Regarding his vision for the future, David Lubars, chairman/chief creative officer, BBDO North America, laughs. At first blush, asking him–as we did in our “Then, Now and Looking Ahead” yearlong series–to gaze into his proverbial crystal ball would seem a plausible query given his track record of often being ahead of the creative curve (from the original BMW series of films at Fallon to HBO’s “Voyeur” and “Imagine” initiatives at BBDO).
However, Lubars responded, “I have never been good at predicting and knowing what direction things are headed. We follow a path and try to sniff out what to do as things happen. A fool believes he or she can accurately predict the future. Years ago who would have easily envisioned Google or Facebook? All you can do is have your antenna up and be ready for what’s coming. So when an outlet emerges, you need to be ready to figure out how to best use it to communicate. This means your creative culture needs to be like cement that never hardens, that constantly stays liquid. Otherwise you’ll only be an arch traditionalist and you’ll get left behind. Cement that stays liquid can be messy, stressful and uneasy, but you have to be in a fluid state to adjust, adapt and create.”
In the spirit of that fluidity–and with the caveat that accurately predicting the future is inherently an oxymoron–SHOOT sought out something short of outright prognostication, more resembling educated conjecture to help shed some light on what’s around the corner and beyond. In this feature, we highlight feedback from “Then, Now and Looking Ahead,” while adding to the mix some new insights from others.
On the latter front, Saneel Radia, director of innovation for BBH New York and BBH Labs, gives the buzzword “integration” a bit of a buzz cut. “If I had to place a bet, I think we’ll see a lot less of the ‘matching luggage’ syndrome–making an execution and copying it across other media. Many are obsessed with this kind of integration but it feels a bit robotic to me. Social media has opened up the space we have. When a brand only says the same thing and only talks about itself, there are drawbacks. If you’re the guy at the party doing that, I’d want to punch you in the face. I don’t care to hear all the time about the new exciting things you have going. I’d like you to behave a bit more humanly. That’s why I think we’ll probably see things that look a lot less integrated. We may start to embrace the one-off a little more. I say that realizing that ‘one-off’ is regarded as a dirty word–‘that’s a great idea but it’s a one-off.’ But it shouldn’t have a negative meaning. We’ll see ideas that are created specifically for a particular medium. The same brand can act differently in different environments yet have its message based on the same core values throughout. Over the next 10 years, I think we’ll see less uniform integration.”
Furthermore, history tells us that when new media arrives, there’s a tendency to try to put the square peg of an old medium into the new round hole. It’s like the early days of TV when the visual was the radio standard of a guy talking into a microphone. The idea, said Radia, is to not use media as a container [for executions made for old media] but rather as a canvas. He noted that BBH is trying out a new job–media designer–in its creative department. “We’re still using words, images and art as tools. But in a world where media is a building block, why not have creatives make media another tool–and a media designer role helps to address that. It’s still critical to have a writer and art director focused on a creative idea that’s truly integrated, having the same spirit and essence of a brand. But that’s not how most people use and define integrated–which is to have things the same across the media board.”
However, it takes more than avoiding uniformity in the name of integration to engage a prospective consumer. One means toward such engagement is social co-creation. “You can create a deeper relationship than just a one-time purchase,” related Radia. “You can empower an audience to help develop things, to develop products, for example. Mountain Dew does a great job of this. They call it crowd sourcing, engaging people to co-create their new line of flavors. Letting people pitch their own flavor ideas, packaging design. It’s creating product with those you are trying to reach.”
Radia noted that packaged goods clients are doing a good job of asking customers to help them with product improvement and ideas. He cited P&G which reportedly got the idea of Swiffer pitched to them by a mom. “It sounds easy to ask a question of consumers. But it’s hard to have a system in place to accept the input. A mom has an idea that turns out to be a billion dollar idea. How much marketing should be allocated to such things? This is just one of the many questions we ask ourselves.”
As an extracurricular project, Radia was involved in what turned out to be betacup, an open competition asking customers to suggest ways to reduce usage of disposable coffee cups that aren’t recyclable. Starbucks embraced the idea and formally launched the contest, with Radia serving on the initiative’s advisory board.
