10 Reasons Why There’s Not More Great Work in the Interactive Space
8th April 09
Posted in creativity, interactive
(NOTE: This post is an attempt to capture some of the emerging themes resulting from an earlier and original post on the subject - see http://bit.ly/iZf7 for original post . . . probably worth going there first if you’ve landed here and want to contribute)
Some great, insightful and provocative replies to the earlier question around the perceived paucity of great work in interactive.
First off, I found it fascinating that - to date at least - no one’s responded with a great list of knockout creative, or, in fact, with any knockout creative. This would suggest that there is indeed a problem and that it’s not just perception. Please correct me if I’m wrong here. I’m reassured that various folks who ‘know their shit’ have commented here, and I’m certain they would have picked out the gems had I missed them in my haste to make the point.
Second, what we have emerging is a really very useful list of factors that, together, explain why we’re not yet seeing consistently great work, and in particular strong enduring campaigns, in the interactive space. Factors cited by contributors will be familiar to many, and include the following, which are reported not as fact but as supposition, at least at this stage:
1. SPEED - Our lack of speed in responding to the changing landscape, a blight suffered by agencies of both old & new skools, digital & analogue, hampers creative innovation.
2. ENDURANCE - We suffer a particular weakness at creating . . . (more)
. . . work that endures over time - what Bud Caddell captures well as ‘long is the untapped market’.
3. VALUE - There endures a disparity in budget allocation between offline & online worlds, suggestive of a pervasive disparity in value in clients’ eyes, perhaps.
4. EFFECTIVENESS - The online mix is inevitably ‘optimized’, resulting in the replacement of brand building content for ‘hard sell’ work that ‘really delivers’ (Griffin Farley nails this powerfully in his response, suggesting that we currently encourage clients to look at media through the wrong lens).
5. PASSION - Interactivity can certainly make an ordinary brand more useful or more relevant, but truly great interactive ideas still tend to come from brands that people care about already (Tom Morton, as ever, sums this up infinitely better than I could).
6. LINEARITY - Involvement of the specialist digital agencies occurs too late for them to show what they can really do; they provide a microwave meal-style service rather than the full Cordon Bleu of which they are capable; they manage rather than soar.
7. BELATEDNESS - Even when the right people are cast together (the geeks, the strategists & the creatives) it’s often too late for that fertile collision to produce the magic that should be possible.
8. NOT INVENTED HERE - We’re frequently seduced by the temptation to want to invent from scratch rather than borrow (&, critically, credit) with pride.
9. NARRATIVE - There’s currently much less of a culture of developing narrative or storytelling on the web (possibly linked to numerous points, above, including one made by Rory Sutherland about the instant disposability - & thus perceived low value - of much interactive work). I look enviously at the output of Campfire and other such agencies in this respect.
10. RISK - We’re crap at taking risks, partly because there’s no facility for doing so (& I liked Gareth Kay’s point about the CDP studio in the basement where people could flex their muscles and stretch the boundaries), but partly because many of us think we’re already taking risks, or being ‘new skool’ just meddling in digital. We’re not.
Hmmm. So what now. While many of these factors remain out of our immediate control or require significant re-tooling of our ‘factories’ (client budgets & pressures, archaic processes, the dreaded ‘optimization’ of media plans at the last second, the fact that people are more likely to be moved by atheletes or music than by fabric conditioner or banks), actually so much is easily within our remit to change. Now.
As Sir Winston Churchill noted, with Churchillian economy, ‘attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference’.
Around half of these factors seem - at first glance - to be matters more of approach than of structure. Creating an environment for experimentation, giving away credit (or at the very least ensuring it’s shared with those who deserve it), encouraging early and respectful collaboration . . . these might surely be actioned today? What’s stopping us?
Some of the more structural issues - around the value of interactive, linear process, cumbersome execution of that process - present more of a headache, but remain ENTIRELY within our control. The one area I feel I particularly disagree with contributors on is in instances where the client is blamed for something. I’m not absolving certain clients from responsibility for poor interactive work, but I am clearing them of the responsibility for changing the situation. It’s down to the folks who runs the businesses which are dysfunctional to change those businesses. That’s us, by the way.
