When we look back I believe that we will see 2009 as the year when the interactive grew up and stopped being the new kid of the advertising world.
- This year the Grand Prix at Cannes went to an online film not a TV ad - Tribal and Philips’ “Carousel” (1)
- A few years ago creative people in agencies only wanted to do TV. Nowadays online is sexy. There are now many examples of great online films and interactive advertising.
- Online advertising nowadays takes a significant share of many clients’ budgets. Worldwide it is approaching 10% of total spends (2).
- There are several agencies including Razorfish and Sapient with approaching $200 million in revenue in the U.S. alone. (3) Crispen Porter has redefined what being an advertising agency means in the new world, and it often doesn’t include traditional media.
However with this new status needs to come a new maturity.
Stop claiming your new campaign will go viral. Realistically only a handful of campaigns worldwide create real buzz. Making empty promises like this is dishonest and will come back to bite us. We’ve learnt from traditional advertising that while it’s nice to have famous advertising, an ad doesn’t need to be famous to work. (4). But the online world has not really how do we use this knowledge. And the answer is not finding more ways to make my online experience painful by sticking ads on top of what I really want to look at.
We should ban the use of the terms “social media” and “marketing 2.0” (I’ve even recently been hearing marketing 3.0). It disguises lazy thinking and usually means “let’s do something cool on the web”. We rarely mean a true dialogue.
Nor should we claim online will replace TV. Radio didn’t replace print, and TV didn’t replace radio. Each has its own strengths and each has its role to play in a total communications plan.
We need to get more sophisticated in assessing effectiveness. A great advantage for online is that it is measurable. We can measure click throughs, eyeballs, and subsequent behaviour. But success is not just responses. What we are often trying to do is build a brand – to influence how people see us and feel about us. Until online takes this more seriously it will continue to be seen as just a response based medium.
All this means the specialist interactive agencies need to look out. The things I’ve talked about are the areas where traditional advertising agencies are strong. And trust me, they are all investing massively to get their share of interactive business. It used to be easy to say that the big agencies didn’t get it (5). Watch out guys, clients want their on and off line activity to work seamlessly to both sell and build the brand. Specialist agencies are starting to look less attractive, especially if they keep the “we’re the cool kids” attitude and don’t adapt to this new maturity.
The next few years will be fascinating as we grapple with how to do online advertising day in day out and not just as something sexy.
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0S7bEsTM60
2. http://www.zenithoptimedia.com/gff/pdf/Advertising%20Expenditure%20Forecasts%20%20March%202007.pdf
3. http://adage.com/datacenter/datapopup.php?article_id=108866
4. http://www.accountplanning.net/Central/InTheirOwnWords/LowInvolvementProcessing
5. http://blog.schematic.com.au/?p=93
Showing posts with label toolkit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label toolkit. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Friday, November 7, 2008
A Tale of Two Cities
Is Canada really the multicultural mosaic we want to believe it is? Well yes and no.
I moved to Toronto ten years ago from the UK. And there it’s true. My dentist is an Asian from the Caribbean. In my daughters’ elementary school the majority of children didn’t have English as their first language – their friends came from Latvia, Jamaica, Sri Lanka amongst many others. Locally I have a choice of food from anywhere from Poland to Ethiopia. We celebrate the Ukrainian Festival, Caribbana, the Taste of the Danforth. According to the 2006 Census 43% of the population belongs to a visible minority.
But I also have a cottage in Haliburton. There, according to the Census, there are 165 people who belong to a visible minority, or 1% of the population. Yes 1% vs. 43%. As they say, you don’t see too many black faces on the dock. But don’t get me wrong. The people of Haliburton are not unsophisticated – there has been an explosion of high quality restaurants; the local radio station, if sometimes delightfully amateur, is more intelligent than most Toronto alternatives; there is a thriving local arts scene.
But it is not multicultural. Ethnic food is hard to find. The artists are mostly white. You rarely hear other languages spoken.
