Archive for the 'Agencies' Category

Not long to go now before advertisers and their agencies get the bad news they’ve been avoiding for so long - viewer ratings on their TV ads. For the first time on a widespread basis Neilsen Media Research will start releasing data on how many viewers (if any) continue watching a channel during the breaks. We Punks predict the data will make depressing reading for the majority of the people who are responsible for the $70billion of TV advertising stuffed on our screens each year. Who will be the most depressed? We’ve ranked them, in order of decreasing depression:
1. TV network executives (because they’ll continue to lose ad dollars to other media)
2. Ad agency executives (they have focused too heavily on TV campaigns and don’t know what else to do)
3. TV production companies (their business is built around TV ads, but the smart ones are honing their skills for other forms of film content)
4. Marketing executives (they will realize how much money they’ve been wasting - not “half” as Mr. John Wanamaker said all those years go, but maybe seventy, eigthy or ninety percent)

And who’s most to blame? Weve ranked them too, in order of decreasing blame:
1. Ad agency executives (they’ve pigeonholed themselves into experts at making TV ads when the writing has been on the wall for years that they should be thinking far more broadly to other formats)
2. Marketing executives (they allowed their weak agencies to make terrible ads containing no Big Ideas that are irritating to watch)
3. TV network executives (they should have said “no!” to bad ads or at least charged a premium for them a long time ago - bad TV ads weaken the content on the network)
4. TV production companies (for agreeing to make crap ads because the money was good - shame on you)

To the few smart marketers and agencies who have seen this coming and are now thinking Punk, we salute you!

People who develop innovative ideas often work in innovative ways. No shit, right? But think about it. It often takes a different way of working to develop big ideas, not just a eureka! moment.

Take ad agencies, for instance. Most of them are proud of their creative environments but are still working in ways that might not make for the Punkest Marketing solutions. A creative team is briefed by an account guy or planner or whatnot and then goes off in a huddle for a few weeks to come up with ideas. The problem with that is a two-person team, over familiar with working with one another, may not be pushing through their own comfort zone. They come up with work that starts looking tired and familiar because, well, they are tired and familiar.

Then look at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky and how its creative process - one we call ‘Democratic Creativity’ in our book - involves many more teams jamming together until the good ideas rise to the top and, under the guidance of the creative director, they build upon these ones until some truly great ideas emerge. Ones that are so unexpected they knock you sideways.

There is an interesting company in South Park, San Francisco, that is also using a collaborative rather than a silo-based approach to problem solving. They have developed a product that is causing quite a buzz among the Silicon Valley money men. The company is called Obvious Corp, and the product is Twitter. Twitter is a way to broadcast short messages on cell phones to large groups of people. Apparently it is strangely addictive and has attracted tens of thousands of users (60,000 or so as of last week), including presidential hopeful John Edwards. One simple question that is at the core of Twitter gives friends a glimpse into one another’s lives: “What are you doing?” The answers can range from the mundane to the ridiculous to the downright hilarious.

According to a March 19th article in the San Francisco Chronice, Obvious Corp. has been experimenting with ‘co-working’, in which likeminded companies share office space and ideas. Once a month they convene a Company Chow Fun, a meeting at which a dozen local tech firms get together over food to brainstorm solutions to their problems. While we wouldn’t recommend ad agencies all club together to develop creative ideas for their respective clients, bringing outsiders in as part of the problem-solving process to shake up the comfortable old solutions is something we definitelty would.

One problem Obvious Corp. might soon have could be how to spend the millions of dollars they will make from selling Twitter to NewsCorp or Viacom or Yahoo! or Google, or whoever else thinks it will be the Next Big Thing

The Super Bowl represents the last watercooler moment for TV advertising. With the splintering of the media into a million different pieces across the airwaves, online, in games (video, that is) and everywhere else that will sell space to marketers, the Bowl is still a place where millions of young guys gather around their 70 inch plasmas and LCDs to share an entertainment experience. And advertisers know they have a chance to reach this precious demographic with gold old-fashioned TV commercials. Who can say TV advertsing is dead when an advertiser like Anheuser-Busch spends $25 million on Super Bowl commercials? Right? Right…?

And the agencies had better come up with the goods to prove that they can still woo the consumers with their fare.

Over the last 10 or 15 years the big lumbering agencies have become specialists in creating big lumbering TV-centric campaigns and are smarting from the blasphemy spoken by many with data to back it up that commercials are no longer reaching the people they need to reach, and those that they do reach, fast forward through them on TiVo or their cable operators own brand of DVR.

The Super Bowl is the agencies’ chance to prove that TV advertising can be great, that sponsored online search, branded entertainment, viral marketing and the like are no more than flashes in the pan and will crawol back from whence they came before too long.

