Hasta La Creative!

Editor’s note: Please welcome Nathan Archambault of AKQA in NYC to AdPulp. An earlier version of this article appeared on Maybe I’m Gravy.

The old advertising agency model, the one where Madison Avenue agencies took their sweet and expensive time, isn’t working anymore.

It’s time for a forced retirement.

Sorry, old model. The nature of the business has changed. Client relationships have splintered and the traditional methods by which agencies profited are shrinking or disappearing. Clients want more effective work and they want it faster and cheaper.

Agencies are left with a clear choice: become more nimble, flexible and cost-effective or fade away. As Jeff Goodby recently admitted, we’re past the time for quick fixes.

It’s time to build a more agile agency. Here are a few things agency leaders can do.

Reduce logistics.

Today’s agency doesn’t need the same departments that were once a centerpiece to the creative offering. Goodby folded project management into account management and scaled back in-house production, opting to work with more outside vendors. Other agencies have eliminated the studio department, instead leaving final design responsibilities to creative instead of to a separate department.

Ask your agency: What departments are redundant, outdated or inefficient?

Operate like a newsroom.

It’s time for agencies to get out of the meeting business and get into the making business. The old model has too much overhead, too much process and too many barriers getting in the way of the work. An agency should feel like a living organism with the sole goal of producing great work, and nothing else should matter or get in the way. Oreo operated like a newsroom during last year’s Super Bowl and we all know how that turned out.

Ask your agency: What can we do to get out of the way of the work?

Replace perfection with experimentation.

In the past, clients demanded perfection and the agencies that delivered it thrived. These days, experimentation returns more on investment. Google launches everything in beta and future updates are expected and (mostly) welcome. The important thing today is getting your product, service or campaign idea to market. Once people have access to it, you can gather feedback, revise and repeat. This is what successful startups like Instagram, Foursquare and Path do and it works pretty well for them.

Ask your agency: What can we make today and worry about making better tomorrow?

Hire doers, not thinkers.

Agencies used to be able to hire creative teams to sit around and think up big ideas. But teams that lack the craft to build the ideas they come up with aren’t pulling their weight today. They’re requiring the agency to hire someone else to execute and bring the vision to life. The jig is up, big thinkers: Being clever and having good taste is no longer a job. That’s why side projects are the new main course – they’re the work of a doer.

Ask your agency: Who actually makes things around here?

Cast for talent.

Interpersonal relationships and unique skills matter more than staffing plans. The need may be for an ACD-level copywriter, but it’s important to be open to creative solutions when filling this or any position. An agile agency wants to find people with the right mindset, regardless of whether or how they fit into a particular department or job title. With the right people in place, an agency can cast for projects, not staff for them.

Ask your agency: Are we hiring the best people first and determining their role later?

Deconstruct the process.

It doesn’t make sense to implement the same process for every project. These days, unlike when advertising was mostly made of TV and print, each project is different from the last. Michael Lebowitz, Founder and CEO of Big Spaceship, gives his teams a framework instead of a process. This allows each team, each operating as mini-agenices, to bubble up a unique process that leads to more unique work.

Ask your agency: Are we finding new paths to the end goal of creativity?

Integrate every department.

The different stages of any given project shouldn’t feel like a baton pass. The brief can’t spend weeks with strategy before being handed off to the creative department, and later to production. AKQA CCO Rei Inamoto believes that agencies need to combine strategy, storytelling and software in order to build emotional and useful connections with people. This means that creative, strategy and technology work together from the start, making each team more invested at every stage of the process.

Ask your agency: Is each team member a stakeholder from the beginning?

Maybe you’re not in a position to change the way your agency operates. But there is something you can do: you can join an agency that believes in the game-changing power of agility.

In this agile age, one thing is for certain: the inflexible will be left behind.

Previously on AdPulp: The Google To Adlandia: Be Lean And Agile Like Us, And You’ll Be Rich Like Us

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Hats off to David Zaleski at iMedia Connection for capturing a serious topic in a humorous way.

Zaleski says at the end of his video lashing that there’s no need for social media managers. I wouldn’t go that far, but statistics do point to a downward trend. According to newly released stats from career site Indeed.com, growth in positions with the title “social media manager” slowed to 50% in the past year, a dramatic decline from recent years, when triple and even quadruple digit growth was commonplace.

Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite, believes the decline in social media managers indicates a sea change in the way that social media itself is used within organizations. Once the exclusive domain of digital gurus, Twitter, Facebook, and other tools are gradually becoming everyone’s responsibility.

To my mind, everyone’s responsibility means a shared responsibility. Brands do in fact need agency partners who live and breathe digital media to develop a strategic framework and help guide the discussion online. Brands also need people inside the company to step up and field customer requests when they come in via social, and to help deliver “real news” from inside the company.

