8.0 Intro
5.30 AM it's an early wakeup, even for an early bird like me. But brain is whirring because of thousands of things and so writing stuff down helps slow it down a bit. But then I log onto my Twitter, start reading more stuff and I spend more time reading and looking for ideas than I do actually writing because the internet.
8.1 please, leave me alone.
I was reading Dan Hon's last episode, where he highlights an article published by Entrepreneur.com and tweeted by The One Club (allegedly "the world's foremost non-profit organization for the recognition and promotion of excellence in advertising").
This article is titled "The 4 Digital Advertising Trends That Are Reshaping Advertising". The first one is - and I'm not joking - mobile advertising. Yes. Anyway, the point that really made me (and Dan, to be honest) go mental is the following:
Mobile video viewers are what you might call a "captive" audience. When TV commercials begin, people look down at their phones. On the bus or subway, people focus on their digital screens instead of the ads passing by in the cityscape. When radio ads begin, people change the station. However, when people are already looking at their smartphone, nothing is going to distract them. Use mobile video ads to take advantage of this undivided attention.
This is the same biased thought I was writing about in Chapter 7, about the self-playing videos of Facebook. The idea of "captive audience" is something blatantly wrong, from my point of view, and by expressing it the writer might have focused what it's wrong in the advertising industry today.
A TV Ad used as pre-roll video on YouTube without the skip option doesn't help a brand growing its awareness into my mind. It just manages to piss me off incredibly because I can't access what I was looking for. The same on mobile: if I'm commuting and you force yourself into my space, I'm not going to pay "undivided attention" to you. And what you call "undivided attention" you should really call scrutiny because what that achieves is only putting the advertised brand in my brain's "hell-no" section. And this, because I work in advertising. I suspect the average person would simply not give a massive F.
So, I get how digital is the only area of advertising spending that is growing and mobile (especially in emerging markets where no one has a laptop but everyone has a mobile) is the golden goose, blah blah blah. But do we seriously think this is the way to grow profit?
I don't know if it's agencies or client (it would be too easy to put the blame on the latter, working in the former) but we seemingly are trapped with the original idea of advertising: pushing content onto our audiences, bashing them on the head with triflin' ads, caveman-like. Regardless what technology is available.
8.2 you don't know what I'm doing
As an industry, Advertising (and marketing, for what matters) is particularly prone to fall under the spelling charm of the flavor of the month. Digital, content, big data, you name it.
The Big Data one is a particularly interesting one. For such a long time people have attempted to rationalize every step of a person's purchase decision behavior, to bring science into a rather unscientific environment that the opportunity to gather "facts" from tech platforms made everyone's eyes shine.
I wrote somewhere else about the logistical complexities of handling a big amount of data (let alone analyze them). John Battelle outlines in a great piece how every human will create this year 600GB of information. These data though outline intentions, not behavior (and this kind of knowledge can tell us a lot where we are going as a culture - think Google Trends - or can be abused in an extraordinary way - think Patriot Act. Yet, in marketing we tend to rely on them as if it was indication of behavior. And in a digital ecosystem intentions can be extremely erratic.
This is why I tend to be quite skeptical of things like Native Advertising. The relevance of what I am proposed is too often completely disrupted by erratic searches on Google or visits to random websites I thought I could have been interested in but was not.
In this sense I think technologies like iBeacon or the Apple Watch could be a great integration to online behavior. Imagine having access through the Apple Watch (and Apple Pay) to the wanderings in a specific retail space: would the online behavior be close to the retail behavior or would it be completely different? But I suspect the iBeacon didn't create such high expectations as other innovations because most people cannot really imagine what it could help them with.
Again, it taps into what I was writing last week: innovation is not what your platform can do, but how much of a standard your platform can become.
8.3 The epitome of culture clash
There is a huge language barrier I think, between Marketing and Technology, despite how similar the two disciplines should be from an approach point of view. The former often looks for reliability while the second thrives in uncertainty.
Most agencies and clients are increasingly dependent on processes. Processes don't allow to be hacked by innovations whose impact is massively unfathomable. In such a system innovation becomes complicated: in a process-driven organisation individual success derives from the adherence to the process, not from the relevance of the output. Agencies talked for a while about the importance of prototyping - not in tech terms, as much as in a method that would be beneficial to creative output. Yet, very few have managed to succeed in implementing it.
I don't think the innovation challenge organizations face is growing the technological infrastructure or gathering of as many data as possible, I'd say it's understanding where processes are detrimental and can be substituted to experimentation. But what do I know about processes.
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