while the corporate establishment has weathered everything from accounting scandals to bankruptcy. The Economist recently reported that Google “is now equal to the combined worth of Walt Disney, News Corp., and Viacom,” while “shares of ‘old’ media firms such as News Corp., Comcast and other giants of television, film, radio and print, have fallen 25% behind the S&P 500 in the past two years.”And it’s not just media. Delta, Northwest, United, and US Air all struggled through bankruptcy filings in 2005, while low cost player Southwest Airlines posted a fourth quarter profit of 54%. Ford and GM continue to struggle through high fuel costs, business and product issues, while Toyota and Hyundai continue to gain market share. In the U.S. Federated closed Filene’s, while the flagship brand of Spanish fashion group Inditex is planning to bring Zara to the American retail market and Japanese fashion brand, Uniqlo’s, has said its push into the United States is part of its plan to achieve annual sales of about $9 billion by 2010.In the advertising and marketing world newer, lesser-established, smaller agencies like Strawberry Frog, Mother, Mcgerry Bowen, Taxi and Modernista! continue to win more business and grow, while most large, established agency holding companies (the exception being Omnicom) struggle to maintain profit margins and accounts.
What could possibly be the cause of so many beleaguered established players and fortunate newer ones?
From A Culture of Unity To One Of Plurality
Audiences are smaller, more fractionalized, more difficult to define and easily distracted with many choices. As marketing and media professionals, we are versed with the shift of consumer culture from a passive audience of unity to an interactive audience of plurality. Technology, new mediums, the Internet and choice proliferation has splintered the unifying principle of Americanism into many, fragmented sub-cultures organized by interests, ideology, preferences and tastes. A twist on the Latin phrase ‘E Pluribus Unum,’ to ‘E Una Pluribus,’ (from many come one to from one come many) would adequately describe today’s society. We have become a Culture of Plurality.
In a culture of plurality, groups transcend demographics and gather around meaning. This means a 20 year old in St. Louis has more in common with a 50 year old college professor in the U.K., than his next-door neighbor. In fact, if the 20 year old has an iPod he would have a great deal in common with Professor Michael Bull, a lecturer in media and culture at the University of Sussex. Bull is often referred to as Professor iPod because of his research into the cultural phenomenon of the device and has noted that all types - doctors, lawyers, students, mothers, musicians, celebrities of all walks and all ages - have gathered around the lifestyle, dubbed the iPod generation.
Yet, we have not embraced the full significance of millions of consumers armed with affordable technology to plug them into any conceivable piece of information attainable on the Internet. This quantum leap in technology and information control is having a profound effect on society at large. Just as the railroad system at the turn of the 20th century cut transcontinental travel time from 6 months to 6 weeks, the jet plane from 6 weeks to 6 hours, the fax machine from 6 hours to 6 minutes, the Internet has cut it from 6 minutes to 6 seconds. Technology, whether we disdain it or love it, is accelerating the pace at which we live. Consider this:
- We absorb the same amount of information in 1 year today that took 100 years to absorb in the 17th century.
- In the next 5 years we will double the amount of information generated by all humans throughout history.
Accelerated Culture
The result is Accelerated Culture: the impact of having to simultaneously operate within the ‘Fastspace’ of our networked culture and the ‘Slowspace’ of our physical culture. We quickly get caught up in the tension of the rate at which information is produced and our limited capacity to absorb it. Psychologically, we have difficulty distinguishing between the two. Which is certainly the case of Paris Hilton and John Siegenthaler.
You are probably asking yourself “What could Paris Hilton and John Siegenthaler possibly have in common?” They were both victims of accelerated culture. Paris Hilton’s cell phone was hacked and her contacts and information were posted to Digg and linked to Yahoo! and Google by keyword search. Within hours Paris’ personal information was available to millions before she knew it has happened. Eventually, the hacker was prosecuted. John Siegenthaler, former assistant Attorney General to Robert Kennedy in the 1960’s, was recently victim of a false posting on Wikipedia that suggested Siegenthaler was at one time a suspect in RFK’s assassination. The posting was on Wikipedia for 138 days before it was corrected. Millions read it. Wikipedia itself is experiencing the tension of accelerated culture. The Wikipedia Foundation temporarily banned Congressional IP addresses to put a stop to a ‘flame’ war between congressional staffers, who have changed thousands of Wiki posts. Wikipedia cannot keep up with the amount of posts and information. They have to resort to censorship, which is ironic for an entity that bills itself the users’ encyclopedia.
