It seems that we’ve fallen into an age of technicians. Or worse, an age of technocrats. The focus of marketing is increasingly about technology, with few hat tips left to creativity. Rather, marketing is now the domain of those who create and promote platforms and apps. It’s the domain of those who herald a new age of conversation and giving goods away free.

These are today’s marketing rock stars. Even though many of them don’t believe in good old fashioned marketing. According to many of them, any prior form of marketing is dead, along with brands and advertising.

The funny thing is the majority of consumers couldn’t care less. Sure, they flock to facebook, use gmail and view videos on YouTube. But to them it doesn’t represent anything other than convenient and free entertainment and communication.

In fact, I’ve never heard anybody outside the hallowed echo chamber of social media actually call it social media. “What are you doing tonight?” “Oh, participating in a little social media, how about you?”

Social media is just another form of media added to the palette. Not the promised land. Neither does it represent the destruction, or replacement of marketing and advertising.

The problem is the barn doors have been kicked open allowing anybody with a social media opinion in. Now everybody is a self-proclaimed marketing expert, guru, or maven. (Oddly enough, ‘maven’ is a word coined by an ad guy in the 1960’s. But like so many things in marketing, you’d have to believe much of the history was invented yesterday).

Over at a blog called The Ad Contrarian, Bob Hoffman says, “The advertising industry, in fact the whole of marketing, is now sinking in the quicksand of complicators. They are in charge. This is the era of the complicator.

He’s right. The influx of complicators has caused confusion, inertia and as a result, some very bad marketing efforts and advertising lately. But, like most things, it’s probably cyclical.

Back in 1947, prior to opening up Doyle Dane Bernbach, Bill Bernbach wrote a letter to his then employer, Grey Advertising. In the letter he expounded on a topic that reflects much of what we’re dealing with today:

I’m worried that we’re going to fall into the trap…that we’re going to worship techniques instead of substance, that we’re going to follow history instead of making it, that we’re going to be drowned by superficialities instead of buoyed up by solid fundamentals. I’m worried lest hardening of the creative arteries begin to set in.

There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules. They can tell you that people in an ad will get you greater readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this sort or that long. They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier reading. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

It’s that creative spark that I’m so jealous of for our agency and that I am so desperately fearful of losing. I don’t want academicians. I don’t want scientists. I don’t want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things.

In the past year I must have interviewed about 80 people – writers and artists. Many of them were from the so-called giants of the agency field. It was appalling to see how few of these people were genuinely creative. Sure, they had advertising know-how. Yes, they were up on advertising technique.

But look beneath the technique and what did you find? A sameness, a mental weariness, a mediocrity of ideas. But they could defend every ad on the basis that it obeyed the rules of advertising. It was like worshiping a ritual instead of the God.

All this is not to say that technique is unimportant. Superior technical skill will man a good man better. But the danger is a preoccupation with technical skill or the mistaking of technical skill for creative ability.

The danger lies in the temptation to buy routinized men who have a formula for advertising. The danger lies In the natural tendency to go after tried-and-true talent that will not make us stand out in competition but rather make us look like all the others.

If we are to advance we must emerge as a distinctive personality. We must develop our own philosophy and not have the advertising philosophy of others imposed on us.

Let us blaze new trails. Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling.

Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at Altimeter Group (specializing in research and consulting on digital strategies), wrote a post on his blog, titled: “Scorecard: Does Your Agency Fondle The Hammer?” He too cautions clients away from agencies focused on tools and techniques:

Caution. Agency partners that are focused on technologies –not business needs, can destroy your brand. Although new technologies are emerging at an ever-increasing speed, creating a strategy based on tools will leave you in a churn of change, without anyway to escape. Agency partners that jump from one shiny tool to the next (hammer fondlers) risk poor implementation, not tying efforts to business goals and worst of all confusing your customers as you over-deploy.

Rather than developing a strategy based on the latest tool –focus on the end goal of building a place for your customers to come interact with each other, and your brand.  Look for agency partners that focus on customer behaviors, and business goals as the over-arching goal.

All of this is not to say digital tools and technology are bad.

Social media, is a great and promising new development that requires skill in getting to know how to use it and integrate it into a broader business purpose.

Rather, as science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon, so eloquently put it, “Ninety percent of everything is crap.”

Given the ubiquity of communications, hype and along with it - expert opinion – Sturgeon’s law is more true today than ever.

Take the fun out of advertising and the spirit is gone. When there’s little to motivate the people creating it, then there will be little built into the advertising to motivate an audience.

The same could be said for taking the fun out of anything. Except for taxes.

Fun is the one thing that should be included in all aspects of the advertising manufacturing process, injecting the final product with an overdose. Fun is contagious inside the organization and out. It’s something the audience will grab onto and share with their friends. It’s something that will be remembered long after the campaign has ended.

“Up The Organization” is a book written in the ‘60’s by Robert C. Townsend, the CEO of Avis Rent A Car. In a chapter titled “Advertising” he writes:

Fire the whole advertising department and your old agency. Then go get the best new agency you can. And concentrate your efforts on making it fun for them to create candid, effective advertising for you. Unless you’ve just done this, the odds favor that you have a bunch of bright people working at cross purposes to produce – at best – mediocre ads.

Mr. Townsend hired Bill Bernbach’s agency, DDB, on one condition put forward by Bill himself, “…run every ad we write where we tell you to run it.”

For that Bill promised, “five times the impact.” Apart from that he gave good reason for the condition:

Our people work to see how effective their ideas are. But most clients put our ads through a succession of Assistant VP’s and VP’s of advertising, marketing and legal until we hardly recognize the remnants. If you promise to run them just as we write them, you’ll have every art director and copywriter in my shop moonlighting on your account.