Social is about real people and real voices — when a skilled staffer or team of staffers takes on social media marketing responsibilities, the authentic voice that comes through is impossible to fake or replicate and that’s worth a lot.

The post For Modern Brands, Social Media Marketing Is A Shared Responsibility appeared first on AdPulp.

I spent the past weekend visiting friends in Atlanta, and revisiting familiar haunts. So while taking in a little college football at a sports bar on Saturday, I saw a new (to me, at least) form of distraction: A rotating slide show screen housed in a napkin/straw dispenser, courtesy of a company called Mediacaddy.

I’m not exactly sure how the system works, although slides seem to get semi-updated throughout the day with news tidbits, weather reports, and of course…advertising. Admittedly, the ads aren’t quite there yet:

With 5 Mediacaddys on the bar, I’ll admit I got a bit curious. Mediacaddy is, after all, simply the latest form of interruptive marketing, a modern-day approach to the table tent. But it’s quite in-your-face, so clever POP ad concepts could push sales for the right liquid brand (or taxi service). It’s also a reminder that, in this day of multiple screens to distract the tavern-goer, there’s always room for one more. And there’s always a startup willing to take old-school advertising and slip it into new packages.

The post Mediacaddy Puts A Third Screen Right At The Bar appeared first on AdPulp.

Are you a change agent? If you work in advertising today, there is no doubt.

According to The Wall Street Journal, a recent Adobe survey found that 76% of marketers think marketing has changed more in the past two years than in the past 50.

Needless to say, digital is the great disruptor. Clearly, there is much opportunity in this turbulent media atmosphere — new agencies with new specialties are being born. On the other hand, there is much chagrin.

Sometimes I miss the days when I had a print ad and a radio spot, said Carlos Figueiredo, a creative director at Publicis Kaplan Thaler. He said it feels like there are “a billion” ad options today.

I know how Figueiredo feels. We want to uphold not just tradition, but craft, and radio and print are great vehicles for it. Also, traditional media tends to deliver desired results.

Someday, we may in fact bring craft to digital advertising. Media companies, brand marketers and possibly consumers with no ad blockers in place will be grateful. Because for all the talk about innovation and change, when it comes to display advertising, most of what’s out there continues to be an embarrassment.

Of course, display ads represent just one aspect of digital advertising. There are many more creative expressions of brand advertising in digital, including serial video content, mobile utility and the building of brand sites and microsites. Nevertheless, sometimes you just want to make a radio spot.

The post Digital Disruption Adds Complexity To The Job of Keeping Things Simple appeared first on AdPulp.

Jonah Peretti, Founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, kindly outlined his media company’s plan for the coming year. He also opted to share the memo on LinkedIn, “so future BuzzFeed employees could read it too.”

His seventh main point in the plan concerns Advertising on BuzzFeed.

Part of being a great business, is being a ‘must buy’ for advertisers who have many options. This means giving advertisers the full advantage of our scale, our data, our creative team, our social and mobile reach, and our technology platform… In the coming years we will expand BuzzFeed University to train brands and agencies in the ‘BuzzFeed way’, we will launch a branded video studio in LA to compliment our creative team in NYC, we will grow our partnerships with Facebook and Twitter to expand buys beyond BuzzFeed, and we will develop our social homepages product to power social advertising across the web. We have the ability to solve our clients biggest challenges with a unique combination of technology, content, scale, and expertise.

CEOs do get juiced on their own talking points, I understand that. And hey, if AdPulp was raking in the BuzzFeed cash pile, I might be the one issuing talking points. Regardless, let me ask you are you prepared to attend BuzzFeed University and learn the BuzzFeed way?

Hey, I can hear you groaning from here. But ad people have been notoriously slow on the digital uptake. Given how much money this reluctance to be disrupted has cost the industry, and how dumb it makes traditional ad people look, perhaps now is the time to listen to Professor Peretti. What do you think?

The post BuzzFeed Is Making A Nourishing Meal From Its Giant Menu of Info Snacks appeared first on AdPulp.

The newspaper business fascinates me. Like advertising, it’s a place for rogues. And like advertising the industry is rapidly morphing into something hardly recognizable to its senior practitioners.

Change is natural, of course, but change is not always good. According to Columbia Journalism Review, “The Oregonian is about to get Newhouse’d.”

The Times Picayune company yielded to NOLA Media Group (and Advance Central Services). The Plain Dealer shifted focus to digital, cut publication/delivery, and added Northeast Ohio Media Group. Advance’s Alabama papers became Alabama Media Group. All more or less followed the same template: gutted newsrooms, reduced publication, and a turn to the hamster-wheel model of digital journalism.