By the time Paris Hilton, John Siegenthaler or the Wikipedia Foundation realized what had happened, let alone could act, the damage was done. The information was moving and evolving faster then they could comprehend. It’s slowspace versus fastspace. It’s the effect of accelerated culture.
Accelerated culture isn’t just a web thing and isn’t limited to public figures. We deal with it in all aspects of life, particularly media. In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the news media was quick to report unconfirmed looting and rapes in New Orleans and the Superdome. The authorities have acknowledged these reports delayed their entering parts of the city. Now we know the reports were grossly exaggerated and prematurely shaped opinions. More recently the media misreported that 12 of 13 coal miners survived the accident near Sago, West Virginia. The ferocity to report any information led to the wrong information spreading and printed in national newspapers before the truth was known that only one miner survived. It’s another example, an offline example, of accelerated culture in which we were all victims.
Many sectors beyond media cope with accelerated culture. For example, the intellectual property courts have a permanent fast-track division to accommodate litigation in the high tech sector. Fast tracking was traditionally used sparingly. Yet, in an accelerated culture the courts have to adjust for the pace of innovation and business. The securities industry is very aware of this issue. A mere mention or rumor can send stock markets soaring or spiraling. Recently, a rumor that a Japanese Internet company cooked it’s books forced the Nikkei to close early trading 20 minutes. The Nikkei could not keep up with the volume of trading caused by a frenzy of nervous investor dumping shares. The effect was felt world-wide the following trading day when retail and institutional investors began dumping stock on all exchanges.
The fashion world is another example. The shear number of fashion magazines in publication, the growth of shopping online, reality fashion and make-over television and our celebrity-obsessed society are fueling tremendous demand for the latest trends in fashion. Labels suffer when they are slow to market. For example, GAP Inc. recently experienced its’ 13th consecutive same store sales decline in the last 14 months. Part of GAP’s woes is the time it takes to bring designs to retail. H&M and Zara, on the other hand, have made a business of mass producing and retailing the latest, hottest fashions weeks after they hit the runways in Paris, Milan and New York. The GAP is caught up in the fastspace fervor, while H&M and Zara have capitalized on it.
But in no area is the effect of accelerated culture more evident than that of email and wireless. The average Fortune 1000 company employee receives 138 daily emails. Blackberrys, cell phone and pagers have turned white-collar execs into raving email addicts. Some executives admit sneaking away during family vacations to use their Blackberrys because they cannot stand being ‘out of touch.’ All of these are examples of the tension and dissonance when information moves faster than our capacity to keep up.
The Marketing Conundrum
The implication for marketing is clear. Traditional marketing cannot keep up with accelerated culture because marketing has always followed culture. Advertising and marketing have been labeled The Mirror Makers as their goal is to reflect the audience. To that end, the traditional marketing approach researches consumer trends, conducts surveys, focus groups to uncover an insight about the target. It then exploits the insight, creates a strategy, and executes the strategy into creative work. All the troubled brands mentioned earlier follow this approach, or some form of it. Given accelerated culture, how can we expect the hierarchy of effects/ awareness, interest, desire, trial marketing model, developed after WWII for a three-network mass broadcast system to still be relevant? Given the typical 18 to 20 week strategy-to-creative schedule how can traditional marketing keep pace with accelerated culture?
The answer is it cannot. In a world where the wrong perception stays posted on Wikipedia for 138 days, where the rush for information results in the wrong information, where rumors close international stock exchanges, marketing as we have practiced it, cannot make an impact in enough time. In the future, marketing can no longer follow culture. It must lead culture.
Some marketers have arguably been doing this. In the U.S., Target has created a style cult around discount shopping by reassuring consumers that style can be had affordably. Starbucks created coffee house culture in America. Red Bull is the embodiment of club culture world-wide and invented the energy drink category. In the U.K., Orange transformed the wireless culture to distinct groups of friends and relatives. While all of these brands are the exception, they are reaping rewards in the marketplace because they are leading culture. Like Zara and H&M, who are using a business approach to capitalize on fastspace, so too are these brands.
Marketing in the Future
If marketing is to lead culture, marketers must create brands that stand for more than product attributes or heritage in the category. Brands better distinguish themselves with a point of view, rather than with a point of difference. Often, it is the intangible that makes any difference at all. Tennis shoes are tennis shoes. And coffee is coffee. But certainly Nike and British Knights are as different from one another as Starbucks and Duncan Donuts are. What distinguishes them is their point of view and how that feels to the consumer.
