Jon Steel: ‘If the answer is always Twitter it must have been a pretty stupid question’
Jon Steel speaking at yesterday’s Mumbrella Perth event
One of the most respected planners in the world Jon Steel has urged agencies to “hit the reset button” and start investing in real world face-to-face research, or risk further losing relevance to their clients’ business objectives.
Steel, the group planning director for the world’s biggest advertising holding group WPP, said of the current tendency to rely on social media and new technologies and “soft” measures of success such as likes and followers to show results “someone’s got to say it – the emperor is not wearing any clothes”.
Acknowledging to the audience at Mumbrella Perth he probably sounded “old fashioned, irrelevant, a 20th Century ad guy from the era of television and long lunches talking about the way things used to be”, he added: “I don’t think it’s either old fashioned or irrelevant to expect effects like increases in usage frequency, sales volume, share, margin, profit.
Nice one Jon!
Gotta love Roy Morgan Research for their people based focus and their deep insights into the attitudes, values, psychographics and behaviour of Aussie consumers.
There is too much focus on bland, 2 dimensional digital data.
Love the quote in the headline.
Hopefully our collective fascination with the virtual bells, whistles, buttons and levers of all things digital is starting to abate. In it’s place should be strategic & tactical rigour around how to leverage these undoubtedly powerful platforms to deliver bottom line results.
Anything else is just doing stuff for the sake of it. Not a great foundation for achieving marketing objectives.
The current worst planning practice that agencies use is sending poorly designed SurveyMonkey surveys to their colleagues in agencyland or mates on Facebook. It happens all the time.
The “insights” gleaned are biased, unrepresentative rubbish and must surely assist agencies in failing miserably during pitches and execution.
I’ve been calling social media “the Emperor’s New Clothes” for years now!
Jon Steel has urged agencies to “hit the rest button”
I thought we called it the ‘snooze button’ in Australia?
Hi Sub-editor,
Thanks for flagging it was actually the reset button but thanks for flagging. Piece now corrected.
Cheers
Nic – Mumbrella
Why is he referencing Best Job?
It was donensix years ago. Successful enough for TA to run a sequel. See Nick Baker’s Credits on this site.
I guess he can’t talk about his groups abominations.
He is clearly suffering from relevance deprivation.
@stevo, spot on. Major half-arsery.
I very much respect Jon Steel but surely his POV is no great insight or revelation.
I know what Jon is trying to do with the “I am just an old fashioned, irrelevant, a 20th Century ad guy from the era of television”…he is trying to sound like he is really provocative and stinging voice for truth in an industry that doesn’t have it.
But come on – really? Is there anyone who doesn’t agree that business results are more important than media results? Anyone who doesn’t know that you cannot replace solid planning fundamentals with technology? This is not new news surely?
nah – this bloke is right – lunch Jon? (on you natch)
Then Hatchd and Brownes got up in the afternoon and proved him right.
Wish he had stayed around ‘engaged’ with them.
I can’t imagine anything more biased and superficial than a couple of face-to-face interviews to “take the temperature of the nation”. It’s truly a drop in the wrong ocean when a completely new culture and way of thinking is required.
Could not agree more with Jon. Finally someone has come out and addressed these issues. Often the robust old stalwart research studies are too quickly dismissed. However I’d add that in the media agency world too often even the quality data is used for short term “support rather than illumination”.
just because someone holds high office, it doesn’t entitle them to shit on an entire medium as if it’s fact. There’s little evidence presented to suggest this man is right. There are numerous examples of social media – inc bloggers – building brands and generating sales and out-performing traditional channels – particularly in the fickle world of fashion and beauty.
What shits me is there is a long tail of ad land people who have their heads too deeply buried in their ass to see an emerging world of new brands that doesn’t use traditional advertising to connect with audiences and it get results. It may not be huge brands, but who’s to say huge brands and big budgets are the future?
Success is out there, have a look. Stop focusing on the failures. And perhaps look a bit further than your own patch of agency dirt because I’d find myself questioning it all too were I standing there.
totally agree that Google Planning leads to vacuous strategies as everyone’s searching the same trend reports, reading same blogs etc. However doing a bit of basic ethno research/ exploring culture is hardly new – kinda expected from any decent planner. Social listening insights will never unlock a big human truth, they do give you great context and sentiment
If sending your planners out to conduct qualitative research is a new strategy for WPP I’m scared to ask what little they were doing before.
Walk into any half decent media agency and you’ll find dedicated researchers conducting face to face qualitative, online quantitative and rigorous social media monitoring to build a complete picture of categories and audiences. This then makes it easy to set measurable business objectives and track them over time.
Sounds to me like an old fashioned, irrelevant, 20th Century ad guy who has seen a sharp decline in the demand for his skill set and is trying to persuade clients he is still relevant. Same goes for everyone else here who agrees with him.
Ryan, “Same goes for everyone else here who agrees with him.”…nothing very qualitative or quantitative about your comments is there? If I had spent as many years honing and developing my “skill set” as Jon Steel has I don’t see that he has any need to persuade clients of his relevance…he is extremely skilled and extremely relevant. Interesting also that you plagiarised Jon’s very own words to bag him out.
Now, your skill set is?…built up over how many years?
Why is it when I read articles like this it reminds me of my parents trying to text on their phone.
Yawn. The same hype screamed to those that said digital is a fad, dotcom is the end of digital, google is ridiculous. Why on earth would you put the URL on a TVC? 20 years on companies are still trying to get themselves in order digitally. Seriously. Good advice.
Perhaps the planners who are looking at Twitter have foundation and strong basis, related to their strategy and objectives. If not, learn.
What about attention? Ever been on the bus, Jon? Or at brunch with smartphone users?
What does work? Tell us that? I can tell you there is no formula anymore.
Not every client can drop a nuclear size media bomb, mass reach masked as effectiveness with the real mass casualty being massive money and mass wastage. Fishing with dynamite.
I’ve spent many, many millions in ATL media and I know the truth of it. I know the wastage. And we all know it’s fragmenting exponentially. A planners nightmare.
Do things that matter to people. Understand that. So yes, do your planning. But it sounds like a 10% process for todays world. I’m sure it’s more than that?
Nothing is right and nothing is wrong, until the process shows the way. I agree with that.
By the way, there are no ads on Netflix…. that’s ok though, you’ll be able to reach them by …… well, engaging with them on Twitter 😉
Sorry but is this really the only story you have from Mumbrella Perth? While the event was great, if you can’t find more stories worthy of sharing with your broader audience you have confirmed our thoughts here that Mumbrella is for Sydney / Melbourne markets only. You guys aren’t the only ones who put effort into the day – speakers & sponsors gave time & money to support you. Very disappointing.
Hi Perplexed,
Thanks for the comment, and by the looks of things supporting the day.
There’s been a couple of technical hold ups in us doing so but there are other stories to come from the event this week – we certainly think there was plenty of good content to share from the day.
Cheers,
Alex – editor, Mumbrella
Why on earth would you put a URL at the end of a TV ad? If I see a Toyota ad, for example, and then I want more information about Toyota, It’s not hard to guess what the URL would be. Or just google ‘Toyota’. Unless it’s a new brand, it’s pointless.
Most people wouldn’t know their arse from their URLbow anyway.