Partly cool because it is smart and funny, partly becuase has been planned in advance to be in Monday's paper after a weekend game - someone confidently planning what to do if Germany thrashed the favourites!
Smart thoughts, great analogies, and some real insights on the social world and why it isn't the same as advertising. in fact why it is the opposite of advertising. Advertising is the brand's view of the world: social is everyone else's
Is advertising the next casualty of the ongoing digital tsunami? For now, advertising looks like the patient who developed an asymptomatic form of cancer without realizing how sick he is. Such behavior usually results from excessive confidence in one’s body’s past performance, mixed with a state of permanent denial and a deep sense of superiority, all aided by a complacent environment. The digital graveyard is filled with the carcasses of utterly confident people who all shared this sense of invincibility. The music industry and, to some extent, the news business built large mausoleums for themselves. Today, the advertising industry is working on its own funeral monument.
Before performing media oncology tests and discussing possible treatments, let me describe which soapbox I’m standing on. Each time I raise the issue of advertising trailing behind the digital train, I get two responses: Media execs nod sagely and later explain how they intend to progressively circumvent the ad food-chain; advertising people breezily dismiss my remarks: ”Anyway, you don’t like us.” Untrue.
First, I’m in the same boat as many of my friends in the news media: A significant part of my income, past and future, rides on advertising. Therefore, my pragmatic self-interest is to see digital advertising thrive.
Second, over my 25-year career, I have worked with ad people on many occasions. In the late ‘90s, for a year I even worked at a large ad agency, trying to evangelize for multimedia. I met interesting people there, even though I quickly realized we had little in common. And my last job as a managing editor was at a free newspaper that was 100 percent dependent on advertising.
I am far more open to this business than most of my journalistic colleagues are. No ideological posture or agenda on my part. Today’s note is the result of two years of observations and conversations with digital editors and publishers I met in Europe, the United States, or Asia.
Let’s face it. On digital media, advertising hasn’t delivered. In the news business, we have a rule of thumb: An electronic reader brings 15 to 20 times less in advertising revenue than a print reader does. I’ll stop short of saying this dire state of affairs is attributable only to advertising. Between inadequate interfaces, poor marketing, and the certainty that, just by itself, intellectual superiority entitles it to success, media carry their share of responsibility in this situation. But for the most part, it is the advertising community that missed the digital target.
Digital advertising sucks. Both on the Web and on mobile. There are two main reasons for this.
No. 1: Poor design. Where is the creative talent? Not in digital, that’s only too clear. Let’s face it: Most banners, skyscrapers, sliders, pop-ups, you name it, merely act as reader repellents. They end up as fodder for ad-blocking systems. Unfortunately, these defense mechanisms are thriving. A Google query for “ad block” yields 1.25 million pages that send you to dozens of browser add-ons. On Firefox, AdBlockPlus is the most used extension, with more than 80 million downloads and more than 10 million active users. The same goes for Chrome, whose ad-blocking extension is downloaded at a rate of 100,000 times a week and now has over 1 million users. For Internet Explorer, there are simply too many add-ons to count.
I spotted this comment in an excellent Guardian ad-blocking story.
<<BLOCKQUOTE>>I work for a digital advertising agency. Along with microsites, iPhone apps and long-form digital content, I make banners. Shitloads of them. And I use Adblock Plus. I also advise my friends and colleagues to use it too. This is because most advertising, online or otherwise, is utter crap. And banners contain some of the worst of the crap. Flickering, squiriming, farting, buzzing crap.
Another sign of the ad-design failure is Apple’s (AAPL) decision. Not only does Apple enter the mobile-ad business as a sales house, but Jobs’ company will also design ads, for a hefty $50,000 to $100,000 fee. Apple’s message is that the profession needs to reboot advertising graphical standards. How strange it is to see a technology company giving lectures on design to the very people who prided themselves for their creative brilliance.
No. 2: Badly sold, badly bought. Digital advertising high-tech products sold and purchased in the most low-tech way. One after the other, most technology aspects of the advertising business have slipped out of the hands of those who were supposed to own them: ad serving, data management, behavioral targeting, analytics—all are now controlled by engineering-driven companies.
In the process, the added value of media buying outlets has shrunk to a bare minimum, in which a bunch of twentysomethings are negotiating discounts with their counterparts in media. That’s the exact opposite of yield management.
Everyone laments that Google (GOOG), the ultimate geek machine, has absorbed a large part of the digital advertising business, but that’s just the logical consequence of an inability to invest in technical talent.
Three trends should cause the advertising community to stop and think harder about its future.
1) The technology dimension of the business will intensify. Competence and imagination will tend to be in the hands of small companies. As they already do, the biggest and the smartest ad outlets will want to acquire such talent pools. But they will face tech companies ready for a bidding war; see what happened in the mobile ad sector with the AdMob’s acquisition by Google and Quattro Wireless’ takeover by Apple—with the subsequent launch of iAd.
2) Media will have a strategic interest in boosting their CRM. They’ll invest in developing this crucial asset for their digital properties.
3) Media will tend to move up the ad production chain by having their own creative teams, working more closely with big advertisers. On that matter, Apple could give an interesting pitch: “We are the media, we spent time and money designing a good interface; we don’t want our work ruined by substandard advertising; let’s work directly with brands and concoct great campaigns that will benefit us, the advertiser, and the reader.” This could become a broader trend, spreading to other media, such as broadcast radio, neglected by today’s ad creatives.
Does this lead to the extinction of big advertising shops? Certainly not. First, there is the inertia factor; these companies remain quite wealthy, thanks to decades of solid rainmaking. Second, agencies still enjoy profitable strongholds in which their value-added is undisputed, such as outdoor, display, television, and print—and the associated media and strategic planning. Third, they have no shortage of good managers able to organize a turnaround … in due course.
It is hard to reform a fat-cat culture—from heavy margins, captive clients, cozy cronyism—to a more agile one in which technology and innovation drive the business. In this very respect, advertising and news media converge: Both have been late in hiring developers able to understand the specifics of their business. Because of their intrinsic vulnerabilities, the media have been the first to take a hit. If advertising wants to avoid a Jivaro-like downsizing, it needs to listen to the clock: It’s ticking away.
iAds as a symptom of a dying ad industry - or how in advertising Apple used to sell hardware for creative people to be creative on. Now the creative people have stopped being creative, Apple are having to do that for them too...
In traditional advertising terms, a committee created this. In the post digital age, it’s referred to as a cross-discipline team.