So moving forward I’d really like to hear about solutions to some of these issues. It has to be the most exciting time to be doing what we’re doing since Mad Men. We’re only going to be doing this - if we’re lucky - for a few handfuls of years. So my mantra is fight for change today, not tomorrow. And don’t even think about complaining if you’re not also actively engaged in changing.
Would really value your thoughts on accelerating transformation.
38 comments on “10 Reasons Why There’s Not More Great Work in the Interactive Space”
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Ben Malbon
I think, like I said in that other post…but with completely different words, agencies (digital or otherwise) need to get more involved in creating things that will draw clients to them rather than getting in front of clients and saying what they can do.
A lot of clients have only the most passing interaction with the elements of the interactive world that a lot of us take for granted…and they’re no different than the users we’re trying to engage.
Qapture is a great example of getting out ahead of the curve and creating some gravity that will draw in users and interaction. I don’t think it’s OMGWTFBBQ! But it’s community creation and development for it’s own sake and I think that is a pretty profound shift in mindset.
Have a look at this brilliant, short, deck from John Maeda, President of the Rhode Island School of Design: http://creativeleadership.com/slides-4 Maeda is both a designer and computer scientist (as well as a brilliant thinker). The fact that his work straddles both design and technology gives him a unique perspective on the area where these two fields are merging and is very relevant to you marketing types. Slides 3 and 4 are particularly instructive - as he contrasts the hallmarks of traditional leadership with those required for new-skool Creative Leadership. The comments here touch on some of the contrasts he points to (taking risks, linearity etc) but I think the most powerful contrast he draws is “Orchestra Model” vs “Jazz Ensemble”. This for me captures the gap in leadership and team structure between ‘what you have’ and ‘what you need’ t do great interactive, whilst simultaneously capturing the vast difference in aesthetic approach. Two further characteristics of the new creative leadership are “Comfort with Ambiguity” and “Metaphorical in Tone” - so I won’t explain too much. Have a look at the deck and see which column most describes you and your organisation. How many people want to be in the left hand column any more…?
I agree with the issues of risk and value.
Too often digital production work appears to be a “race to the bottom”, ideas and execution are too rapid a commodity. Down-stream digital agencies are often selected, by clients and lead agencies, by their price and an idea too well defined so they can form a contractual relationship.
How often do you hear of a risky piece of interactive work being prototyped and thrown away to actually improve the creative process.
Truely great work in the interactive space won’t happen until the same budgets and processes are thrown at it that are more commonly seen with a first-round funding for a digital startup.
And that will only happen when we get the same passion for digital as delivered by the entrepreneurs, which is sadly lacking at both clients and agencies alike.
When did all this become work?
Projector + Uniqlo = Uniqlock, one of my favourite pieces of digital work. Knockout creative. AND it’s branded (following up on my comment to your previous post).
Build the right team, make that blindingly obvious idea a creative reality, sell it in, sit back and relax. Or start work on the next piece of knockout creative. Let the naysayers say what they want, and go for broke.
Find the issues of narrative ability and comfort with risk particularly resonant.
Yes, getting to truly great work in the interactive space requires much greater comfort with risk, ambiguity, even an element of chaos than most of us are instinctively comfortable with. But if we are are uncomfortable our clients, anxious to set budgets and agree on fixed tasks are inevitably even less comfortable. So somehow we have to find ways of taking the pain and fear out of risk-presenting clients with the upside of risk but also finding faster, cheaper ways to experiment. Clients I’ve spoken to are comfortable with experimentation, even happy to set aside an experimentation fund, as long as the financial risk is at a level they feel is manageable. We also need to show them that there is method in the madness, that what seems like an inefficient way of working is actually the only effective way to work.