“It was an amazing brand opportunity with people talking about how to make the disposable coffee cup better, how to change behavior, rewarding people for reused cups, how to find a way to reduce the impact of disposable cups. It was a discussion tied to the Starbucks drinking experience, with customers serving as sort of an R&D department,” said Radia. “We weren’t asking people to buy something but to come together to achieve something. It’s not always about selling but gathering people together in a positive interacting space.”
Winning first prize–$10,000–was the creator of the Karma Kup, a chalkboard that tracks how many customers use reusable cups. Every tenth customer that brings in his or her own cup wins a prize.
Meanwhile as director of innovation at BBH, Radia noted that responsibilities go beyond him and beyond campaign and contest ideas.
“Everyone at BBH is accountable for innovation. We have to do innovative work. BBH Labs is investing in innovation. We want to constantly make sure we are innovating in our processes, to make our ideas, output and executions better.”
There’s also the need to scrutinize the not so obvious. “Look at the titans of the empire today–the Googles, the Facebooks,” said Radia. “These are companies that took over businesses no one expected them to take over 10 years ago. Why would newspapers expect someone like Google to destroy their business. The point is that you can be good at something–put out a good newspaper–but that’s not enough. You can be sideswiped by what seems at first to be a tangential business. Part of innovation is to innovate and better what you’re not doing. We have to keep on top of the currents of change and make sure we’re innovating in the right areas.”
Choice Morsels The aforementioned square peg/round hole scenario as applied to the radio to TV transition also came up in conversation with Michael Lebowitz, founder/CEO of digital creative agency Big Spaceship in Brooklyn.
“The earliest TV had images of people sitting in front of microphones–pushing radio into TV,” observed Lebowitz. “Right now current forms are being pushed into digital. Hulu, while it takes advantage of interactivity, is still kind of pushing TV into digital. Online and tablet magazines are still on a monthly production schedule.”
As for looking to the future, Lebowitz affirmed, “We have to embrace the limitless and start to look for new paradigms more appropriate to each individual brand.” He cited as an example Big Spaceship’s involvement in defining the digital presence behind GE’s “Healthymagination” engagement. The agency helped GE establish “Healthymagination” as a shared commitment to creating better health for more people–together.
This required a dramatic shift toward engaging people in an ongoing dialogue around better health. Orchestrating a team of partners, Big Spaceship defined the strategic direction, guiding efforts in creating a broad ecosystem. Healthymagination.com acts as the hub of that ecosystem, with media-rich features, a portfolio of projects, and the new “Healthymagination” blog. Big Spaceship took the lead on UX, content strategy and design in launching the site to coincide with GE’s promo campaign centered around the 2010 Winter Olympics.
The main site is complemented by and extends into dynamic social channels on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. Big Spaceship defined the editorial and digital presence strategy for each platform.
Healthymagination encompasses a variety of ongoing and evolving projects, which Big Spaceship launched simultaneously, including:
• The Better Health Conversation, a partnership with WebMD, is a targeted dialogue that helps people craft a custom set of talking points and questions so they can get more out of their next doctor’s visit.
• Morsel, a mobile app that makes healthier decisions a part of everyday life. It offers simple, fun daily tasks that help individuals get healthier one step at a time. Over 20,000 Morsels were completed with the first two weeks of launch, and enhancements are on the way.
• Sharing Healthy Ideas, a media partnership that makes it easy to find a snapshot of the most talked about issues in health. When people share an article on any of the partner sites, that activity is aggregated into data visualizations that provide a novel way to explore and navigate health content.
For Lebowitz, Morsel underscores the personal nature of the mobile platform. “Mobile seems to be an incredibly strong channel around personal health,” he observed. “That makes sense because we’re dealing with a most personal device that’s in your pocket, part of your everyday life. You tend not to share your mobile computing experience as you would an iPad with the entire family. Our larger insight about mobile makes Healthymagination part of a social effort, not a social media campaign. It’s very much an ecosystem strategy.”
