Faris Yakob, chief innovation officer at MDC Partners, says we shouldn’t be asking what advertising agencies do – we should be asking what are advertising agencies for?
Outside of the industry, it is little recognized that advertising agencies do not actually make television commercials—this is outsourced to production companies.
Agencies germinate, direct and manage the processes of advertising production. However, the question is more fundamental than what do they do, but rather, what are advertising agencies for?
In 1975 Theodore Levitt wrote one of the classic texts of marketing. “Marketing Myopia” is the “quintessential big hit HBR piece”, to quote a later article about it from the self-same Harvard Business Review.
In it, Levitt points out that every industry was once a growth industry but that never seems to last, not because the market is saturated but rather because companies misinterpret the fundamental question: “What business are you in?” Read the rest of this entry »
Ex Libris is the name of a regular feature in the International Journal Of Advertising. Faris Yakob is keen to try and bridge the gap between the very interesting acadedmic research around advertising and the industry of advertising as it seems like we could learn a lot from each other.
The very lovely Professor Stephanie O’Donohoe from The University of Edinburgh reached out and asked me to do one for them and believing as I do that reading is for awesome people, how could I refuse?
Faris Yakob chief innovation officer at MDC Partners discusses world media, drought in East Africa, thinking small and feeling big.
I’ve been back in Europe for a while sorting out life logisitcs and visas and that.
This is unlikely to be of much interest to you but it reminded me that the world out there is, well, out there.
The American newsmedia is famously solipsistic – international affairs rarely take centre stage, or get mentioned at all, unless the affairs in question directly involve American actions.
You like to think that the media doesn’t effect how you think.
The title is something I find myself saying a lot, one which ultimately stems, I assume, from my laziness, but can probably be expanded to a larger point.
Proximity is a virtue because, even in world flattened by the Internets, things that are nearby are more vaulable, useful, important, most of the time. Read the rest of this entry »
Faris Yakob talks about the future of digital post PC, each generation has distinct media behaviors and expecations, and those behaviors and expectations will dictate the actions of the advertising/media/technology industry in the future.
A while back my mate Jake sent me this deck he had whipped up – and jolly good it is too.
It syncs up nicely with my last few posts about proximity and context and that – and contains lots of facts to chew on and ideas to mull over, mapping out our increasingly mobile, POST PC future.
Whilst phrased as an ironic tautology [and Whitney Houston reference], it also attempted to point out that each generation has distinct media behaviors and expecations, and those behaviors and expectations will dictate the actions of the advertising/media/technology industry in the future.
Or they should, anyway. In some ways.
It also spent some time worrying about problems of prospection – the difficulties we have predicting things that are novel, due to the biases like presentism and anchoring and so on.
Then, later, I began wondering a lot about how the rampant acceleration of change brought about by the stability of Moore’s Law was disrupting the mediascape and therefore advertising landscape in Stuff that Doesn’t Work Yet, where I touch on the idea that technology isn’t technology if you grow up with it – it’s just stuff.
It has some nice insights about how internalized the idea of technology has become – in some ways it feels like technology itself, as an idea, has become just stuff to the next generation.
They intuitively feel that online and offline are the same, that computers should be more human [in some aspects] and that technology is empowerment, and is ultimately, invisible.
Early last year I was giving this talk a lot. It’s about what we mean by technology, and how it is changing the nature of media, and hence advertising, and some strategic responses to the change in the media environment.
The quote concerns the modern semantic halo of the word technology – it means anything we don’t yet understand how to use, what to do with.
It hinges on the triumverate of laws that are the drivers of exponential change in our world: Moore’s Law, Kryder’s Law, and Guilder’s Law.
And exponential change is super weird – it’s not a feature of any older technologies, only post silicon/digital ones. Older, mechanical, technologies evolve incrementally.
[Imagine if cars got twice as fast and half as expensive every 18 months.]
As the graphs in the deck shows, processing, memory, and bandwidth are well on their way to approaching a marginal cost of zero.
When things are free[ish] they rapidly become ubiquitous, and as Shirky says, abundance breaks more things than scarcity.
The printing press was an incredibly important technology, but only when everyone could read did the world change.
So what happens when media/content is infinite? When every reader is a writer?
I have no idea, but in the interim I posited some thoughts about content creation for brands that adapt to the existing media environment.
1. Principle of Ubiquity – Make More Stuff
2. Principle of Alacrity – Respond to Stuff Faster
3. Principe of Utility – Do Stuff that Earns its Own Attention
4. Principle of Interactivity – Do Stuff That Gives People A Role
And it touches on the ideas that technology is a medium, and that every new channel changes the whole system.
When I wrote about alacrity and ubiquity – I meant things like the Old Spice Response campaign: more stuff that responds faster. [I just didn't know that I meant that at the time.]