Now Portland’s Willamette Week reports that The Oregonian’s holding company has filed to trademark the name Oregonian Media Group.

The Newhouse family owns Condé Nast — publisher of Vanity Fair, Vogue, Wired and many other top shelf magazines. The family is also in the newspaper business. In 1950, Advance Publications founder S. I. Newhouse purchased The Oregonian for $5.6 million.

Like all newspaper owners today, the Newhouse family is scrambling for answers to tough economic problems. Their failure to find them is becoming a real problem for the company, and its newsroom staffers.

Oddly, for a company leaning towards digital (over print), Advance’s corporate site looks like something right out of 1994. I don’t see this as a minimalist approach, I see it as lazy and uncaring.

Regardless, what the hell is Advance’s leadership doing to its newspapers brands? Advance is taking historic newspaper brands — which “belong” the the city, as much as anyone — and corporatizing them in a weak bow to digital. The strategy is flawed in so many ways. For instance, The Oregonian is one of the most recognizable and powerful brands in the state, along with Nike, Intel, The Ducks and so on. Yet, to read “the paper” online, you must go to OregonLive.com.

I’m not against sub-brands or offshoots, but the digital version of The Oregonian, from a brand perspective, is The Oregonian, not Oregon Live. And “Oregon Live” as a two-word combo packs no punch. It’s lightweight, frivolous. The Oregonian, by comparison (like the other legendary newspapers owned by the Newhouse family) has history, believability and the community on its side.

[UPDATE 10:48 a.m.] Here’s the official announcement, just released from The Oregonian: The Oregonian will continue to be published daily and sold at outlets in the Portland metropolitan area and elsewhere in the state and southwestern Washington. Home delivery will be Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, and include the Saturday edition as a bonus.

Previously on AdPulp: Will The Newspaper Industry Save Itself By Reinventing Online Advertising?

The post The Oregonian Is A Valuable Brand Asset, But Its New York Owners Have Other Ideas 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.

Few bloggers keep me, or anyone else, interested for long. When one does it is worth noting.

Geoff Livingston writes beautifully about marketing, and content marketing in particular, which is not easy to do.

Given the level of noise in the sector at the moment, I appreciate his insights and skilled delivery all the more. Here’s a recent clip:

Marketing is not the final product. Yet for some reason we treat it like a stand alone offering in our marketing conversations online. It’s frustrating to hear conversations about companies modeling after Red Bull, and then watch hundreds try to become a media company. Much of the resulting customer-centric content is created haphazardly with a blind eye to customer-brand relationship.

If I hear Livingston correctly, he’s saying don’t get lost in online engagement, as it may or may not be a brand-building activity. Duly noted!

In related news, Matt Kumin, founder and CEO of PublishThis suggests, “Developing an editorial voice is akin to building a brand.” Kumin also says you are what you eat, that “the content and sources that a company consumes define it as well as any outbound marketing or message that is communicated.”

Two lessons from Kumin’s piece: 1) Careful what you curate and 2) Seek out and digest highly nourishing media. The main takeaway from Livingston’s piece is concentrate on relationships with customers and then use media judiciously to support and/or enhance the brand experience.

Photo credit: Flickr user, technotheory

The post Optimize Your Content To Support Marketing and Drive Sales appeared first on AdPulp.

Media companies certainly have a ton to gain by solving the online advertising riddle that continues to plague Adland, for they will be the direct beneficiary of client dollars invested.

According to Adweek, The New York Times’ 10-person Idea Lab is helping to reshape what it means to be a display ad.

Just as technology enables the Times to tell stories in a more visual, more interactive way, it now affords advertisers the same opportunity.

Recently, Idea Lab created an ad unit for Prudential, the insurance giant, which allows people to type in their date of birth and see the front page of the Times on the day they were born.

The ad satisfies the interactivity problem straight away and that’s a big step in the right direction. Plus, if you think of the Times’ archives as a canvas and a data mine, a developer certainly has plenty to work with.

From the agency perspective, the desire for a more complex storytelling vehicle is palpable. No one wants to make banner ads that just sit there. We’re happy to now ask what kind of value these ad units can deliver, and how can they perform more like an App?

The post Using Interactive Technology To Forward The Brand Story appeared first on AdPulp.

What has Twitter unleashed with its new video platform, Vine?

For one, instructional video now comes in six-second bites, care of Lowe’s, BBDO New York and director/photgrapher Meagan Cignoli.

Here’s another tutorial from Lowe’s, also in six second frames meant to be digested on Twitter. And here’s a non-branded Vine from Ms. Cignoli, an artist busy exploring what the platform offers.

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