Let’s call it reality. Why agencies will pretty likely stick around.
Februar 8th, 2010 • Allgemein • Comments
Bud Caddell from NYC’s Undercurrent has published a great rant about the question on how the agency of the future looks like. As usual it is a great text to read but it ends with a plea to share our opinion. And that is what I do now.
Hi Bud.
I would like to share my opinion with you and I appreciate the time and effort it took to write such a long article about the agency of the future. First up, it’s a good perspective to start a discussion. But before we talk about the question what the agency of the future might look like, let’s begin with the essential question what an agency actually is. At this point we encounter the first logical problem. You won’t find a global definition of “Agency” on Wikipedia. But you will find a definition of “Advertising agency”.
An advertising agency or ad agency is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising (and sometimes other forms of promotion) for its clients.
If you scroll down a little bit further you will find the chapter “Types of advertising agencies”. It separates different types of agencies – such as Inhouse, Interactive, Search Engine etc.
Simply stunning!!! This little chapter alone demonstrates the disadvantage of 99% of the world’s agency models. It is not at all focused on the core business needs of their clients but on the output the agency founder once planned to generate – SEO, Social…you name it. But do we still have a clear understanding about what we are supposed to produce? In a small poll on my blog last week I asked if there is still such a big line between traditional and new jobs in the industry. The answers ranged from ‘Absolutely. Traditional agencies haven’t got anything to do with digital ones’ to ‘Not at all. The future model is integrated’. Or, to put it another way, there is no average ad guy who has got a precise understanding about what he is supposed to produce anymore. Pure confusion, no matter where you look.
The problem
Agencies are just normal companies in the first place. And then there was the web, this fantastic engine that made all these fantastic concepts of crowdsourced products, E-Learning, brand fandom and LOLcats possible. But, the web is half as old as I am. And 7% as old as the Top 3 ad networks nowadays. Companies such as Ogilvy, JWT, or McCann have been around for decades. They produced innovation at a certain point in time. But unfortunately they cannibalized their own concept. Customers drowned in messages and meaningless awareness campaigns while more and more products hit the markets.
It may sound a little bit cheesy, but my dad told me about his childhood days in Germany last weekend. There was not too much choice when you were a kid in Frankfurt in 1960 – there were only a handful of products, few toys and most of the time you played soccer outside with your friends. According to a study from earlier this month modern kids spend enough time with screens of all kinds to make it a full-time job – 53 hours per week!
What I say is, the crisis of the agency business is the crisis of our society. We just have anything we could dream of. And it’s not a question of traditional versus ‘new’ agencies. It’s not a question whether I drown in traditional or digital messages. It’s just a problem that we possess anything and nothing seems special enough to us anymore. We are not not thrilled by brand campaigns anymore. We aren’t thrilled by anything anymore. We just struggle to stay alive in a sea of stuff.
adidas. Preparing the Social Push for NBA All–Star Weekend.
Februar 5th, 2010 • Brands, Experimental, Social • Comments
For about three years I worked on various adidas accounts here at my employer, Neue Digitale / Razorfish. That’s why I’m pretty interested to watch what the brand is up to when it comes to new digital (mainly social) concepts. In fact, the days of big digital presentations are over are getting reinterpreted at adidas HQ, Amsterdam.
On NBA’s All-Star Weekend Orlando Magic Center Dwight Howard takes the lead in a push by 180/TBWA Riot and adidas to socialize….umm…..big shiny ad productions. They will air a 30-second spot starring the basketball god which unlocks more Howard-related content the more it is shared. Additionally it will be intertwined with the website and a Youtube channel.
Code Monkey. A Hymn for the Industry.
Februar 3rd, 2010 • Allgemein • Comments
Jonathan Coultron is a singer and songwriter from NYC. His song Code Monkey has been around for some time but it took me until today to find it on thesixtyone.com. And it’s a fantastic song – a hymn for a whole industry. Check it out here and sing along
Poll. Is there still a line between traditional and digital marketing jobs?
Februar 2nd, 2010 • Poll • Comments
Marketing people usually have marketing friends. Personally I switched from traditional advertising to digital about five years ago. And even though I was quite doubtful in the beginning, I am very happy about this decision. Nevertheless I watch friends from traditional advertising trying to cross the (still existing) border between advertising and digital. Some are succesful because they may have worked on a couple of high profile digital projects. Some of them seem to have a harder time to become credible digital copywriters/concept developers/art directors.
I would like to find out about your background and your vision
- Do you consider yourself as an ad person? Is digital marketing advertising? Or is it something completely different?
- Did you ever work in traditional advertising? If yes, when/how did you cross the line?
- Do you think traditional and digital marketing will be fully integrated? Or will they their own silos?
I am very interested in what you think.
Just answer the following quick polls and feel free to comment on how you crossed the line from traditional to digital (or back).
Read more »
Apps. An Explosion is underway.
Februar 2nd, 2010 • Mobile • Comments
Ooooh! Aaaaaah! 2010 is the year of the mobile, social, social CRM, IPTV App. No matter how realistic that is, check out this lovely piece of info visualization from the Fast company. Because according to Gartner an app explosion is underway. A developement which is closely intertwined with smartphone sales. Word up!
Charlie Brooker. Your Own News Report Template in a Nutshell.