Given the success of their arrangement, Mr. Townsend wrote the “Avis Rent A Car Advertising Philosophy” for his employees. Points 4 and 5 stand out:

4. To this end, Avis will approve or disapprove, not try to improve ads which are submitted. Any changes suggested by Avis must be grounded on a material operating defect (a wrong uniform for example).
5. To this end, DDB will only submit for approval those ads which they as an agency recommend. They will not “see what Avis thinks of that one.”

At the end of the chapter, Mr. Townsend said:

The rest is history. Our internal sales growth rate increased from 10 per cent to 35 per cent in the next couple of years.
Moral: Don’t hire a master to paint you a masterpiece and then assign a roomful of schoolboy-artists to look over his shoulder and suggest improvements.

As for the ads? They’re just as provocative and engaging today as they were in the '60's.

In fact, Avis is still running “We try harder.” But the motivating, “We’re No. 2″ has long since been abandoned.

We’ve gone through three technology cycles since then and we’re into the fourth. But despite all the new ways of consuming media, people remain essentially the same. They can be persuaded by a good argument, a point of difference, something new and useful – as long as the message is crafted and delivered in a way they will receive it. In a way they want to believe it. In a way they’ll be happy to share it.

And that’s the point of advertising. It’s not about the metrics, or analytics. It’s not about what everybody inside the organization thinks, or feels comfortable with. It’s not about fish bowl focus groups.

It’s about a provocative and persuasive message built on a product difference.

Even if it’s a negative difference. Like the Avis example.

Unfortunately, most companies would never run a campaign like that today. They wouldn’t run it even though the underdog position works. Proven by many movie franchises, books, documentaries and myths.

Today is a gutless age.

Add fragmented media; an overabundance of useless metrics; everybody and their mother tilting the CMO’s ear; confusion over terms, semantics and marketing language in general; gimmicks; quick fixes rather than brand building; political correctness – and what do you get?

Inertia.

But mostly, fear.

On his blog, a well known ad guy, Alex Bogusky wrote, “Fear is the mortal enemy of creativity.”

I think he’s right. Though, Jack Neary, a Creative Director friend at a large NY agency claims that “fear is my alarm clock.” Jack has always been very creative.

I think fun defeats fear. I think fun is contagious. I think fun gives everybody a good reason to get up in the morning, despite the alarm clock.

I think clients would get a lot of free extra value out of their agency if they had an attitude like Mr. Townsend.

And Corporations would get a lot more added to their bottom line if they had a CEO like Mr. Townsend as well.

Or Mr. Jobs. Or Mr. Knight. Or Mr. Branson.

Advertising works. It just doesn’t work as well as it could for everybody.

 

Bill Bernbach forever changed the advertising agency business by knocking down the wall between the copy and art departments and forming the copywriter and art director team. It only made sense at the time and it became the impetus for the agency creative revolution that followed.

But are those days coming to an end?

In the past, the art director had to know things, such as the litho process, marking up type, marker rendering, mechanical art production, etc. These were important trade skills that not just anybody could do. But many of these practices have disappeared due to technology. And whatever’s left are now software applications that anybody can learn.

As more of these practices and disciplines become digitized and commoditized, the once proprietary trade skills and knowledge set of the art director are diminishing.

The copywriter isn’t fairing much better. As information and entertainment becomes ubiquitous, copy - let alone long copy - is disappearing. Attention is at a premium and the demands are that communication be short, simple and understood across media channels and cultures.

Rather than execution, the creative idea has always been the most important thing. Yet, in most copywriter/art director relationships, it’s typically only one of the two that consistently delivers ideas. Often, the idea partner is also equally adept at both copy and art.

Then there’s the cost. Two salaries. Two expense accounts. Two benefits packages. Two yearly reviews and expected raises. Two of everything.

The system is no longer efficient, effective, or valid. As with so many other things, technology is making it redundant.

In this day and age, doesn’t it make more sense that an advertising idea person is teamed with a technology person?

We think so and that’s what we’re doing. We team a strategic planner with a creative idea person and a technology person in what we call a cell. The cell is the key contact and collaborator with our clients. Integration is achieved at the point of planning and each person in the cell is free to collaborate with whoever they need to execute. This is the foundation of our structure and what we believe is a more relevant model for the 21^st century. We also recognize that not many agencies can do this. Especially the large ones, organized as they are around silos.

For example, a former protégé of mine who is now working for a large, well known agency as a creative director, recently lost his art director partner. To replace him and to try something new he suggested to management that he be paired with the creative director of their digital silo. Everybody thought that would be a good idea, until it dawned on them that both are responsible for their own profit and loss, as well as the management of their respective silos and disciplines, making it impossible.

Large agencies are too heavily invested in the old way of doing things and find it difficult enough to experiment, let alone change. In fact, they’re addicted to building silos. As soon as a new discipline, or way of making money is identified, up goes a silo.

The main problem with silos are the walls. Silos force everything through the lens of their own particular discipline. Insulated from the real world, the idea serves execution, rather than vice versa. And miraculously, all client problems can be solved by the thinking inside each particular silo alone.

Is this the best way to serve client needs and solve their problems efficiently, creatively and fast? How can the product coming from this antiquated organizational structure be called integrated, when any sort of integration happens not at the point of planning, but instead is cobbled together sometime after the fact?

More importantly, wasn’t it these very same walls that Bill Bernbach demolished fifty odd years ago, heralding the first creative revolution in advertising?