In the big picture, Lebowitz related, “One of the big shifts and how we articulate it has to do with the analogy of investment. Traditional advertising is a little like putting all of your money into the most expensive stock and watching it decline in value every day after you buy it. Then you have to do it all over again. What we do at Big Spaceship is diversify the investment, judging a client’s personal tolerance for risk in the market. The brand today exists in a networked world. You have to open up your brand to that market, building a foundation and with every investment increasing the value of that foundation. We build a structure on top of that foundation but it’s an elastic structure because the world constantly changes.
“There’s accountability in this changing foundation,” continued Lebowitz. “Brands are starting to get more critical mass in digital. For Skittles, we have crossed 12 million fans on Facebook. The successful brands are those that embrace the networked world. There’s a quote from [sci-fi author] William Gibson that I like: ‘The future is already here. It’s not just evenly distributed yet.”
Chalk one up Indeed the future is here, for some more than others. Part of that future, observed Gaston Legorburu, co-exec director and worldwide chief creative officer of SapientNitro, will continue to have successful agencies involved in work that is “more an invention than an advertising campaign.”
He cited as an example the Nike “Chalkbot” initiative out of Wieden+Kennedy. And from SapientNitro, Brisbane, there’s Tourism Queensland’s “The Best Job In The World” campaign which earned two Black Pencils at the 2010 D&AD Awards, and three Grand Prix honors and five Gold Lions at the ’09 Cannes International Advertising Festival.
The Tourism Queensland campaign invited job seekers from around the world to apply and audition online for an idyllic gig as caretaker for Queensland’s Hamilton Island. The contest wove its way into mainstream culture, generating a buzz and extensive press coverage in traditional and nontraditional media.
“Chalkbot,” “Best Job” and even the placement of Coke vending machines in the middle of a shopping mall next to American Apparel (as compared to being relegated to tucked away at a far corner of the mall) all represent, said Legorburu, instances where the media idea is as if not more powerful than the core creative idea.
Legorburu sees a trend developing whereby successful ideas are increasingly centered digitally and then expanding into traditional media. This represents a change from what had been the status quo, “trickle down” creative where the idea manifests itself on TV and then the agency is supposed to “figure out how it can extend to different channels.”
Part of this shift, observed Legorburu, will have the more progressive agencies “writing dialogue more than writing speeches. Traditional advertising was built around crafting the perfect words and pictures to drive an emotional trigger spurring consumers to take action. With interactivity, though, if you spend time crafting your client’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, all that work can be undermined when someone raises his or her hand with a question. You interrupt the message and we still have brands and advertising people who don’t know how to deal with that. So you have to instead write dialogue that promotes dialogue between the brand and consumers. Creative becomes much more of a team sport and it’s a discipline that will continue to evolve.”
Key to adapting successfully, he continued, will be how agencies respond to the restructuring of the client’s marketing department. “We’re a byproduct of how they’re changing. They don’t change because we do. It’s the other way around. In the emergence of marketing technology departments, the CMO can be having a hard time dealing with the CTO or CIO. These two functions, though, are starting to come together. However, as people are becoming more accountable and getting better at connecting, budgets are being reduced. So it’s tricky to structure the marketing department of the future. The questions that are being and will be asked include, ‘What kind of partners do you need?’ ‘What skillsets are required?’ Agencies need structures in place that provide the answers. It all comes down to how clients are evolving–and are we responding fast enough in the right way?”
Global bent Part of that response has to be global, according to Rob Reilly, worldwide chief creative officer, Crispin Porter+Bogusky. “Every account is becoming global. And sometimes campaigns go global without the intent of doing so–but they do because of digital. So you look for bigger universal insights. Even small clients are thinking globally.”
For its Windows Phone campaign, CP+B went with the universal insight that people have become slaves to their mobile phones. “We keep our heads down and can’t live without the phone to the point where we’re rude to people, ignoring those closest to us, falling down stairs literally and figuratively,” said Reilly. “Our Windows Phone campaign is running on TV and with digital elements in 17 countries. It was brave for Microsoft to use that global insight.”
