How can we save the ad industry? Don’t be advertising
The advertising industry is on the verge of irrelevance and needs to adopt an industrial revolution mindset when people knew less and had to fail more, argues Jon Holloway.
What’s the fix for our industry? Maybe it’s a simple one, don’t be advertising.
We are an interesting bunch of people, we live in a bubble, we talk about ourselves a lot (A LOT!!), we award ourselves, we define our own standards and we train people like a cult, praying at the alter of this thing called advertising.
It’s hard for a multi-billion dollar industry to pivot on the spot, but that’s where we find ourselves. On the verge of irrelevance. We have been out-maneuvered by the people we used to manipulate, the one we label as the ‘consumer’.
Australia is well behind the curve, we still have people watching certain areas of the main stream TV world, print isn’t completely dead and channel selection is still relatively limited. There is still good business to be had in the world, we call advertising, we can still make money(ish) and keep clients happy(ish) by filling the gaps created by the ‘spots and dots’ media plans.
The main reason for this is that KPI’s and measurement of marketing success is outdated and still working in favour of the marketing community and the people employed by it. Especially in Australia, brand targets are short term thinking, laid down the same way they were 10, 15, 20 years ago.
But this is OVER, I could roll out all sorts of stats of fragmented media, personal choice metrics, ad-blocking, exponentially expanding channels, mobile killing media control.. and on and on.
This is not about TV v digital, this is humans behaviour v brand thinking.
Australia is slow to adapt, but ramps up faster than any other country on the planet. We are changing our media consumption rapidly, but we all know this.
This is not about the changing media world (that is done), this is instant access to knowledge and experiences that change what our future base level of expectation.
Many have seen this coming, we have seen agencies rebranding as CX agencies, a plethora of consultancy businesses dipping down in to the brand experience world. In all honesty it is just lip-service to the future we are all facing.
It’s definitely not advertising, that’s a diminishing return in anybody’s book, whether thats 18 months, 5 years or 10, it’s going to happen and we are powerless to change it.
It’s also definitely not the CX agencies, which mostly come from digital backgrounds, hoping to bring digital thinking to the human and real worlds.
Maybe the answer is actually super simple.
First it starts with a ‘flipped’ mindset and hybrid skill sets from different industries. We then crowd these people around a loose process that gets from ideation to making in the shortest possible time. We learn quickly, fail fast and create a world where ideation, making and media work symbiotically in real-time.
We change our thinking of what making is, moving away from a blinkered view of media spaces towards a relationship between the only five things that matter today:
Experience + product + service + content + WOM
Creating a true melting point of ideation and prototyping: (THINKING <+> MAKING <+> MEDIA) /365
We test live with micro-groups of consumers, slowly expanding the exposure, stealing from the minimum viable world.
MINIMUM VIABLE IDEAS?
Then we break down the walls and silos, no more ‘creatives’, no more ‘strategists’, no more tech departments. No more client service, no more buildings with people working on ‘briefs’.
Then we break the media model, expand our view on what media is. We live in a world where everything is a ‘media’, our mobile obsession has turned every object, location and experience into something that can interact on hyper-personal levels.
We have trained our mind to ignore areas where media is bought and placed, they are becoming irrelevant in the head down world and in the on-demand world, in the connected world.
We adopt the industrial revolution mindset, we go back to the days when people knew less and had to fail more, because in all honesty, as an industry, we have more data than ever and know less than ever about what works, what will work and what to do next.
- Jon Holloway is R/GA Sydney managing director
Miranda Ward worked for Mumbrella from 2013 to 2017, eventually becoming deputy editor. Miranda joined Mumbrella in September 2013 from Sky News.
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Great stuff if you want to buy on the basis of assertions, dogma and rhetoric.
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Yawn. Another advertising is dead article.
This feels like a Naked PR release circa 2009
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Isnt advertising working quite well at building brands???
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…and yet TV ads (or filmed pieces with human people conveying an idea to camera) continue to be the some of most shared things on the internet. If this piece is saying don’t make boring stuff, then I agree.
But if it’s just another damn planner (or someone else who has never spent thousands of hours concepting or ever actually making any work) trumpeting the same old patently false argument that we should be about ‘conversations’ or some utopian socialist view of how to come up with ideas, (which is really a personal PR piece designed to create the illusion of knowledge and understanding to lift their personal brand), then I’ve been hearing the same argument for 10 years now. Seriously.
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I watch the US online streaming TV channel Hulu. In exchange for free stuff it asks me to choose which ad to watch from a selection of 4. It works.
Seems Jon is a little slow to catch up.
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I think the point of the piece was that we tend to be overly skewed into marcomms to transmit a message about our brand, when we have products, services, places, etc to do all that too. The piece is about (at least it is to me) about a total Brand Experience, not just marcomms; TV, digital or otherwise.
I think the second point is that today, because of who we are and the way we perceive and consume marketing, marcomms on its own is not enough.
I didn’t read this as a TV is dead piece – that’s been done already but rather, there needs to be a more contemporary approach in the creation of ideas and their implementation.
I do like the MVP idea applied to marcomms though…….very transferable I think…….interesting approach.
