Hasta La Creative!

Generally speaking, clients across the board are not impressed. They want results and all ad people have to peddle is their sacrosanct creativity.

That’s the news from The Fournaise Marketing Group (c/o Warc, which interviewed more than 1,200 chief executive officers and decision makers around the world for its 2013 Global Marketing Effectiveness Program.

A full 78% of CEOs thought agencies were not performance-driven enough and did not focus enough on helping to generate the business results they expected their marketing departments to deliver.

In addition, 76% felt agencies talked too much about “creativity as the saviour” while not being able to prove or quantify it. Indeed, they believed that agencies were frequently opportunistic in claiming credit for results that could be attributed to other factors such as the product, sales force, channel or pricing.

So much suspicion fouling love and respect’s nest. Can we agree that we are all creative people? If we can agree to this basic tenet, I think we can make progress.

The truth is ad people can be aloof, disinterested and bitchy. Meanwhile, clients can be blind to basic realities, particularly as it relates to the value of their product or service in the marketplace. Bad clients can also be coarse and needlessly demanding. What we have here are two groups of highly opinionated “professionals” talking over and at each other from their respective sides of the polished Rainforest wood table.

You can blame the money involved for part of the hostility problem. If the client wasn’t “risking” millions and their own professional reputation, it wouldn’t be such a scary transaction. But it is scary, which means we must bring more empathy and compassion to the proceedings.

I think ad people would do well to bow to the pressure the client is under, and clients will absolutely get better work and results from the work, when they cop to the difficulty involved in making truly moving brand communications on a consistent basis.

[UPDATE] John Winsor of Victor & Spoils, arguing for new compensation models, notes in Harvard Business Review, “While some in the industry wish that we could remain as creative free spirits with our clients as patrons, clients are becoming so squeezed — and so focused on ROI — that that model isn’t sustainable.”

The post CEOs Not Pleased With Creative Snots Who Pack No Data appeared first on AdPulp.

Some things are still scared, but your privacy on corporate-owned communications networks is not, and never has been.

This fact of digital life has been evident for years, but the recent revelation that the National Security Agency is working closely with leading tech companies, makes it crystal clear–anything you write, say, record, transfer etc. is subject to inspection by a federal employee tasked with keeping America secure from terror attacks.

Tech companies could stand tall and say yes, we help keep America safe from terror. But they’ve chosen to deny their involvement instead.

This is what The Google has to say for itself:

We have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.

Thankfully, Foreign Policy breaks down the geek’s coded language for us.

According to Chris Soghoian, a tech expert and privacy researcher at the American Civil Liberties Union, the phrase “direct access” connotes a very specific form of access in the IT-world: unrestricted, unfettered access to information stored on Google servers. In order to run a system such as PRISM, Soghoian explains, such access would not be required, and Google’s denial that it provided “direct access” does not necessarily imply that the company is denying having participated in the program.

A similar logic applies to Google’s denial that it set up a “back door.” According to Soghoian, the phrase “back door” is a term of art that describes a way to access a system that is neither known by the system’s owner nor documented. By denying that it set up a back door, Google is not denying that it worked with the NSA to set up a system through which the agency could access the company’s data.

Yes, the company that vows to “do no evil,” not only engages in domestic spying on its users, it uses doublespeak to cloak its activities and protect its brand value.

As users or consumers of these networks, we have few places to turn. The connected networks we know as the Internet is a classic monopoly, conceived by the military and managed by their corporate contractors. Yet, we think of it as the peoples’ media. Why? Are too bedazzled by the promise of riches to pay attention to the facts? Or just lost in another cute cat video?

For me personally, I return time and again to the importance of media literacy. If we are not able or willing to turn away from the machine, we need to know how to live with it and work with it. And this means knowing what it is, how it works, who owns which piece and so on. Media literacy is also of the essence when flithy-rich corporate entities, and the government, use language to intentionally mislead people.

The post Google’s PRISM-Driven Doublespeak Needlessly Misleading appeared first on AdPulp.

I’ve written before about a company called Automated Insights and their “written” fantasy football recaps and other content.

Now, they’re broadening their reach with the launch of Site AI, a new service that summarizes web analytics and site stats using reports written to simulate everyday language.

This could mark an interesting turning point in our use of data, charts, dashboards, and infographics and solve one of big data’s big problems: The need to put it in language anyone can understand. As the site itself says:

The problem with dashboards is they don’t directly provide insights or deliver knowledge about the data. Even worse, most visualizations require the user go through the mental exercise of interpreting the results. Site Ai does the analysis for you and presents the information in plain English.