Brands not only need to understand the value of such insights but also, said Reilly, an ever growing level of transparency. He cited as a prime example CP+B client Domino’s which admitted that its pizza wasn’t as good as it could have been, and assured customers that efforts are being made to improve the product. “We sometimes do well with clients who aren’t doing as well as they would like because we’re then allowed in on some of the biggest issues and how to resolve them,” observed Reilly. “We were maybe not the first agency to convince them that their pizza could be better. But we were the first to convince them to acknowledge that and to put it into their marketing.”
With consumers interacting and providing more input and feedback, clients are being more open about their practices and about areas that could stand improvement. And if such improvement results from consumer input, you have situations where consumers have more influence over brands they support. They are going to start to feel more of a sense of ownership of the brand. “It’s the difference between loyalty and ownership,” stressed Reilly. “The brands that will be most successful in the future are those that understand that their customers need to have input in how the brand evolves.”
Also evolving is the nature of the talent pursued by agencies. “Intelligence–smart people who will generate ideas–remain the currency,” said Reilly. “But the talent pool has opened up. You can take risks on people who don’t have agency backgrounds. Our head of planning, Dagny Scott, was an investigative journalist two years ago. She had no agency planning experience; she was an editor of a paper. But she’s a great storyteller, understands people and human insights. Companies are looking for agency partners to help them tell their story.”
Conversely, ad professionals are finding themselves more attractive to outside industries, a prime case in point being Deutsch LA CEO/chief creative officer Eric Hirshberg who earlier this year exited the agency world to become CEO of video game company Activision Publishing.
“Touching Stories” “If any of us were to say we know what the advertising/creative industry will be five years from now, we’d by lying–in a major way,” said Dustin Callif, digital executive producer, Tool of North America. Nonetheless Callif is doing his part to get the conversation going with projects such as Tool’s “Touching Stories” initiative in which five of its directors turned out four short interactive films for the iPad. (SHOOT 8/20)
Agencies have responded favorably to the shorts which viewers can help shape and influence as they explore options on the iPad. “We’ve been getting a lot of calls,” said Callif. “People are talking but it takes time. Brands are moving slowly with the idea of content for the iPad but they are excited about the prospects. It takes longer to pull the trigger on a project like that as compared to a :30 spot. There’s no doubt, though, that it’s a question of when and not if. We’re moving away from linear passive pieces of content to work that people can engage with via Google TV, your computer or on the iPad.”
As for what other platforms he would like to explore, Calif is anxious to delve more deeply into interactive television as well as interactive installations. On the latter score, he related, “The physical world has so many different digital touchpoints. For the right spaces, the opportunity is emerging to tell a story and allow people to engage with it.” Callif added that Tool also is engaged–in talks with a retailer to achieve an in-store experience which people can interact with via their cell phones. “We’re just starting to scratch the surface of the potential out there with so many people each carrying a personal computer in their pocket at all times.”
And multi-tasking translates into multimedia. “For me personally I cannot watch TV anymore without having my iPad or computer open,” said Callif. “If I’m watching an NFL game, I can Tweet my buddy and talk smack, change a camera angle, take part in some trivia–aside from the Aflac trivia question on TV–and just enjoy a sporting event on so many different levels. This kind of environment represents a great opportunity for brands and content creators together….What’s exciting about the future in general is the integration of social viewing and media with content and advertising. The age of irrelevant advertising creative will be gone.”
Retail Beyond trying to figure out what the agency and production company of the future will look like, what business models will apply, work for hire versus equity in intellectual property, there’s also the question of what shape the retail store of tomorrow will take.
Callif alluded to a possible in-store retail experiential project in the offing for Tool. And there’s much movement generally in terms of exploring the retail gateway. Interpublic reportedly maintains a retail center at its Media Lab in Los Angeles. Window dressing goes beyond what is on display alongside mannequins. A static storefront window is evolving into a giant touch screen as customers can choose outfits for an avatar. Virtual store associates can be accessed at special kiosks. Interactive mirrors provide more than a reflection at the Media Lab–a customer can project clothing onto his or her body before entering a dressing room, sampling different colors and accessories.
Some of the most elaborate in-store interactive options in development are connected to mobile devices–those personal computers in a pocket or purse referred to by Callif.