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Is this satire?
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MORE RHETORIC me thinks IN UPPER CASE
I’d like to hear from an Old CD Guy or a Groucho on this coz for me it just buggered the R/GA brand big time
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Sorry Jon, but is this a regular R/GA annual event? Your boss was saying pretty much the same thing on this site just over a year ago: https://mumbrella.com.au/digital-agencies-great-storytelling-says-rga-founder-bob-greenberg-240967
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I can’t stand it any longer. This whole industry is insane. Insane, I tell you!
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“we talk about ourselves a lot (A LOT)”. oh the irony
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The last piece of work I saw out of RG/A Sydney was a TV ad for Google!
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What you’ve written Jon is nonsensical gibberish. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it.
Let the star RGAers in New York or London do the talking and take their advice by making RGA quality work in the Sydney office before you start telling any industry what the future is. Show us the work. Then you will have credibility to talk like this.
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Zzzzzz….every time I read a Jon/rga rant I think of this article.
http://adcontrarian.blogspot.c.....y.html?m=1
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Jon… I like some of this rambling.
It’s interesting. It’s different… It shakes up the models of the status quo and reminds us that many forms of media are hilariously outdated.
I get it. You want to be a rebel and go and create, change, invent, hack and innovate… Do the brands that believe in these core values come knocking on the door of big agencies? Not really. They are feverishly working away in their own spirited huddles.
I think what it boils down to with advertising and marketing these days is – Do I give a shit or not? About your product, your service and the way you talk to me about it. That’s it. The formats etc. are totally irrelevant. If we can find a purpose and fulfilment while playing this game, then we hit a sweet spot – and that’s what really matters.
Like the attitude, keep it up.
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Posturing like this has turned me off RGA. A rant on why everyone’s wrong and suggesting they have a date with doom isn’t appealing. I’d prefer to see a demonstration of where you’re right and what success was had. I’m unaware of anything done by RGA Sydney that lends credibility to the theme above, Jon?
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What is everyone a talking about? You see RGA Sydney’s enormous portfolio of work each and every day. Every banner ad from Telstra is made by one of ten people sitting in its banner team. 20% of your staff just making banner advertising all day for one client does not sound like you are disrupting the industry Jon. It sounds like hell.
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“A rant on why everyone’s wrong and suggesting they have a date with doom”… it’s his schtick. Every article.
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I like how the formula advocates for less thinking.
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The Ad Contrarian
MAY 07, 2015
The Perspective-Free Marketing Industry
There are currently 2 types of dumbass marketing people in the world.
First is the type that thinks things will never change. These are characterized by the folks at McDonald’s who think they can continue to sell their dreadful hamburgers for the rest of eternity. They think they have a marketing problem and if they just torture their agencies a little and have conversations with consumers they can get the problem fixed without having to actually do anything.
Second is the type that thinks everything is changing. They go around spouting all the insufferable new-age marketing cliches about everything being either dead or dying.
Both of these types don’t get it.
First, things are always changing. Nothing in business, or in any other human endeavor, stays the same very long. Change can happen invisibly. Ask a bald guy. You don’t notice when one hair falls out. But then one day you wake up and you look like me.
Conversely, not every change “changes everything” like the marketing hysterics would have you believe.
The sign of the amateur marketer is his inclination to be either complacent about change or hysterical about it. Change is nothing new. It is always with us and has always been with us.
These days it seems like hysteria about change is the prevailing mode. The people who perpetrate this nonsense are all over the web, all over marketing conferences, and all over the best-seller list.
The only thing they know is what is right in front of them. They think that everything that is happening now is seismic, and everything that happened before is inconsequential. There is a name for people like this — fucking idiots.
The number of hysterical articles, conferences, books, and talks about how “everything is changing” and if you don’t immediately adopt their newest technology or philosophy or methodology you will be left behind is absolutely oppressive.
In fact, consumers have shown a surprising attachment to traditional purchasing behavior in light of a revolution in technology, communication, and media.
People are 15 times as likely to buy something in a store than online.
People are 99 times as likely to buy something in a store than with a cell phone.
People watch 20 times more video on their TV than on their computer
People spend twice as much time listening to their radio than going online on their computer.
Are things changing? Of course. Things are always changing.
But if there’s an untold story of the digital age, it is the degree to which perspective-free marketers have overestimated peoples’ appetite for behavioral change, and underestimated peoples’ attachment to traditional consumer behavior.
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Ha. Ha. Ha. Let’s all laugh at RGA
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The funny thing is… Everyone that is complaining and mocking are actually making themselves look like fools… Like I said – I quite like this attitude. It’s fresh, it’s rebellious… Half the commenters (not that we need to point that out) are struggling to find work as DM creatives and don’t actually understand much of the contents Jon is talking about. Technology and progression scares them.
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I don’t know who should cringe the hardest at this – the author, their agency, or anyone that managed to read the whole thing and then somehow agree
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For the first time in my life I started paying attention to ads for health insurance after the tax laws were changed two years ago to punish you if you didn’t have private insurance. NIB had an ad on TV that said they actually wanted you to claim on their insurance. After a brief bit of online research, I bought an NIB policy.
