Making sense of life, & communications, online & offline
Posts tagged traditional
Follow The Money – Focussing on Inputs or Outputs
October 10, 2011
Deep Throat said it to Bob Woodward in 1976, and it’s still true today – if you want to understand, if you want to really get to the truth, you need to follow the money.
And this is is just as true in the advertising business as we try and evolve an ageing traditional, TV and print focussed, business model into our 2.0 world. Agency holding companies have created digital exchanges, ad agencies have bought up their BTL counterparts and certain organisations have even attempted to renew their entire staff base by bringing in new digital specialists, but at the end of the day, bringing ‘digital’ More >
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.
Hence it is still not uncommon to be presented with very traditional print or outdoor brand ads More >
Are digital agencies the new dinosaurs?
February 27, 2011
I was asked to answer the question ‘Are digital agencies the new dinosaurs?’ in this week’s Campaign ME – check out my answer below and those of my industry colleagues in the attached.
Digital is no longer a microsite or a banner ad, digital is everywhere and in everything – look at interactive TV, digital billboards and magazine subscriptions on the iPad. Agencies are evolving too and the term digital agency has lost its meaning – many of the original pure play web agencies are finding that their strength is in production as ‘traditional’ agencies are evolving their own positioning to truly 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 >
BDW Making Digital Work – Day 2, Morning
Day 2 of BDW’s Making Digital Work was as, if not more, insightful and interesting than the first. We began with a panel discussion with Ty Montague (Co-Founder of the Co-Collective @tmontague), John Windsor (Founder of crowdsourcing agency Victors & Spoils @jtwinsor), Ian Schafer (Founder of Engagement Agency DeepFocus @ischafer) & Edward Boches discussing the different models of agency and how they are helping to transform the industry.
Co (www.cocollective.com)
For Co, process is key, they only work with partners who are the best in the world, up for collaboration and those that they’d 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 >
Elephant in the room syndrome for agencies
October 12, 2010
The more I search for information about agency structures and models, the less of it I seem to find, not only are there very few descriptions of the traditional agency structure, how planning, creative and client service work together, but there is even less information about how these models are evolving and what might be the models for the future.
It is not like this is a new topic, very few are the people in the agency business who have not heard, or talked, about the transformation of Goodby, Silverstein and Partners in the US and winning digital agency of the year in 2006 – this is the More >