Back to the future In some respects, the future is mirrored in the past as agencies and clients hearken back to the Golden Era when they had a hand in creating and developing TV programs. The new wrinkle now entails development of series not only for television but also for the web. On the former score, taking a page from television history, JWT is again developing primetime fare with its Yes, Virginia animated Xmas special debuting last December on CBS, drawing some four million viewers, critical acclaim and earlier this year a Gold Pencil from the 2010 One Show Entertainment Awards.
The half-hour animated special was created and produced by JWT for client Macy’s in conjunction with The Ebeling Group and MEC Entertainment (a division of Mediaedge:cia). Yes, Virginia is based on the story of eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlan, a girl growing up in late 1800s NYC who started to have doubts about Xmas when a bully insists that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. The TV special takes us on her quest to find out the truth, culminating in her writing a letter to the New York Sun, prompting arguably the most famous editorial ever when the Sun’s curmudgeonly editor Francis Church pens a response which includes the line, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus!”
The special–which has a hand-drawn stop motion look though it deployed CG resources at Starz Animation, Toronto–evolved from the 2008 “Believe” holiday campaign conceived by JWT for Macy’s. JWT had turned out a commercial in ’08 based loosely on the O’Hanlon story. The spot, which showed a little girl on her way to Macy’s to mail a letter, was in line with the “Believe” theme reflected in every Macy’s store having a mailbox for letters to Santa. For each letter, Macy’s donates money to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
Wayne Best, exec creative director of JWT New York, said the success of the special–and Macy’s natural tie-in to it with a select few subtle appearances that don’t smack of product placement–has since spawned a children’s book, and a Virginia balloon in the Macy’s Parade. And Yes, Virginia appears to be headed for annual holiday airing, perhaps starting a yuletide tradition akin to such perennial TV special favorites from the 1960s as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty The Snowman.
Breaking through Indeed barriers are breaking down and figure to continue to do so in the future–barriers separating ad makers from creating entertainment, barriers keeping production companies from taking on client-direct work, even barriers between agency competitors who can find themselves collaborating more frequently on projects through partnerships and sharing of resources.
So too are lines blurring between disciplines as Jim Morris, general manager and executive VP of production at Pixar Studios, said in his keynote address to attendees at this year’s SIGGRAPH confab. Morris joined Pixar in ’05. During his tenure there, he has served as production executive on such films as Ratatouille, Up and Toy Story 3. In ’09, he produced Disney-Pixar’s Wall-E which won the best animated feature Oscar. Morris is currently producing Disney’s digital/live-action film John Carter of Mars, directed by Andrew Stanton and which is scheduled for release in 2012.
Morris observed that this movie, with its live-action cast, is taking on many of the sensibilities of an animation film. On the flip side, he related that Wall-E crept into live-action film sensibilities. “We’re seeing more work that is blurring boundaries while pushing into new ones,” said Morris, noting that this meshing is one of the dynamics that excites him about the state of cinema today.
This mesh is also evident in progressive education, as articulated in another SIGGRAPH keynote talk by Don Marinelli, co-founder of Carnegie Mellon University’s Master of Entertainment Technology Degree Program with Randy Pausch, the late educator/author whose “The Last Lecture” provided inspiration to many.
There were some parallels thematically between Marinelli’s SIGGRAPH presentation a couple of months ago and Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Pausch’s famed lecture which was given in Sept. ’07 at the Pittsburgh-based university. At the time, Pausch was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and knew he had just several months to live. Still, his talk was upbeat and humorous, containing insights into education, building multi-disciplinary collaborations, and learning life’s lessons for happiness and personal fulfillment.
Breaking down barriers so that people could realize their dreams and aspirations was a theme from Pausch’s lecture that carried over to Marinelli’s 2010 SIGGRAPH talk. Marinelli recalled his being a theater professor at Carnegie Mellon years ago when he reached a crossroads. He could continue on a fast track to becoming “an old fart” lamenting the fact that more students were moving away from the live theater art form. Or he could gravitate to forms that students were embracing with the paradigm shift from passive traditional media to interactivity such as that found in videogames.