A decade ago, in 2001, BMW unveiled a series of short films, collectively known as The Hire, but commonly called BMW Films.
High production values and big name actors and directors highlighted what the cars could do in dramatic situations and kick-started the burgeoning world of online branded content.
Since then, the world has shifted, ever so slightly…
Let’s lay this oft discussed issue to rest, shall we?
I have long held and espoused the view that All Market Research is Wrong.
The idea of researching a market makes sense to anyone who is about to invest money into engaging with one, using products, services or communications.
However, the basic idea underlying all market research is epistemologically specious. That is to say, it seems to make sense, but, under examination, it does not.
In essence, the foundation of market research is that, by asking lots of people questions, or asking a smaller group of people more in depth questions, we can gather dependable insights into why they buy what they buy, and whether or not they will buy something in the future, perhaps after having seen some advertising.
I don’t believe this is true. For two, very simple reasons.
1. We don’t know why we do what we do.
We make these [and most] decisions at a subconscious level, which means, by definition, the operations of the decision process are inaccessible to our conscious minds.
That doesn’t mean people won’t answer though.
They will happily answer, erroneously, in a way that seems to make sense, as their minds create explanatory fictions to explain their own behaviour to themselves, or the interviewer.
2. The gulf between claimed attitudes [and intentions] and actual behaviour is vast.
Asking people if they intend to buy something is analogous to asking them if they intend to go to the gym – the results may not correspond well with future behaviour.
Focus groups are particularly fraught: they create utterly artificial data as a response to utterly artificial situations and social dynamics.
I wrote a paper about this a while ago – you can download it here if you want
- and recently a nice person called Hilary sent me a review copy of an excellent book called ‘Consumer.ology’ by Philip Graves that examines, in much more persuasive detail than my paper, the same issues.
I recently gave a talk at an IAB Conference on Mobile Marketing. You can flick through the deck above.
The talk begins by pointing out that Everyware is stolen from the book of that name by Adam Greenfield about the internet of things and the future of ubiquitous computing.
As Adam himself recently pointed out, he wrote it in 2006, before the iPhone changed the mobile landscape, and so it doesn’t take into account how much the ubiquitous computing future would be a function of mobile phone technology.
The second bit is from Copernicus.
He was a smart dude and renaissance type polymath, who dabbled in astronomy mostly as a hobby.
He began to suspect that, contrary to what EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD believed, and what our senses tell us, that the sun didn’t go around the Earth.
So he went back to older sources before Ptolemy to find anyone else who had suspected this, and he found some, which helped him light the way to a cogent heliocentric model of the solar system.
So my points were: sometimes we can use the past as a lens to help us look into the future, when we do look forwards we are often heavily biased by the concerns of the present, and that sometimes the thing we are focusing on gets in the way, and maybe it’s the other stuff that’s moving.
Then you get to watch some awesome AT&T ads from 1993 that predict the future with the voice of Tom Selleck, directed by David Finch.
In the bit below, I talk about some use cases for mobile.
I am often fighting back, as I have before right here, about the way new technology platforms as subsumed into our worldview as ‘channels’. New things don’t fit into the old boxes – new digital platform aren’t like previous media – receptacles for certain shapes and sizes of content.
They are functions as well as containers – digital things can take any form, and digital platforms are convergent – things that receive can broadcast, things that consume can produce.
Hence the endlessly heralded year of the mobile will never come – by the time that it does ‘mobile’ will be the ‘web’. Increasingly the idea that channels are discrete I find unhelpful.
This is why I think it’s useful to think about mobile not as a channel but as a tool – something someone is using, not just viewing.
[Although with the iPhone, the highest definition screen anyone owns will be their phone – it is significantly higher resolution than full HD TVs. This means that, should you want to create transmedia content, you would need to record for the iPhone and degrade the footage down to HD for broadcast.]
Your mobile exists in a constant state of NOW – which is what leads to the Google Use cases I highlight in the video.
But Google’s bias is that of a company built around information retrieval. My contribution to their use cases was the addition of TIME SHIFTED NOW – when you use your phone to make sure you do what you intended.
I suspect there is a role for lots of brands here, in helping people act the way they think they will tomorrow, NOW.
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#WLTM: Marketing Society Business Leader Paul Wilson, CMO, Sunguard http://t.co/xZYSkyovFebruary 3, 2012 2:39
@BrainJuicer: How Can Brands Show Us They Care? http://t.co/SoDI8XQnFebruary 3, 2012 12:13
@RobinHoughton Thanks for braving the cold last night and joining us @SohoHouse. We will send you another book to review for #bookclub soon.February 3, 2012 12:03
Faris Yakob, chief innovation officer at MDC Partners, says we shouldn’t be asking what advertising agencies do – we should be asking what are advertising agencies for?
