A large sporting event apparently.

Putting the quality of this year’s advertising in and around the Super Bowl to one side. Why does it take huge sporting events to motivate brands to create communications that people are actually willing to watch? And not only watch, but seek them out.

Creating communications that people are willing to spend time with seems like an obvious mandatory that should be in any brief, no?

Admittedly most of the ads are essentially gags or emotional cinematic pieces but at least it adds to the experience rather takes away from it. Have you tried watching anything on free to air TV in Australia these days? It’s absolutely impossible to get into any show and follow the story. I’d rather wait for it to finish and buy the box set.

I’d love to see networks place some rules around the quality of what goes into the ad break. After all it’s in their interest to keep people interested isn’t it?

To be good you need a squillion dollars I hear you say? Ludicrous Super Bowl rates aside, not really, check this out from Field Notes.

Perhaps the reason for this sudden change in inertia is that the big cheeses suddenly take an interest and who wants to be the CMO with the least popular ad?

However rather than a future of planning essay, I felt it much more appropriate to write a ‘future of planners’ piece. Mostly because I don’t believe the next generation of potential planners are as attracted to our industry as they once were.

Yes, the golden era of planning, or the days of the planner as the advertising rock star are well and truly over.

Hence I didn’t think it was worth entering, I’ll just blog about it here instead (and it’s less work and carries no fear of failure. In my head I have won). So here it is.

It’s probably best to broach this subject by starting with a question. If you were graduating now, all bright eyed, ambitious and hoping to change the world, which companies would you be applying to? Mine certainly wouldn’t be the ones I originally applied to about 10 years ago.

Whilst there might be a few agencies in the mix (such as where I work obviously), it’s now filled up by companies such as Apple, Google, Intel, Pixar or Facebook, potentially even consultancies, or IDEO and Frog over a traditional agency. The options for smart, analytical, creative and curious people are in abundance.

One of which is starting a venture of your own. Whilst more ventures will fail than succeed, the general feeling of the moment is that anything is possible. It’s all very Silicon Valley and it might just be me, or the economy but the amount of smart and not so smart people leaving the ad industry to pursue a personal venture is increasing rapidly.

A lot of this comes down to experience and the fact it isn’t really seen as necessary anymore. This is a bit of sweeping statement and there are many exceptions to the rule, but when I meet ‘experienced’ ad or marketing people they are generally long in the tooth and the very people that are making the industry less innovative.

Experience is still valuable, but it isn’t something that young people feel like they need to wait for in order to succeed. Gone are the days of having to work your way up from the mailroom (yes this does still happen) or being the research dogs body, you can just get on and do it, you don’t need permission.

Even client side is becoming sexier and its not just to work on brands such as the Nikes of this world. Take P&G with its ‘Inspired by purpose’ positioning and focus on design strategy.

For me at least, that sounds way cooler and meaningful than running groups and writing briefs for ads, even for great ones. It takes you much higher up the food chain and closer to the making of stuff and most importantly a difference. (And you don’t have to deal with precious creative directors, which is always nice).

Agencies also used to hold all the cards. If a brand wanted to drive sales, the easiest thing to do was to create some adverts and book some media. Brands needed agencies to do that for them. That is obviously no longer the case. There are more ways to skin a cat and its increasingly possible, easier, cheaper and more effective to do things in house and through other channels and partners.

That’s not to say that all innovation will or should happen in house, or that agencies won’t be required, but any planner with an ambition will look to be at the centre of innovation, at the heart solving real business problems or be on the margins of cutting edge R&D. Advertising still has a future, but it’s no longer the strategic lynchpin in your plan that it used to be, it’s now merely a service.

What would you find more attractive? Transform an industry? Change the world with a new product? Or help create an award-winning ad? Even the coolest integrated, digital, social media thingy isn’t be as cool as a Nike + Fuelband. Yeah it will need advertising, but I’d rather have contributed to the product than the ad.

So what do agencies need to do to attract the next generation of smart people?

The majority of answers to a client’s problem do not lie in advertising, they lie in creating new products, services or even new business models. This is something that young planners will organically follow. Therefore common sense suggests that ad agencies need to focus on the 3 other Ps of marketing and not just promotion.

Agencies need to make more money from developing products and services, and not just ads. It’s critical if they are to survive and also attract the best talent. Ultimately agencies have the potential to create great ideas that can help a business over and above advertising.

BBH is a great example of a ‘traditional agency’ being ahead of where the industry is moving via Zag. I also wish more agencies would put their money where their mouth is, just like Anomaly by creating its own IP.

Agencies need to really get rid of any process that creates divisions around the ownership of an idea and help planners get closer to the making of stuff. Promote entrepreneurialism by getting them to help make things happen. Perhaps even give them a share in any IP they help create?

Spend money on them and help them learn a new skill that’s not just brainstorming, social media or storytelling. I’ve interviewed young planners who know a bit of code. This is cool and something I’d bite my arm off to have learnt when I had more time.

Get them working on something extra curricular that’s not advertising to stretch thinking and bring something new to the table. It might be a Google 20% kind of thing. Let them work on a project that has the potential to create new revenue for the agency but also new ways of thinking.