Marinelli chose the latter option, one day walking across campus to the computer science department, asking if it could use a theater professor. To his amazement, the answer was yes, spawning a coming together of art and technology as embodied in the eventual formation of the university’s Entertainment Technology Center, which is a joint initiative between the College of Fine Arts and the School of Computer Science, teaming technologists and non-technologists on projects that produce installations and content designed to entertain, inform, inspire or otherwise affect people.
“We broke down the barrier between theater arts and computer science,” said Marinelli, noting that computer science has a passion often associated with the arts and conversely theater performance and storytelling have structural elements like science.
Indeed the boundaries between and among artists, scientists and graphic experts have become more blurred. That is the underpinning of the Entertainment Technology Center. Marinelli and Pausch envisioned the Center as a “Dream Fulfillment Factory,” providing students with the tools, experiences and expertise needed to realize meaningful accomplishments, including the creation of entertaining, engaging, challenging content.
Team coverage Creative directors Alistair Robertson and Alex Braxton recently joined DDB Chicago as chief creative officer Ewan Paterson’s first hires since joining the agency at the end of June. Robertson and Braxton are a noted digital and integrated team who had been with AMV BBDO, London, which they helped diversify from a TV-centric agency to one with digital and integrated chops. They started their careers at Dare London.
Yet with all their digital savvy, Robertson and Braxton surprisingly keep it light on future vision and heavy on the importance of concept.
“We’re big believers that you always go to the idea first and don’t get too wrapped up in the technology,” said Robertson. “It all still comes down to a pure great idea that taps into real basic human needs.”
And those needs, noted Braxton, have essentially been the same over the years and probably will remain so tomorrow. “People have the same basic concerns; they care about family, life, money coming in, what will I cook tonight, what’s in the fridge, what should I buy?”
Beyond the idea designed to address such human concerns, Braxton said another key is the choice of platform or platforms to do justice to that idea. “That’s part of what attracted us to DDB. Campaigns are driven by whatever medium the message best suits. It’s a place where they think about message first and medium second. We want to give people experiences and feelings in the right form and in the right place.”
Braxton and Robertson see a future, hopefully, without banner advertising, for which they have a strong dislike. They also have some concern over people becoming too insulated due to having more power over what they choose to see.
“It’s true that people will have more power to select where they go but sometimes I wonder if that can get to the point where it’s too much,” conjectured Braxton. “Online will start to amalgamate into areas you’re interested in and content will be delivered to you based on what you like. News feeds will be dictated by that.”
But both Braxton and Robertson wondered about content outside those areas of designated interest that a person might find engaging if he or she were open to it.
Robertson hopes that social media will play a meaningful role in opening up such new possibilities. “Your network of friends, if they’re true friends who understand you, might suggest content outside your norm. You tend to take your friends’ opinions more seriously. Content is passed from friend to friend and maybe that might counteract being too isolated.”
Braxton noted that an Amazon on books mindset could also help. “If you like this book, you might like this other book,” he said. “Part of our job is to get people to open up to new content, connecting them with brands and each other in different ways.”
Highlights Looking back on the “Looking Ahead” portion of SHOOT‘s “Then and Now” series over the past not quite a year, here are some highlights:
Education is paramount on numerous levels, including as companies evolve to meet the demands of an evolving industry and marketplace. Robert Greenberg, chairman/CEO/global chief creative officer of R/GA, said that education will only increase in its importance. R/GA’s own history underscores that assertion as Greenberg noted that part of each iteration in R/GA’s evolution has been education–educating others about computer graphics, then about the digital studio, then the integration of film, video and computer graphics, about an interactive ad agency, about digital displacing traditional media as the most important part of contact between brands and consumers, about being an ad agency for the digital age. “Education breaks barriers,” affirmed Greenberg.
Meanwhile also breaking through are numerous screens. “We’ve entered the screen era,” observed BBDO’s Lubars. “Everything’s a screen. Outdoor is a screen, offline, online, TV, the back of a taxi cab. I was in a restaurant the other day and in the restroom they had screens over the urinals. For the creative community, it can no longer be about sticking the same thing on every screen. Your content has to be relevant to each screen–whether it be a passive traditional television experience, or a clicking and exploring experience on Facebook. The big upstream idea that can go everywhere but take different forms so that it works on each of these screens is gold in today’s marketplace.”