The fact is there are two Canadas. Not French speaking vs. English. Montreal has its own thriving multiculturalism, albeit not as pronounced as Toronto or Vancouver. The Laurentians are ethnically as white as Haliburton.
The real split is cities vs. rural Canada.
One, the cities, where the majority of the media live, where 96% of all visible minorities live, where the great multiculturalism experiment is happening; and the other, rural Canada, where 2% of the population is a visible minority, where the media visit but don’t live, where non-white people stand out as different.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we shouldn’t believe our own mythology about Canada being the great cultural mosaic.
I moved to Toronto ten years ago from the UK. And there it’s true. My dentist is an Asian from the Caribbean. In my daughters’ elementary school the majority of children didn’t have English as their first language – their friends came from Latvia, Jamaica, Sri Lanka amongst many others. Locally I have a choice of food from anywhere from Poland to Ethiopia. We celebrate the Ukrainian Festival, Caribbana, the Taste of the Danforth. According to the 2006 Census 43% of the population belongs to a visible minority.
But I also have a cottage in Haliburton. There, according to the Census, there are 165 people who belong to a visible minority, or 1% of the population. Yes 1% vs. 43%. As they say, you don’t see too many black faces on the dock. But don’t get me wrong. The people of Haliburton are not unsophisticated – there has been an explosion of high quality restaurants; the local radio station, if sometimes delightfully amateur, is more intelligent than most Toronto alternatives; there is a thriving local arts scene.
But it is not multicultural. Ethnic food is hard to find. The artists are mostly white. You rarely hear other languages spoken.
The fact is there are two Canadas. Not French speaking vs. English. Montreal has its own thriving multiculturalism, albeit not as pronounced as Toronto or Vancouver. The Laurentians are ethnically as white as Haliburton.
The real split is cities vs. rural Canada.
One, the cities, where the majority of the media live, where 96% of all visible minorities live, where the great multiculturalism experiment is happening; and the other, rural Canada, where 2% of the population is a visible minority, where the media visit but don’t live, where non-white people stand out as different.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we shouldn’t believe our own mythology about Canada being the great cultural mosaic.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Why don’t people hate the Mac vs. PC advertising?
The other day someone was telling me how offended they got by competitive ads that knock other products. Interestingly only 5 minutes before they had said that they really liked the current Mac and PC ads; you know, the Mac ads that knock the PC.
I gently pointed out this apparent contradiction and they countered that the Mac-PC ads were different because in those the Mac wasn’t knocking the PC, the PC was drawing attention to its own weaknesses.
Now my friend isn’t stupid. They know it’s an Apple ad, written by Apple copywriters and using actors employed by Apple. So why the logic failure?
Maybe it’s OK to knock the opposition if you wrap it up, or maybe it’s OK if it’s done humorously, or maybe it’s OK to make fun of and disparage the PC if you’re cool like Apple. Or maybe Microsoft is the marketing equivalent of white males – one of the few ethnic groups you can make jokes about.
Now all that may be true but it does undermine the moral dimension of the criticism of comparative ads. Seems like all is fair in advertising so long as it’s done well. And people don’t apply logic to what they see in ads. Not that’s there’s anything wrong with that. I love the ads too.
I gently pointed out this apparent contradiction and they countered that the Mac-PC ads were different because in those the Mac wasn’t knocking the PC, the PC was drawing attention to its own weaknesses.
Now my friend isn’t stupid. They know it’s an Apple ad, written by Apple copywriters and using actors employed by Apple. So why the logic failure?
Maybe it’s OK to knock the opposition if you wrap it up, or maybe it’s OK if it’s done humorously, or maybe it’s OK to make fun of and disparage the PC if you’re cool like Apple. Or maybe Microsoft is the marketing equivalent of white males – one of the few ethnic groups you can make jokes about.
Now all that may be true but it does undermine the moral dimension of the criticism of comparative ads. Seems like all is fair in advertising so long as it’s done well. And people don’t apply logic to what they see in ads. Not that’s there’s anything wrong with that. I love the ads too.
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