Since then I’ve never paid attention to a single insurance ad and probably never will until I want some more or to change. That is how most advertising works.
I’ve got no idea what Jon is talking about.
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Once you get past the deliberate agitation, there’s quite a lot of sense in what has been stated. And it has been said before and elsewhere, so I don’t buy the “gibberish” and “nonsensical” suggestions, since it’s a pretty well established vision and state already. I think some folks need to take a cold shower, have a cold drink, etc first off.
Perhaps the posturing and the suggestion that we’re all on the sinking ship is not meant to be anything else other than a little agitation to get our attention? I think this has unfortunately rubbed a few people up the wrong way certainly.
Get past that……read the content; it is suggesting advertising, just advertising alone will not be enough tomorrow……..great ideas, great experiences fused through a new eco-system of comms/product/service/etc shaped by a brand promise is where we need to shift towards to stay relevant and be engaging for a positive return.
I think we owe it to ourselves to keep reviewing the status quo, to ensure we don’t become dinosaurs and this forum along with other forums help challenge the norm and keep us thinking.
I agree with @Matt, the content is interesting and provokes thought, discussion and debate. It’s an opinion piece afterall.
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I wonder if doctors, engineers and people from other professions where the techniques employed are subject to constant iterative change are as quick to pronounce so defiantly; respond so childishly; and ‘debate’ so fruitlessly.
Must say though, it’s delightfully tedious.
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Over 100 years ago Edmonds baking flour company in New Zealand produced a cookbook full of essential recipes. It’s has been an iconic and revered item in NZ kitchens ever since. It’s a genius piece or marketing.
The suggestion that marketing departments and ad agencies haven’t been producing alternatives to ads for years is supremely arrogant.
“Then we break down the walls and silos, no more ‘creatives’, no more ‘strategists’, no more tech departments. No more client service, no more buildings with people working on ‘briefs’”
Honestly, WTF is he on about. This is just confusing, annoying and frankly damaging garbage.
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@Matt C
The difference is when a new technique is developed for the medical profession it is tested and demonstrated.
But this kind of pseudo scientific pet theory has no basis in the real world or in any examples. It matters because his kind of vague made up theory makes all of our jobs harder as someone somewhere gets believes it for a while.
Every creative I know attempts valiantly to produce ideas well outside of traditional media. But marketing managers think we’ve all lost our minds.
“Creating a true melting point of ideation and prototyping: (THINKING MAKING MEDIA) /365”
Give me a break.
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When stuff like this comes from Nick Law, not only is it more coherent, but it’s also full of credibility. The runs on the board are there, and the philosophy is backed up by the work.
This on the other hand, is a desperate attempt to try and posture and differentiate r/ga – when the reality is that they offer nothing different in Sydney to any of the other progressive digital agencies in town (apart from doing more banners than most). The most recent, fairly unspectacular, tv ad for Google is a perfect example of it.
I can’t imagine the r/ga top brass being happy with this rubbish.
Work first, then talk.
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@@Matt
‘I’ve got no idea what Jon is talking about.’ Then I feel sad for you. Welcome to the future… It’s a shit load of fun if you embrace it.
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Picking up on the ‘agility’ point made in Jon’s piece; seems a similar message is being made here too; http://adage.com/article/agenc.....ts/301541/
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I was coming here to engage in what I thought would be respectful debate and discussion because I didn’t real aggree with the article either. I was met by Troll gold. I’m going to make art out of it I hope you don’t mind, but its the Internet and you posted it so it wouldn’t really matter. Thank you overly verbous *moderated content*
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The writing is on the wall for digital agencies. The big agencies are executing idea based digital work better than them now. The top 5 CB rankings for digital M&C, DDB and the like.
Building websites is no longer a profitable business model, and despite Australian clients still being devoted to the banner, that isn’t really digital now is it. Every digital shop in town is scrambling to re-invent itself as a full service agency, R/GA included.
Pure play digital ideas or activations are ignored unless they’re amplified through video, which is why R/GA New York are now making TV and video ads for Beats and other big clients. The digital ninjas have been exposed, because everyone understands how the pipes work now and you still need ideas to fill the pipes. Rants like this don’t help the cause of R/GA Sydney as unfortunately clients in this market don’t have the money or desire to do the work that comes out of NY. So its writing banners for ANZ and social posts for Red Bull. Hence everyone is leaving the agency. But hey, whatever makes you feel better Jon.
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@Matt
People have been saying the agency model is dead for 10 years. But if that’s the case where is this agency of the future, where there are no separate job skills or titles with a bunch of people working on something that isn’t a brief in a space that isn’t an office.
Where is this agency Matt? Where?
Every single agency whether they’re new, old, digital, traditional or ‘content’ based has planners, account execs, management and crucially, creatives working on briefs.
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@heh
You are very clearly out of touch with what clients need. Digital agencies have never been more profitable, and as a result they’re not overly concerned with awards tables.
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If this is the future of R/GA, shouldn’t be long before it just won’t be advertising…
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Poke the rotting poo and the flies will swarm angrily.
Excellent piece.
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