BBDO has been true to this integrated mix, spanning traditional broadcast as well as assorted platforms, the latter reflected in such work as HBO’s “Voyeur” and “Imagine” initiatives, and the Starbucks Love Project. “For HBO’s ‘Imagine,’ we had to produce 41 separate pieces of content,” continued Lubars. “That shows you how things have changed in recent years, and it’s resulted in our having to evolve our working relationships with production houses, artists and internally. We have to create so much more content for less. It’s not just a film anymore. It’s a batch of different elements. Budgets have to be re-thought as does how you shoot, the whole grid of a project. It’s not linear anymore. Again, it’s the big upstream idea that drops down to all these different, varied yet important pieces and executions.”
Stefan Sonnenfeld, who oversees the features and commercials business for Ascent Media‘s Creative Services while maintaining his role as president/managing director/colorist at Company 3, sees the current market pulling in two decidedly different directions. On one hand, there are the high-end breakthroughs in 3D and HD, while conversely we live in the time of the YouTube, small screen (lap tops, cell phones, PDAs) generation. The latter has clients asking at times for less sophisticated, more inexpensive forms of filmmaking like Flip video camcorder shoots. So while there’s a technological revolution on the very high end, there’s a concurrent “good enough” school of thought with clients at times looking for solutions that don’t call for state-of-the-art, pristine quality images and sound.
For Sonnenfeld, the answer for Ascent and Company 3 is to stay relevant in both camps. “Being ‘good enough’ is easily attainable. But ‘good enough’ is not going to be the best,” he observed. “So we have robust resources, the latest technology for when ‘good enough’ isn’t good enough,” he said. “If you are only looking to satisfy what’s ‘good enough,’ then you cannot move into ambitious projects that require more. But if you have the best people and resources in place, you can work on anything–‘good enough’ and a whole lot better. Ultimately I don’t think ‘good enough’ is okay. I’m of the mindset that brands want the best for less and we have to work hard to achieve that. And the only way to do that is to have the best people.”
Indeed for Sonnenfeld the constant in the face of an ever changing technological and media landscape is simply “getting the best, most creative, most artistic people…That’s the key to the success of a creative services business. You need the talent to serve client needs, especially as those needs are evolving to encompass multiple platforms and varied forms of content.”
Kristi VandenBosch, CEO of Publicis & Hal Riney, observed that it’s prudent for all talent to “play,” experiment, collaborate and discover. She noted that “play” has played an instrumental role in Publicis & Hal Riney’s culture and creative product.
“The nature of ‘play’ is something we gravitated to, from both the planning and creative side,” said VandenBosch. “Play is the beginning of true knowledge. It lets us solve problems from different perspectives, to look at things in a new light.
“We talk about what ‘play’ is, and what it’s not–for example, ‘play’ lets you be unapologetic in the process of creation. But it’s not frivolous or irresponsible. It’s a natural way to learn, through the process of making and doing. It’s how insight unfolds. But perhaps one of the most important tenets of ‘play’ is that it’s always best when done with others. Let’s face it, we’re a society of gamers–not just video-game gamers, but people who interact every day with metagames, often without realizing it. They use Mint to manage their financial life, and FourSquare to ‘collect’ recognition for their everyday behaviors, and have never read a manual for their iPod. As a culture, the tools of technologies we embrace most readily are grounded in ‘play.'”
VandenBosch continued, “It’s such a perfect parallel for how we steward brands today. Every ‘traditional’ agency is scrambling for digital cred. But they’re missing the larger point. It’s not about digital for digital’s sake. We need to understand how actions connect with one another. Sure, digital is a huge enabler of that, but these connections happen in the real world, in retail stores, when you interact with packaging, when you use a product, when you talk to someone about a brand you love. If we’re to be really good stewards of a brand, we’re always thinking about how actions connect–asking ourselves the question: ‘And then what happens?’ This is fundamental to both digital design and game theory, and in our minds, a great thing to explore through the tools of play.”
