Borrowing the “Then, Now & Looking Ahead” moniker from our series of articles last year leading up to SHOOT’s 50th Anniversary, we now commemorate the beginning of the industry’s next 50 with observations from an agency veteran, Larry Postaer, whose ad industry tenure just turned 50–and whose shop, RPA, turned 25–and a look to the future from Hilding Anderson, SapientNitro’s sr. manager of research & insight, who edited a recently released report, “Insights 2012,” which examines consumer marketing trends and digital technologies.
For Larry Postaer, it’s been a time to reflect on the business–prompted in part by his two aforementioned anniversaries, and brought home by the release of his book, “Pickett, Plunkett and Puckett. My 50 Years in Advertising.” Pickett, Plunkett and Puckett were his first “clients” as part of his senior year ad sales curriculum at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism–the three “P’s” were owners of a lumberyard, a Dairy Queen and a men’s clothing store, respectively.
After graduating, Postaer moved into retail, and ended up writing for the Sears catalog. He later landed his first agency job, serving as a copywriter and then creative director at Stern, Walters and Simmons, Chicago. He enjoyed a lengthy tenure there and his eye for young, smart talent caught the eye of Keith Reinhard at the then Needham Harper & Steers, Chicago, who hired some of those promising ad artisans. So why not hire the guy who had the vision to give those ad folks their first career breaks? In line with that thinking, Reinhard brought Postaer aboard to run what amounted to half of Needham’s creative department. Five years later, Postaer came West to join Needham’s L.A. office. Five years after that, Needham, Doyle Dane Bernbach and BBDO formed Omnicom with a resulting conflict that meant Needham had to resign the Honda automobile business. So in Oct. 1986, Postaer and Gerry Rubin struck out on their own, launching Rubin Postaer & Associates (now known as RPA) with Honda as its flagship account.
A lot has changed in Postaer’s 50 years in the ad biz. He noted that the computer has impacted advertising perhaps more than any other industry, “with the exception of NASA and space exploration.” Some of that impact has been positive–for one, it’s meant that ad creatives need to be smarter, with their expertise having to span more than TV, radio and print, extending into the brave new online and social media world, and integrating communication across those platforms.
And that expertise must also run a vast production gamut. On one hand, there are the sophisticated high-end technologies reflected in the likes of 3D and HD. On the other, there are stories for which production quality is not quite as essential, with content filling laptop and smartphone screens.
Still, at a time when expertise must be more far reaching than ever, creatives, observed Postaer, can find themselves confined on other fronts. “In the old days, you didn’t start a job until someone gave you a job ticket or job number,” he recalled. “Now, you can’t do anything without a strategy statement. Strategy statements are fine, they can sharpen creative focus. Clients have agreed to a certain focus and the storyboard should address that. But the creative process can sometimes be negatively affected. There’s less room for good old intuition, which has been reduced to playing second fiddle.”
Sans intuition, classic RPA spots like “Stealth” for the Honda CRXsi and “Art Gallery” for the Accord wouldn’t have been made, said Postaer. For example, the inspiration for the former–comparing the sexiest, zippiest and most youthful Honda car, the CRXsi, to the not yet unveiled U.S. military’s stealth bomber–came while driving on a Los Angeles freeway. An excerpt from Postaer’s book reads: “Rarely, though, does a big idea shine through your windshield as you drive up the 405 in the company of your two creative stars.
“[Bob] Coburn saw it first. ‘Check out that license plate,’ he drawled.
“In front of us was a CRX, black, maybe two years old. The clever owner’s vanity plate read ‘STLTH.’ It might’ve read ‘BINGO,’ so quickly did Bob and Gary [Yoshida] begin to free associate.”
Today at many agencies, the intuition-based idea of unveiling a realistic looking stealth bomber–before anyone knew what it would look like–and putting a car ahead of it wouldn’t have flown, said Postaer. “But back then, we just went with it.”
And as it turned out, the stealth bomber in the commercial wound up looking amazingly like the real aircraft when it was rolled out months later, a resemblance reported on during the Nov. 22, 1988 edition of ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.
Along with intuition, human interaction can at times be a casualty of contemporary “new media”/staying-ahead-of-the-curve practices. Postaer commented on a Los Angeles Times story about the launch of the McDonald’s Channel, a digital network with original content targeting the restaurant chain’s dine-in customers. Included in the programming mix will be fare from reality TV maven Mark Burnett and his digital production company Vimby.
The initiative represents a 180-degree turn from what Postaer remembers during his years working on the McDonald’s account at Needham, Harper & Steers.
“I think Keith Reinhard came up with the creative mantra ‘Food, Folks and Fun’ for McDonald’s,” related Postaer. “It’s what guided us in many respects. That was the foundation for everything. Now, you stick television sets in McDonald’s and that nice little moment of a conversation between dad and son is lost. We marketed McDonald’s as a place for those moments–where families have a meal, talk, laugh–not where you’re watching a TV monitor.”
Postaer regards Reinhard, now chairman emeritus of DDB Worldwide, as a mentor.
“Earlier in my career, I had a boss who was highly animated and opinionated,” recalled Postaer. “Then I started to work with Keith–an extremely patient man, unflappable, always able to reason with clients without arguing. I had been a bit argumentative when I was younger. Under his wing, I learned to cool it and be more open. Keith is an extremely honest person, a forthright guy who would stand between you and the bullets. He protected his creative people so they could do their best work. Gerry [Rubin] and I have always tried to do that [at RPA].”
