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.

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Back in 1990, an iPhone would have been the size of a car.

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Competition between these two produces a winner. Consumers.

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"Living in an information age...knocks down all the walls between culture and business." As far as I'm concerned, McLuhan becomes more relevant as the years pass. An academic visionary, or charlatan? What do you think? (via Mark's Posterous)

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