As if there wasn’t enough low self-confidence swirling around the economy last year, those of us in the digital advertising industry had to put up with an extra dose of good old existential angst, with senior figures talking about digital advertising’s ‘failure’ and August publications like the Wall Street Journal questioning just how effective online advertising is at engaging user attention.
The Creative Social event sponsored by Microsoft Advertising in Shanghai last November gave those of us involved in online creativity a chance to get together, compare notes and ask ourselves how much of this doom-mongering we really believed. As anyone who was there will tell you, it was a truly uplifting insight into a significant new market and concluded with us all feeling inspired, not only about digital advertising’s value, but about its centrality to the entire business of talking to consumers in the 21st century. Yes, advertising online has failed to fulfil its full potential so far, but the understanding and strategy that we need to change things is already on hand.
A lot of this digital industry angst comes back to the vision of the ‘tumbleweed site’: the flashy online destination that is spectacularly creative and clever, but lacks the crucial ingredient of visitors. The criticisms levelled at digital advertising recently stem from an assumption that this is the kind of work agencies yearn to produce – as long as it impresses their mates in the creative world, it doesn’t really matter whether a consumer ever comes across it. As anyone present at the Shanghai Creative Social can tell you, nothing could be further from the truth.
The appetite of creative directors has never been more firmly focused on producing work that has real usability – a clear and undeniable role in consumers’ lives (fact based or entertainment equally viable). Take a look at the postings on the Creative Social blog (http://www.creativesocialblog.com) and you’ll find comments coming back time and time again to the need to deliver experiences that compete with the best and most relevant content on the web. The work that stands out as the best web marketing of 2008 has consistently done this, from a Johnson’s Baby campaign designed specifically around the needs of time-poor mums to the ‘Heidies’ campaign that turned Diesel.com into risqué reality show for a week, and the irresistibly engaging uniqlock campaign developed by Projector for Uniqlo, which fuses the jobs of clock, music videos and global social network and makes each of them better.
Let’s focus on that Projector work for a minute, because it reflects one of the other key themes that emerged in Shanghai: what kind of digital agencies do we all want to be? Projector consists of a small core team of people that bring in other specialist teams for web development and production, but root this in a core understanding of digital consumers and what creates connections with and between them. It’s this core understanding, this essential creative insight, that’s the ‘agency’ bit. Yet Projector is well aware that a great idea isn’t enough, just as a superb realisation of it isn’t enough; bringing this idea into contact with consumers is an essential part of the process. This is why the Uniqlock campaign involved bringing a specialist PR team as well as a digital production outfit. In the digital age, marketing competes as entertainment and content – and entertainment and content both need that magical element of buzz. Today, the talkability, the word of mouth, matters just as much if not more than the ad itself. It can’t be left to chance.
In helping advertisers to adjust to this new state of affairs, digital agencies have a great advantage – and a responsibility to make the most of it. After all, we have been dealing with connected consumers for a lot longer than anyone else, and the understanding that comes from this is invaluable. However that understanding is liable to be wasted if it’s not fed into our client’s thinking at the highest level. Creatives have been arguing for years now that digital agencies need to force their way into the boardroom to share this insight – and ensure that the advertising campaigns that we work on are rooted in a real understanding of how consumers respond to marketing messages in the digital age. The ‘failure’ of digital advertising agencies that we seem to enjoy beating ourselves up about is really still a failure to make our voices heard at the highest level; it’s not a failure to understand consumers, it’s a failure to use this understanding to force advertising itself to change.
There’s no doubt that we have come a long way. Our industry is 10 years old, and the level of growth in that decade has been beyond anything achieved in advertising beforehand. The top digital shops in London more than outweigh any traditional advertising agency in terms of headcount. Glue’s recent success in landing the ‘3’ through-the-line account on the strength of its digital work demonstrates the growing appetite for digital insight at boardroom level. The challenge for digital agencies now is to bring in the talent that will get them heard in this environment. Senior account management is a skillset that traditional agencies have fostered for years; we have to catch up if we’re serious about our ideas being given the same hearing. And unless we’re serious about spreading those ideas, we’ll continue to find ourselves fulfilling briefs for campaigns that don’t give themselves the same chance to connect with consumers.
This doesn’t mean tampering our creativity in order to appear more ‘grown-up’, rather it has to mean giving ourselves permission to fail as we push to create the content and experiences that forge connections and start conversations. The media companies whose content our campaigns compete with have been taking creative risks for years. We need to have the understanding and confidence to do the same.
Creative Social is the global forum for the worlds leading interactive creative directors and business owners. Founded by Daniele Fiandaca and Mark Chalmers in 2002.
http://www.creativesocialblog.com/
