Making sense of life, & communications, online & offline
Posts tagged advertising
Content & Amplification – The New Brand Brief
May 25, 2011
Sometimes it’s still hard to talk to ‘traditional ad guys’ and get them to understand how the business of communications has changed, how the web has exploded the number of channels through which we can deliver messages and also empowered the consumer to respond, turning a monologue into dialogue and thereby giving them a voice. And how these evolutions have not just created a step change in the strategy of marketing communications but really created a paradigm shift in how we approach our work.
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Hence it is still not uncommon to be presented with very traditional print or outdoor brand ads More >
Can agencies really play nicely together?
January 20, 2011
I’ve had a few conversations recently about the changing remit of the advertising agency and the growing inter-relationships between different agencies, be they pure event/activation groups, web development or even media agencies. The question that always comes up (on both sides of the table) is whether the agencies will be able to get along.
The fact of the matter is that an agency is always looking to increase its bottom line – after all this is the business that they are in, and we know that the big holding companies are driving each of their business units hard with absolute revenue More >
The contradiction of agency recruitment
January 4, 2011
by LexBZ
in Advertising
There is a growing contradiction in recruitment for the agency business, one that is potentially driving us faster into the chasm that I described last week rather than across it to the safety of the other side.
The advertising industry through the 80s and 90s (and even early 2000) was seen as a very glamorous business, the high margins and the shiny-cool products made it have a very polished exterior and the complexities of production made it very opaque in terms of actual workings that the majority of opinion was based on output. As a result there was always a line at the door for bright More >
The Chasm in Advertising
December 27, 2010
by LexBZ
in Traditional vs. Digital
Advertising is dying, but this time from the inside. We’ve seen many of the recent articles in FastCompany (The Future of Advertising, 17 November 2010) and Business Week (Don Draper’s Revenge, 24 November 2010) talking about the future of the industry and although many would argue that the same story has been rolled out annually for the past 10 years, it seems like this time it is starting to come true.
From the outside we have already heard about how advertising and consumers are falling out, not wanting to hear the same old story, not understanding their real needs and not really wanting More >
Learnings from Making Digital Work NY
December 4, 2010
The end of BDW’s Making Digital Work in New York and a chance to look back over the last couple of days and our take aways from the workshop. An amazing collection of speakers and great insights. So what have we learnt that we can take home to our agencies?
The model for integration seems clear
Even if Matt Howell from Modernista is humble in saying that their model was only their opinion it seems clear that they have found the way forward – copied by many other agencies since they began the process, it is evident the age of silos is over and digital must be at the core of everything we do. More >
When clients ask for bread, give them cake
November 29, 2010
Too often I hear account directors and those in client service complain that their clients are not ready, not mature enough or not open minded enough for us to deliver true integrated, multi-channel thinking against their briefs; and for this reason the briefs that are delivered to creative tend to be driven towards more traditional execution and the end result is that the client work remains primitive in comparison to today’s standards; and by today’s standards I mean the work that is getting press, winning awards and that we are aspiring to do, be it Old Spice, Nike+ or the like.
We tend to More >
Getting ready to ‘Make Digital Work’
November 28, 2010
In a couple of days I’m taking the 14 hour flight to head to New York for Colorado University’s, Boulder Digital Works Executive Workshop – Making Digital Work. This is the first time the programme has been run outside of Boulder and promises to be a hotbed of ideas and learning. The programme ran first back in August in Boulder and received rave reviews from those attending – hence the relocation for this event to New York to capture a wider audience.
My own area of interest is particularly around how ‘traditional’ advertising agencies are both integrating the digital competence to their More >
Digital is not a medium
‘Digital is not a medium’ is a post that I have wanted to write for a long time – but that I have repeatedly stopped myself doing because it simply feels too obvious; but obvious as it might seem there are still too many occasions where I am forced to re-explain. So this article should act more as a definition, a base explanation from which we can take future conversations to a new level.
I wrote a few weeks ago that ‘Digital is not a channel, it is part of your product‘ but for agencies this can sometimes seem a little daunting, as it sends the ball back to the client telling them to get More >
Treating creatives like adults
November 18, 2010
by LexBZ
in Advertising
For far too long this industry has treated creatives like the goose that lays the golden egg – a mysterious creature that must be locked away, waited on hand and foot, and generally treated like a jewel that must pandered to and protected. But times are changing. Times are changing both for the industry as we move into a multi-channel, consumer controlled media environment, but also for agencies as structures need to evolve to deliver more flexibility against increasingly tight margins.
Regardless of all this, traditional agencies are still caught up in silos of account management, strategic More >
Digital is not a channel, it is part of your product
November 5, 2010
How about we start from scratch? How about we look at the different pieces of the organisation and figure out how to apply digital, mobile, social, broadband and interactive to the existing structure? How would things look different if we started from a zero sum base?
To start with, I think social wouldn’t want to know about marketing – not that they couldn’t be friends, but I think social really belongs with PR and customer care; after all what does marketing really know about having a two-way conversation with the consumer? Marketing has always been about taking product attributes and More >