I’ve always said that infographics are more “graphics” than “info,” simply because so many visuals are open to misinterpretation. And the big problem for most ad agencies, and other firms, is the lack of ability to turn the data into information we can use. Site AI, even though it’s auto-generated, might be able to help us make more of the data we actually collect. Which could lead to better insights, more effective user experiences, and bigger ideas.

It’s one small victory for verbal presentation against the onslaught of visual information.

The post Site AI Aims To Bring Big Interpretation To Big Data appeared first on AdPulp.

Twitter is finding its rhythm, a.k.a. business model.

Teressa Iezzi reports that the Tweet factory just inked a multiyear agreement worth hundreds of millions of dollars with Publicis-owned media giant Starcom MediaVest Group.

What does Starcom want with Twitter? Sweet data, baby!

So my TV remote is broken- which pretty much cancels my evening plans with detectives Benson and Stabler. And Eames and Goren. And Dr Grey.

— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) April 22, 2013

According to Iezzi the deal has three-parts: a social TV lab; an in-tweet mobile survey; and the ability to leverage Twitter’s API for planning.

The idea is to provide the firm’s clients with “unprecedented real-time data on how consumers are watching (TV), buying and the conversations that amplify brand messages,” says Starcom CEO Laura Desmond.

In other words, Twitter will now do the job that TV and Nielsen can not, by offering marketers real-time analysis of who is watching which programs, and what the temperature of the room is.

The post Twitter’s Real-Time Data Is Money appeared first on AdPulp.

Is Jeff Bezos the new Aaron Spelling?

No, but Amazon Studios, the original content arm of Bezos’ company, is offering up a lot of episodic content today — 14 new pilots to be exact. Six of the 14 pilots from are aimed at kids. The other eight are Adult Comedies. Alpha House is a political comedy; Betas is a comedy about working at a tech startup; and Those Who Can’t looks to be about lame high school teachers; and so on.

Before investing too deeply, Amazon wants to hear from people, a.k.a. “the crowd,” on which, if any, shows they liked. Presumably, the highly rated pilots will then be developed into full blown serial entertainment properties.

The programs are available exclusively on Amazon Prime Instant Video, which may make sense inside Amazon, but it results in yet another platform war. And since Amazon Prime is not linked to Apple TV, viewing is constrained to the third screen. Also, there are no Amazon trailers for these 14 pilots on YouTube. Amazon Studios does maintain a a YouTube channel, but the content there is a bit stale, given the new push.

Seattle-based GeekWire notes that Amazon’s push into the video distribution arena, means taking on the likes of Hulu and Netflix, who have been offering their own exclusive content.

Netflix, of course, created a hit with Kevin Spacey and House of Cards earlier this year. Yesterday, the company rolled out its newest program, Hemlock Grove, a chilling supernatural series based on Brian McGreevy’s novel. Unlike Amazon, Netflix is more than happy to provide a trailer for its programming on YouTube.

Netflix is also different from Amazon in that it is not testing its entertainment product on the Web. All 13 episodes of Hemlock Grove were uploaded last night. As fans begin to feast on one episode after the next — which is much easier to do, given that Netflix shows are available via Apple TV — Netflix may have another hit on its hands by Monday, and all the press that comes with it. What will Amazon have, by contrast? New data to pour over?

The post World’s Biggest Bookstore Dips Toe Into Serial Entertainment appeared first on AdPulp.

This is the hype machine and the the hype machine is deafening.

Chugga, Chugga, Chugga the hype machine goes. That’s the sound of spinning yarns into memes and trends. Social media is the new this. Content is the new that. And so on.

Which is why I find this cold glass of water (or is it sand in the gear box?) from serial entrepreneur Kaila Colbin refreshing.

In the provocatively titled “Can We Please Stop Hyping Social As The Marketing Messiah?” Nathan Safran replaces assumptions with data. During the 2012 holiday season, for example, 34% of retail website visits came from search. 40% were direct. 2% — yes, a mere two percent — were from social.

Another study Safran cites has 15% of respondents always or often turning to social for shopping or product research, while 97% say they always or often turn to search. Search is obviously not the only possible marketing channel out there, but at least if your dogma is that “search is best,” you’ve got some stats supporting you.

I’m not a search marketer. And this post isn’t about search, it’s about our ability to reason and read between the lines. For instance, digital spending reports continue to baffle me. Up and up the spending goes; yet, so-called display ads are the worst of the worst ROI generators.

Can we trust our most trusted media sources today? Hell, can we trust our own media literacy?

Companies are about to spend $17 billion dollars on display ads this year, but only one tenth of one percent of the people who see these display ads will notice, or act. The information fails to justify. Either companies are throwing money down the hype-made drain for no good reason, or display ads work much better than reported.

The post Protect Yourself from Industry Hype – Search Is What People Use When They Intend To Buy appeared first on AdPulp.

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