Your point about narrative struck me on two levels. One, “traditional” marketing thinking tends to be convergent-we try to summarise, precis, refine and and focus. We ask what is the one, single thing we want to say. Great on-line experiences tend to be divergent, fragmented and multi-faceted. It’s a fundamental change of mindset. Second, perhaps we need to be mashing up entirely different skill sets-not simply technologists, strategists and creatives but creators of wonderful off-line narratives and images with on-line skills. So, for example, writers who make a virtue of the fragmented narrative or unreliable narrator in the off-line space could do extraordinary things in the on-line space if enabled with the right technical partnerships.
the fuss about why is digital so low on the radar for clients is REASON 10, most pople think about a national/regional work… since it is ROI linked. Digital or no digital it is hard to get any guy to take a risk in marketing. the bold ones are those who have no geography to look at, but serve a global community. the interactive work based on human insights make splases in a time frame… later the frame of reference changes ofr consumers, there is no magic in repeating it…CISCO GOAL, COKE HAPPINESS FACTORY, LIVE EARTH, good examples.
we never thought of digital advertising and the OTHER as ANALOG ADVERTISING did we… so why draw boundaries when we can collaborate the skills… the only reason I can think of is fear of losing money in chasing a dream… thats what plagues all of us
pardon the spelling errors…to read it would actually be lisp-syncing … the head thinks faster than my keybored skills
1. Make progress, not noise – find creative ways of delivering objective-based interactive campaigns versus doing lots of stuff. Perhaps this only goes half way to solving the effectiveness issue, but at least we can show clients that we think beyond the microsite and ancillary “cool kid” tactics that turn clients into skeptics.
2. Create Utility – ask yourself if the work ads value (to users, to the media mix, to the brand). A lot of times we’re so focused on deadlines and drunk on our own “creativity” that we forget people “use” what we make. If the work doesn’t do anything for the consumer, it’s not going to do anything for the brand.
3. Stop focusing on the meme du jour – enough said.
4. Reward Collaboration - don’t ask me what that “reward” looks like, but it just seems that on a very human level, behavioral change (even in Ad Land) can be tied back to incentives…remember Maslow? Until people are rewarded for strong cross-platform/media/disciplinary integration and collaboration, they’ll have no NEW reasons to celebrate or foster those behaviors.
Two challenges agencies face are:
• alleviating the risks in using the new technologies which are available
• getting over the perception that technology changes really quickly and that they need to keep up
The reality is that technology takes time to be understood as an enabler, for example CRM has been around since the early 1990’s and it has only been in the mainstream for the last 5 years and even now there are very few companies who actually gain maximum benefit from the tools and there are plenty of mid to small companies who have not adopted it or even know what it does.
There is an anxious view within the marketing world that “we are missing out on something really cool” – if we are not using the latest cool technology. Time needs to be spent on working out what piece of the puzzle technology supports or enables and then look to include it in the process – history shows that the first or best technology does not always become the market leader – it may just be the first company to solve that problem. The challenge is to identify the different problems and look at the companies solving then today and work out how these tools can benefit the creative process today and be prepared to replace the technology over time.
The technology used today is unlikely to be the technology that is used in 3 or 5 years time; however the underlying problems do not change:
• Sell more product in one or more markets
• Increase market share in one or markets
• Launch product in one or more markets
• Gain insight about customers needs and wants
• Identify unmet needs and look to address with new product or service
• Communicate with stakeholders, customers, employees, shareholders, partners, suppliers, advocates, external influencers etc
• Engage stakeholders in conversation to gain insight
• Measure results of sales and marketing activities
• Create assets for client campaign and distribute to local market for adaptation and localisation
• Share media plans with global client team
• Etc etc etc……..
The challenge for agencies is to understand that technology provides an enabling platform, which can be used to support the creative process and provide new communication channels as well as create and develop stakeholder relationships, which can provide valuable insight into needs and wants - creating new opportunities.
Many campaigns and initiatives today are about getting quick wins through grabbing attention in one or more digital channel rather than creating a platform for longer term benefits.