Ultimately, that is every marketers goal, to make the consumer feel something about your brand that they do not feel about any other brand. It begins with a strategic process that is more flexible. The traditional strategic approach of starting with a consumer insight about the brand may or may not work. Insights in fastsapce may or may not be relevant at the time work is finally produced. Another approach could be to start with a core truth about the brand, a DNA imprint of the brand (whether consumers recognize or articulate it or not) and build a vision or point of view from there. People are drawn to a point of view, just as they are drawn to a religion or a cult. Brands with strong beliefs and vision are as magnetic as leaders with strong beliefs and vision. JFK is most remembered for his idealism and efforts for creating a ‘Pax Americana’, Roosevelt for his fortitude and courage, Churchill for his bravery, the American founding fathers for their vision for liberty. The romanticized notion of our leaders is exactly the type of magnetism our brands need to lead culture.
Agencies and marketers must develop and implement ideas for fastspace. Which means the jettison of slowspace practices. Agencies should no longer aim to create a brand campaign that is to run for 10 years with a minimal staff of under-paid account executives. Those practices don’t solve business problems. They add to them. Agencies must provide the resources necessary to quickly, nimbly generate ideas that lead accelerated culture. Over the last few years the industry has seen a resurgence of smaller, independent agencies that do just this.
Part of jettisoning slowspace ideas is throwing out established testing conventions. In an accelerated culture there is no time for copy testing. By the time you test and refine your idea the dynamics may well have changed. Additionally, established copy testing conventions will no longer work because the system and conditions they were developed for no longer work. The three network broadcast system has been replaced with hundreds of cable and satellite networks, VOD, HD, DVR (and soon) home-based servers. The hierarchy of effects advertising model (awareness, interest, desire, trial) cannot yield the same returns with this system. Comparing new commercials to normative data from previous years is a red herring. In such a cluttered environment, with increasing ad rates and decreasing ad budgets awareness is difficult to achieve for both established and new brands. How, then, can we assume interest, desire and trial will follow? Rationally, it cannot. Perhaps the reason brand buzz and product placements have become so popular is because they help brands achieve awareness and interest. The question we should ask ourselves is how do we test buzz building ideas and product placement? It’s a tough question. One answer could be in-market testing. But the answer is likely not established copy testing techniques.
Perhaps a better approach is the interactive model that measures and improves in real-time, with real data. The cost efficiency of online advertising has made this possible. Since it is unlikely print and broadcast media outlets will decrease their rates dramatically, the marketing world should develop marketing incubators – efficient, affordable ways to test the waters with real data and real consumers, not unreliable focus groups or unrealistic predictive quantitative copy test models.
Whether we label it accelerated culture or fastspace and slowspace, there is little doubt that the irony of business in the 21st Century is a direct result of our lack of willingness or ability to accept just how much things have changed. Make no mistake. This is not intended to be a dooms-day article for advertising and branding. Marketing will change. Branding will evolve. And agencies will alter their practices to be relevant. The only question is how long will it take?
Advertising Rule #37 February 14, 2006
I’ll throw more of my advertising rules up once we get the new YGG rolling. Today’s rule is randomly numbered #37. And it is:
Consumers aren’t stupid. You don’t have to explain everything to them. Let them figure it out themselves.
An example that perfectly exemplifies this rule, and is possibly one of the best ads in the past several years is below. (Click here or on the image to open)
The Whopperettes February 5, 2006
This is the latest Crispin Porter + Bogusky creation for Burger King. The website is very entertaining, www.whopperettes.com, and the ad carries on the insanity of the Hootie spot I posted about before. I uploaded the video to Youtube (it’s still processing, I’ll post an approved link later), but you can view it by clicking on the image below or here.
UPDATE: For anyone that missed any of the ads or happens to live in Canada (which aired none of the great ads; thank you Global), you can see them all at http://www.ifilm.com/superbowl?htv=12
ANOTHER UPDATE: That ifilm site is just crawling, but luckily Google comes to the rescue. http://video.google.com/superbowl.html
The 3 Best Flashes I’ve Seen Since I Watched that “Late Night” Movie January 28, 2006
The new Swedish Heinz site is one of the three best flash sites I’ve seen in many years. A minimalistic beauty.
This site is for Leo Burnett here in Toronto and is recognized as one of the best ad agency sites of all time. It went live last year but still deserves plenty of attention.