Riney’s adoption of “play as a process” has led to new ways of thinking about content, form, information and interaction. “It’s less about what you could do, and more about what you should do. We look at how brands play in the world, the people who play with them, and how those interactions are created and managed to achieve the brand’s objectives for success.” VandenBosch smiled, “These are amazing times for brands that play well with others.”
Tony Granger, global chief creative officer of Young & Rubicam, observed that brands are playing in an environment where change is constant, including for those dynamics seemingly in vogue. “Honestly, who knows if Facebook will reign two years from now? Two years ago blogging was king, but today 90 percent of blogs are abandoned. That’s why we have to constantly experiment and not be ashamed of ‘tactics.’ Because sometimes a great tactic becomes a great strategy. Think about Hyundai’s ‘buyer reassurance program’–lose your job, return the car. A tactic that helped the company grow 20 percent in a dismal automotive market in 2008-’09.
“In this technology and social driven world, brands have to be transparent,” he observed. “The rapid rise of social media sites have taken the oldest form of communication–word of mouth–and made it arguably the most powerful. Today, we don’t market to consumers, we market with them. The impact of simple product ratings cannot be underestimated. It’s hard to imagine buying anything without first reading what others think today. The challenge for marketers going forward is not just to assemble a social network for a brand, but to learn how to harness that power and help activate it in a positive manner. No small task.”
Transparency, though, is good. “Companies can no longer hide their dirty laundry,” related Granger. “They have to do the right thing regarding how they treat the environment, how they make their products and what they put into them (especially into food). Women are the dominant force in up to 90 percent of all purchase decisions. They spend a lot of time online researching you and your product. They had better feel good about you. The proof is in performance, so brands that connect with inspiring innovation, design and communications are the ones that will thrive.
“Today,” continued Granger, “we have great crowdsourcing technology like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Behance. There is access to a myriad of talent to experiment with. Now, some of that crowdsourced talent isn’t right and isn’t great, but often the quality is amazing and this opens us up to working in different formats and media. As Susan Boyle (Britain’s Got Talent) taught us, don’t write off the amateur. This is now a Pro-Am world.
Paradoxically, in an ever evolving marketplace, Granger finds deep relevance in an observation made some 86 years ago. “While I was searching for Y&R’s DNA,” he recalled, “I found a line that Ray Rubicam wrote in 1924: ‘Resist the Usual.’ He encouraged people to be ‘Anti-Usualists.’ This really resonated with me. I thought, if there ever was a time for our agency and our clients to resist the usual, it’s now.”
Such resistance is ingrained in the culture at Wieden+Kennedy. Dan Wieden, founder/CEO of W+K, cited his shop’s P.I.E., which stands for Portland Innovation Experiment.
“We’ve gathered a bunch of young developers who wanted a place to come together, develop ideas and start up new businesses,” related Wieden. “We’re working with them in an interesting way, trying different experiments in developing businesses and products.
“P.I.E. entails partnering with clients and retailers to do things differently. Right now some of those ideas are half-baked. Others are ongoing and show promise. The real key for us is to work on a different level with clients, to partner with them when it makes sense and to give ourselves as many options to redefine ourselves as possible.”
Somewhere in this exploration, though, resides an incongruity that fascinates Wieden and which he hopes to somehow reconcile.
“As part of this huge technological explosion, human beings have never been connected to so many others in so many different places in so many different ways as we are now,” he observed. “At the same time, there’s never been a greater lack of intimacy despite all these connections. That search for intimacy even with all these connections or touchpoints is fascinating. It’s like you discover sex which is great but eventually you’re looking for something that increases the meaning in your life.
“That’s the role,” continued Wieden, “we’re trying to explore as an agency–connecting with people in ways that are meaningful and valuable to them.
“What is ‘meaning’ today? What is ‘intimacy’ today? What kind of relationships can you build today that enlarge and enrich you in a more profound way? Connecting with people through media is not enough. It still comes back to quality, not just measuring by quantity. We have to try to connect with people in as meaningful a way as possible.”