But even this one last great advertising showcase - the Super Bowl - shows the case for TV comercials is far from proven. The advertising on display in the multiple breaks is not uninimously great. In fact, for the most part, the fare served up for the 41st Bowl was pretty damned poor given what’s at stake.

For one, there was an unhealthy a celebration of violence as a mode of humor. Not just slapstick, although there was plenty of that too, but people hitting each other or fighting or committing mass suicide. Isn’t the Super Bowl supposed to be a family show? I mean wasn’t that the problem with Janet Jackson’s nipple popping out a couple of years ago? But I guess violence is OK for young kids to see (my son is three and I had to turn the TV off when the ads came on) and to model their behavior on. Nice example Mad Ave.

And then there were the “consumer-generated ads” from Chevy, Doritos and the NFL. The Chevy one had a bunch of guys in the street taking their clothes of because they couldn’t resist the new Chevy car SUV hybrid thing in vile orange. It was lame. The Doritos one had a guy driving a car and a girl passerby smacking their heads because they were (a)distraced by Doritos, and (b)nerds. Lame AND violent. The NFL one was a great concept about the end of the season, poorly executed by the ad agency (and shot by commercial director legend Joe Pytca). But the idea actually came from an ad guy, Gino Bona, who works in a New England ad agency (Garrand Marketing Communications), just not from one working at Doritos agency of record, Omnicom Group’s Goodby Silverstein and Partners. Goodby must have hated having to produce an ad wriiten by a guy from another agency. Maybe that’s why they screwed it up. But, the point is, it ain’t really consumer-geberated if the consumer works in advertising. Right?

There was some great work, demonstating a good strategy and a big creative idea well-executed (and that, after all, is all advertising can hope to be), notably from E*trade, Revlon, Emerald Nuts and Toyota. They each showed that TV advertsing can still be a powerful way of getting a point about a product across.

But my award for the best commercials of the Bowl goes to Coca-Cola for two excellent ads from the “Welcome to the Coke Side of Life” campaign, created by Wieden and Kennedy. Coca-Cola has not been known for great ads in the past few years, producing a bunch of vapid, happy, slappy, crappy commercials that offended no-one and appealed to exactly the same number, but it really seems to have turned the corner with this work and I tip my caps to the marketer and its agency. W+K remain one of the great agencies around, developing stellar work consistently across their clients.

Has Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the agency that for the past three or four years has been the poster child for the Revolution of nontraditional marketing, finally peaked?

Maybe.

To many industry observers the evidence is certainly mounting: their campaign for Orville Redenbacher popcorn that uses a dead Orville as its reanimated spokesperson, has been criticized for being tasteless; their remake of the ‘Hilltop’ TV commercial for Coca-Cola, perhaps the most iconic commercial for the brand ever, was dull; they lost the Method Home Care account to Chiat Day in LA; its high profile ‘Men of the Square Table’ campaign for Miller Beer hasn’t translated into sales; and there are rumors that VW, the car account that was handed them on a plate in September 2005, might leave the shop following the untimely departure from the automaker of Kerri Martin , its director of brand innovation and major champion of the agency (Kerri was their client at MINI and hired the agency soon after taking her new job at VW).

As an ex-Coke employee who longed to remake ‘Hilltop’ to say something about today’s world, I have to admit I was damned disappointed with how CP+B wasted this golden opportunity. I mean it’s not like you can do a remake again, at least not until the last one is dead and buried. And as an ex-CP+B employee it’s tempting to proclaim, “Ah, those were the glory days. It’s not been the same since I left” and cite the fact that Method was an account I helped win and is now gone. And as a viewer I always hated the Miller campaign because, while based on a good strategy, creatively it was always trying too hard.

But still, I don’t think they are falling. They are still the only agency in The US that is pushing boundaries creatively and redefining the meaning of advertising to be something far broader. They have made their clients’ brands part of popular culture. And they are still delivering work that is incredibly effective. The Burger King campaign, for instance, has been partly responsible for 10 consecutive quaters of positive comparable sales.

I knew them in 1997 when they were a 90-person shop working on two floors in a corporate looking office tower in Miami and even then they were doing amazing work. For me the creation of the anti-tobacco Truth brand is still one of the most brilliant marketing strategies ever developed. Not just because the work was cool to look at, but because it actually worked and reversed the upward trend in teenage smoking.

Many people have seen CP+B rise since 2003 when the agency won high profile accounts like IKEA and MINI and think their history of great work is brief, but really the work has for the most part been consistently good for almost 10 years.

But of course schadenfreude (delight in another’s misfortune) is natural from those jealous of others’ success.

Having said that, I do think the agency has some challenges. They are now BIG and split into two offices thousands of miles apart. When the creative and strategic force that is Alex Bogusky cannot interract face-to-face with everyone to shape their thinking and their work, some less than brilliant advertising is sure to slip between the cracks.

Watch this space.