All in all, we need to learn from other industries to make our industry more attractive to budding planners. Perhaps we are even talking about changing the industry we are in?

Essentially the future of account planning has no future without account planners.

But to be honest, aside from starting work at Naked and getting married I blame advertising and planning really.  It doesn’t feel like 2011 was as good as it should’ve been for the industry, progress made, but a bit on the slow side. In fact to quote a bit of Dickens:

“IT WAS the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only”.

So to get me motivated this year (albeit it negatively) here are my reflections on 2011:

 The language is still shit. Did you know every time someone says engagement or participation a fairy dies? We also need a wider range of verbs in marketing.

We still didn’t realise that a lot of stuff touted as new i.e. participation (a fairy didn’t die unless you are reading this out loud) is in fact old. It’s always been inherent in us and been happening pre-Dickens.

We keep making words up to make us sound clever or create some headlines. Good to see the first one for 2012. Ergopsychonomics. (Again making something old sound new in the process).

People kept telling me there was only one way of marketing and that something else was dead. I should have put this at number 1 to be honest. The world would be boring and very uncompetitive if there was only one-way of doing things. Oh yeah you’re right, it is…but the point is it shouldn’t be. 

We still keep hanging on to the past. OK people are watching more TV than ever before but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s the wrong question. It still doesn’t mean they are watching your ad, it doesn’t mean they care. Jees, we still spend $ billions on TV based on ratings from a 1,000 set top boxes. Technology I might add that cannot tell if people are putting the kettle on, having a dump or using their smartphone to do a multitude of things whilst your ad is on.

Last but not least we keep mistaking what is right for what is easy. 

Anyway…onwards and upwards. Here’s to a cooler more interesting industry 2012

So when I was moving here from UK, a lot of people warned me it was well, a bit behind the times to put it nicely. To be honest somethings are, like banking, and some aren’t, like the adoption of social media and smartphones.

I then thought I’d check out Google Insights to see if there was a difference in terms of demand for say ‘losing weight’ between UK, US and Australia over time. As you can see there is nothing in it. It’s pretty much the same for anything from iPhone to Cocaine. Take my word for it, I thought it wouldn’t be.

I went on to question the age old ‘Australia is a bit conservative and don’t do great creative.’ According to last year’s analysis of Cannes, Australia was the 5th most creative country.

I’m not sure if these are myths or not. For everything Australia is behind on, I could also come up with one for UK and USA. Maybe it’s scale as mentioned by Mark Pollard in his post about moving to New York. As marketers in Australia, perhaps we don’t have as much to gain financially by risking budget to be any more than number 5 in creative rankings, we just don’t have the scale. Maybe number 5 is OK. Perhaps industry has too much to lose by embracing trends and product innovation. We just sort of track everyone else?? Any way, food for thought.

I love this lego photograhphy. Not sure how I’ve only just stumbled on it, they have got up to day 227. Found here

In this interview Rose essentially discusses the concept of ‘deep media’, where people can engage with a story at any level of depth they like. Whilst the interview mostly references the entertainment industry, it’s clear that this is bubbling over into brand communications on a more regular basis. Ford, Honda and BMW are examples of an entire category adopting a kind of ‘deep media’ approach as discussed by Rose.

As a general rule, the majority of advertising has been about lowest common denominator stuff for decades. How can we reach the most people for the least effort and the lowest cost? I’ve said before that people have always had thresholds when it comes to how immersed they are willing to become in a communication. The net result of generations having grown up playing, watching or participating in more immersive stories will change people’s expectations of everything. Even the most humourous 30 second TVC is quite frankly pretty boring to many people. Hence innovations like this from W+K.

However in addition to thoughts on deep media, Rose also goes on to make some fantastic observations relating to the history and evolution of storytelling and communications.

“the really remarkable thing about Dickens was the way he communed with his readers. That was something serial publication made possible–and serial publication was purely a product of technology. Better printing presses, cheaper paper, trains that could deliver things reliably, rapidly growing cities with a lot more people who could read. Few of these people could afford to purchase entire books, but they could pay for short installments. An unanticipated result of this was that when books were published over a period of 19 or 20 months, readers had a chance to have their say with the author while the novel was still being written. And Dickens relished this. He took note of their comments and suggestions, and he loved interacting with them on the lecture circuit as well. One of his biographers described it as “a sense of immediate audience participation.”

But seeing new media as a threat–that’s a pattern we fall into again and again. Now it’s video games and the Internet. Before that it was TV, and before that it was the movies, and a couple hundred years ago it was serial fiction and people like Dickens. The only constant is that whatever is new is threatening. And usually it’s considered threatening because it’s too immersive–you could get lost in it. But that’s exactly what fiction is. If it’s good enough, people are going to want to inhabit it”.

Then I came across this interview with Johnny Vulkan of Anomaly where he talks about something I’ve mentioned here before. Marketing isn’t just about the promotion. There are three other forgotten Ps we should be considering as advertising. Promotion has kind of become like crack to brands and agencies, but we are undoubtedly starting to see a shift to the other stuff.