And this last one is my absolute favourite website of all-time. They just updated it with new scenarios. I told everyone I know about this site and now I’m telling all of you. It’s for Ikea in Europe. Not sure which country. I will warn you that if you don’t have broadband it could take several minutes to load. But the wait’s worth every second. If I had an award named after me it would be given to this site, hands-down. This is truly what marketing is. This is how you tell a story.
Bernbach Said It Best January 20, 2006
Bill Bernbach was one of the original advertising gods that has greatly influenced all of the media we come in contact with each day. An excellent booklet has been circulating the net for some time. It features quotes of Midas stature that rolled off Bernbach’s gold tongue throughout his career. It’s a definite must read for anyone and everyone, not only adfolk. You can read a bit about Bernbach and his agency DDB and how they not only made advertising cool, but also put Volkswagen on the map, by clicking here. The DDB Canada site is a cool award winning site that you should check out too.
Either click here or on the image to download the pdf booklet mentioned earlier.
The link is from rm116, a great advertising blog put together by the students from VCU Adcenter.
Jelly’s 5 Rules January 18, 2006
These rules were written by Jelly Helm, a Creative Director at Weiden + Kennedy, and featured in Men’s Health last year.
1. Act Stupid
"Our philosophy is to come in ignorant every day. The idea of retaining ignorance is sort of counterintuitive, but it subverts a lot of [problems] that come from absolute mastery. if you think you know the answer better than somebody else does, you become closed to being fresh." states Jelly Helm, creative director.
2. Shut Up
"The first thing we do when we meet with clients is listen. We try to figure out what their problems are. Then we come back with questions, not solutions. We write these out and put them on the wall. And then we circle the ones that we think are interesting. More often than not, the questions hold the answer."
3. Always Say Yes
"What I’ve learned from improvisation is to let go of outcome and just say yes to what4ever the situation is. If you say an idea is bad, you’re creating conflict-you’re breaking an improv rule. You want an energy flow that moves you forward, as opposed to a creative stasis."
4. Chase Talent
"Find people who make you better. It’s best to be the least talented person in the room. It’s reciprocal. It challenges you to keep up."
5. Be Fearless
"Do anything, say anything. In the worlds of our president, Dan Wieden, ‘You’re not useful to me until you’ve made three momentous mistakes.’ He knows that if you try not to make mistakes, you miss out on the value of learning from them."
The Three Rules of Copywriting January 13, 2006
There are 3 simple rules when it comes to writing copy for an ad, press release, article, or even a blog like ours:
1. Proofread
2. Proofread
3. Proofread
A College Marketing Goldmine January 11, 2006
If your a college student with a Facebook account then you may have noticed the Pulse. The Pulse may have been up from quite some time now, but the significance of it can’t be said enough.
The Pulse is a major listing of college campus trends and popularity. Ranging from Music to Books, and even Clubs and Organizations. The data also compares listings among college campuses.
Some of the number one listings, include:
Music - DMB
Books - The Da Vinci Code
Movies - The Notebook
Television - Family Guy
Clubs & Orgs. - Lifeguard
Hometowns - Houston
As someone in youth/college marketing this data becomes an invaluable source of information. The data is also updated daily at 6 a.m. PST.
Burke King, At It Again January 10, 2006
I don’t think I’ve ever gone into one of my proclamations about Crispin Porter + Bogusky with the YGG before. So let this be the first of many. For those of you that don’t know, CP+B is the most awarded ad agency in the World, and has really put Miami on the advertising map in the past few years. They have the Burger King account and have churned out many classics with The King as well as many of their other accounts.
One thing that the Advertising Celebrity Alex Bogusky, an Executive Creative Director at CP+B, has ensured about every piece of advertising his name’s been on is that it’s POP CULTURE.
(Click to open link to video)
As a continuation from their awkwardly hillarious spot directed by David LaChapelle, as seen above, BK and CP+B have arranged for Brooke Burke and The King to create a scandalous life for the paparazzi.
With some searching I came across this video of the couple courtside at a Lakers game:
I also found a bunch of paparazzi style shots of the King and his Queen living living their daily tasks while dodging the media. These pics are from Hollywood Rag.
What separates CP+B from many of the old-school agencies is their focus on not creating interruptions, but rather popular culture. Something that we not only enjoy, but also love to share with our friends, much like I’m doing right now. (Audarius introduced you to this type of marketing, Word of Mouth, earlier today). Look for these pics and video to circulate in a mini Subservient Chicken fashion very quickly.
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