On the latter score, Postaer who is co-chairman and co-founder of RPA, said, “Yes, the client matters. But if we feel something’s right, we will go to the mat for it in a civil, friendly way. Also, over the years, we turned down a number of clients we didn’t feel either had a product we could be proud of or who were very difficult. Gerry always says, ‘If I can’t take the product home to my wife, there’s something wrong.’ We took a pass on certain video game companies whose blood and guts games were a turnoff. We shied away from self-styled geniuses–namely a number of movie company clients. You have to get ‘bad people’ to take care of bad clients and we didn’t want any part of that. We want good, dedicated people–and a creative culture that supports and protects them.”
Future speak Sapient Nitro’s “Insights 2012” is the inaugural edition of what is planned to be an annual report from SapientNitro, launched at the behest of the agency’s clients who want a better handle on relevant marketplace trends and developments–and where they may lead in terms of business opportunities in the years ahead. SapientNitro is well positioned to pinpoint such trends and opportunities in that it creates user experiences for many leading brands (Coke, Unilever, et al) and has multinational reach with 20 offices worldwide. Hilding Anderson edited this first edition and shared some highlights with SHOOT.
Anderson cited a blending and blurring of the digital and physical worlds, a prime example of that coming from Tesco, a grocery store chain in South Korea, which provided consumers with a mobile app enabling them to shop at virtual stores installed in subways. Tesco placed giant posters on a series of subway stops during rush hour–floor-to-ceiling depictions of actual store aisles replete with milk, meat, produce and assorted other products you’d expect to find in a supermarket. Each product included a QR code, allowing subway customers to shop via their smartphones while they’re waiting for the next train. The groceries would then be delivered within two hours to the smartphone user’s home. This initiative sprung out of research revealing customers’ desire to avoid rush hour in the supermarket. As a result of its virtual stores, Tesco increased its online sales by 130 percent, becoming the country’s number one online grocery store.
“That’s what the world will start to look like as smart phones are in the hands of more people,” related Anderson. According to data cited in “Insights 2012,” people now spend on average 32 minutes a day using mobile Internet services, and more than 15 billion apps have been downloaded from the iTunes App Store alone. Customers are consuming these mobile experiences on both phones and tablets, at home, at work and on the move, and are looking for experiences that are fun, useful, usable and/or convenient. Customers are also becoming increasingly comfortable transacting on mobile devices. But even when that’s not the case, consumers are using mobile to research products both at home and in-store–laying the groundwork for purchases that are transacted via mobile or more traditional means.
The SapientNitro report, though, acknowledges drawbacks: 90 percent of apps are deleted after 30 days, and 38 percent of people are not satisfied with their favorite brand’s app. The mobile web doesn’t fare much better; 25 percent of people would not revisit a retailer’s mobile site after a bad experience, and 75 percent of the U.K.’s top retailers do not have mobile-optimized versions of their website even though people spend three-and-a-half times longer and look at three-and-a-half times as many pages on optimized sites, compared with non-optimized.
Major movement is also afoot in transmedia storytelling, according to “Insights 2012.” “Brands increasingly are exploring from a multi-channel perspective a conversation with the customer,” related Anderson. “A story must go beyond one channel and arc through different platforms. We’re trying to connect the dots across those channels for our clients. Companies are increasingly going to be creating engaging stories that span these different channels.”
The SapientNitro report read, “Brands will succeed when they understand the proper media mix, allow stories to run free, take their own shape, empower liquid content, and understand that their brand experience is the sum of all the little moments–and they need to make each one of them count.”
“Insights 2012” also contained observations and assessments for various parts of the world. In North America, for example–as written by Justin Barkhuizen and Rob Murray, strategists at SapientNitro NYC–the key opportunities for marketers in the next year to two years are: “Marketers will have an e-dentity crisis; smart marketers will find a successful solution. They will be challenged by the everyday barrage of content, options and opinions their consumers face. They will understand that iPads and smartphones consume more data than PCs. And that data is ingested in large part through apps.
“Smart marketers will also understand appification–that content is being chunked into packets of digestible experiences. And they will adopt an ’86/4,’ not ’24/7′ mentality; they will realize they are no longer fighting for dayparts or a share of 24 hours, but for the 86,400 seconds in a day.”
As for the most important social platforms in North America and why, Barkhuizen and Murray identified:
• Facebook. Its hush-hush music platform, Instagram-esque photo filters, and video chat innovations show that the leader is aware (unlike MySpace) that it needs to evolve to stay on top.
• Twitter. They are the de facto live search provider, and continue to make the proposition make sense for brands with their “sponsored” suite of products.
• YouTube. The world’s number two search engine is simply a synonym for online video, and is a continually leading innovation in the display world. Their latest suggestion? Maybe they’re the best place to test new shows before sinking millions of dollars into production and network expenses.
• Foursquare. The race to own check-ins is over. Foursquare won–hence the demise of Facebook Place. Innovations include their masterstroke American Express deal, opening up monetization opportunities and silencing the cynics.
• And Google+. This platform cleverly exposed a chink in Facebook. It has a bunch of features, and is integrating them into their properties pretty well. There’s a lot riding on this–including becoming the number one web destination again.