Januar 30th, 2010 • Experimental • Comments
Oh, and as I was in the process to write about cynical DIY ways to create your own PR drama, here is a brilliant analogy – creating your own dramatic news flick out of nothing. Or to be more precise, creating something which looks like news but is just a format. The Guardian’s Charlie Brooker demonstrates a literal version of any piece of outdoor news report on TV nowadays. It looks serious. And by god, it is (via brandflakesforbreakfast).
Audi’s Green Police. Didn’t They say Hitler?
Januar 30th, 2010 • Ads, Brands • Comments
Let’s start an intellectual experiment.
Think about e.g. an ex-spouse in your life and now think about any object in your appartment. Can you associate it with him or her somehow? You probably can. Take the old vase in your living room and you will probably find a connection to your ex who loved flowers so much. Most likely you will be able to link the TV set to her preferences for ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and so on…But why should you do that? Especially since you will be able to link pretty much anything to pretty much anything after thinking about it for a while. Plus, simply put, while you actually might not want to think about your ex-spouse anymore at all?
Well, that’s what self-proclaimed guardians of Political Correctness do on the web 24/7. They love to think about all kinds of connections because there is not one thing which makes them as happy as making up a good old PR disaster.
One information in advance: I am German and I work for a digital agency with Audi International on the client list (not PR, not Audi USA). This is just accidental and not the rationale behind this article. I am professionally not at all engaged in any Audi project even though I like the cars. I simply react on this article by Danny Brown, entitled “Audi and the Super Bowl Social Media Shit Storm“. This is the story: In an attempt to spearhead a social media intiative, Audi USA (keep that in mind, it is important) had invented the so-called ‘Green Police’. It comes with a Super-Bowl ad, a Youtube channel and the inevitable twitter account. This is the more or less entertaining ad:
Did you realize it? No? Audi has just committed a major act of Political Incorrectness, according to Danny.
Apple. Inside the App Store’s Rejection Department.
Januar 29th, 2010 • Mobile, Tech • Comments
The unparalleled freedom of Web 2.0 can nowhere be witnessed as fully as in Apple’s App Store. Well, of course there is criteria to become part of this exclusive digital warehouse – clear, transparent criteria to leave no room for speculation how to get in there. And in order to stop everyone with bad or fake ideas to take advantage of them, Apple, and you, the user, Apple has now opened the doors to its App Store Rejection Department. Thanks to Chris for this link.
Apple iPad. Endorsed by Print Publishers Worldwide.
Januar 28th, 2010 • Allgemein • Comments
What a week for Hubert Burda! The Grandsigneur of German Publishers, ‘Chairman of the Board and Publisher of Hubert Burda Media, President of the Association of German Magazine Publishers, and co-founder of the European Publishers Council’ must have had a great night last night.
Why? Because it seems to me that he, as one of the most conservative protagonists of paid content on the web, has finally won. Earlier this week he had opened Burda’s annual digital conference DLD in Munich. A digital conference which looks like all the industry meetings you know from around the world…except that it was hosted by a brand which publicly asked to disappropriate google because of their online media market share. Sounds ridiculous? Well, it is.
Burda described Google as a “killer application” which delivered almost half of all traffic to local journalism Web sites and yet managed to keep almost one-third of all Internet advertising revenues in Germany for itself. “All of that without making any investment of its own in the expensive business of journalism,” Burda noted.
Burda called for amendments to copyright and even suggested that Google should pay for the use of news it had not produced itself. Of course, the search engine wanted nothing to do with this suggestion. (‘Der Spiegel‘, Sept 09)
Actually your failed business model is not my problem
Earlier, in summer 2009, Burda and other publishers had managed to channel their whining about antiquated business model into the Hamburg Declaration of European Publishers. It demanded a ‘fair share’ by search engines like google. Google reacted with an offer to deny robots the access to the publisher’s pages. The conflict went hot. The web manned the battle stations when Silicon Valley started fighting against Munich. Well, and of course it could get even more bizarre when Rupert Mordoch started to ‘threaten’ google to block them from his newspapers and rumors about a Murdoch pact with Bing versus google made the headlines.
Burdoch’s ‘new business model’ was the old one…translated into digital: Making readers pay for stuff they read online.
In the new business model, we will be charging consumers for the news we provide on our Internet sites. The critics say people won’t pay. I believe they will, but only if we give them something of good and useful value. Our customers are smart enough to know that you don’t get something for nothing.
Similar to the music industry publishers never condescended to think about alternative business models. While print advertising revenues worldwide dropped like they were hot, no alternative business model was even explored. The direction was clear: Save mainstream print media at all cost. No matter wether there simply is no need for so many general interest magazines anymore, we do print…with a digital touch to make it look cooler.
The web’s response was unambiguous: Twitter founder Biz Stone commented the Burdoch’s closed payment model will ‘fail fast’ and it would be impossible to ‘put the genie back into the bottle’. Others compared the old men’s inflexibility to the disaster of the music industry etc. In autumn 2009 both, Burda and Murdoch, demasked themselves as dinosaurs – powerful but inflexible, free from creative power and about to make the same mistakes so many others had done before.
Ad spoofs. And now here comes MAFIA WARS.
Januar 25th, 2010 • Ads, Games • Comments
You have probably watched the hilarious Farmville ad spoof last week. Well, as every successful entertainment concept needs a sequel, here is it – the Mafia Wars ad spoof. It is basically a remixed version of the original spot but we like it nevertheless…kind of (5 out of 10 points because of a lack in originality). Thanks to allfacebook for the link.
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