Businesses need to do both and agencies have to decide how far into the new online world which encompasses business model innovation, new creative and communication platforms, Video, IPTV and mobile, mixing branded and user generated content, two way communication and feedback on all areas of a business.
If agencies want to maximise the benefits that can be gained in an online world and create new opportunities for themselves and alleviate concerns with their clients then they need to put more effort into understanding what technology is, what it does and how this can be incorporated into the creative process – using twitter and writing blogs and creating quirky online videos is not enough.
Great post.
I do think though that it misses an important point. The underlying problems of commerce and marketing do not change but people’s behavior does. And it’s evolving in front of us, with online identity formation, participatory remix behaviors and all sorts of other interesting and emerging behaviors and artefacts.
The point about the internet being a platform is terrific but it’s important to remember it’s a platform for action and not a medium for messages. Or rather the medium for messaging is incorporated into to something much larger and dynamic as far as peoples lives today are concerned.
Love you point about technology as the SUBJECT of conversation. Technology is not the point other than to remind us all that we’re building software and that brings new concepts of creativity and long term responsibilities to the forefront. Thanks for great contribution.
Thank you.
Agree completely about change in behaviour being the result of the new tools and technologies - we are all changing our behaviour, agencies, clients, consumers and every segment within our custoer bases.
This change in behaviour has resulted in an expanding number of services and opportunities many of which need new skills and time to let the individuals with those skills learn to work together effectively and when they do - creatives, production studios, technology specialists, insight analysts, business consultants and clients - new creative examples will emerge which will be beyond what we can imagine today.
This is new for us all and it will be those that experiement, learn and evolve from the process who create the award winning work of the future.
I think this will be a great journey.
Fantastic discussion. Thanks for starting this one off Ben.
Obviously there are loads of reasons for our collective output being weaker than it could be. However, I think there is one key point that, if sorted out, will cause all the other issues will fall into line.
Ben mentioned, in the original post, the importance of defining what great digital work is. I believe that if we (clients and collaborating agencies) shared the same inspiring vision then “great digital work” would come more freely. It strikes me that in traditional advertising there is a long and understood heritage of what makes good communication. Go back to the early days of print advertising and the ads regarded as hum-dingers in their day are still exciting today.
This understanding is kept alive and fresh by the constant debate about what the modern classics are (e.g. Cadbury’s Gorilla and Hovis “As good today…”). These ads take on an aura as a result of commentary and become a shared language within ad agencies and their clients.
The problem that digital ideas is that there is far less opportunity for people to overhear the campaigns. This means that digital campaigns are less likely to become part of the pop cultural landscape. It also means that they are likely to be far fewer conversations about why these ideas deserve to be lauded.
We have a responsibility to spread knowledge and excitement about good digital campaigns. We should be helped by creative awards but often the content we need is put out of reach. The Cannes Lions website used to be a fantastic resource of creative from previous winners to share and discuss with colleagues and clients. Unfortunately, you now 1,500 euros for a subscription.
Surely we can find a way for these awards organisations to make money and help the common cause for better creative work?
Does anyone know of a aggregation website of links to agencies websites that host the previous “greats” (as a way of by-passing the awards) - like an FWA.com but for all types of campaigns?
If not - I might set one up…
What constitutes “knockout” work? Please explain.
exactly, thank you. please.
too many good brains have weighed in already mate
But - let’s look at some of these points.
Speed- the impact horizon of ideas gets shorter as replication and distribution gets faster. Sheet music becomes records becomes mp3. Bestselling hits are hits for less long accordingly.
Speed: We are not nimble. We are big, we are tangled in webs of different specialisms, the sign off process takes longer that the half life of ideas.
Endurance: We create campaigns. Digital doesn’t work that way. But in order to have ongoing commitment, someone needs to commit ongoing to manage and so on. Who does that?
At the moment we are still at the point of media transposition - using techniques from old media and applying it to new.
This is wrong.
Because the internet is a new kind of medium. Interactive at it’s heart. User controlled.
Value - ‘ad inventory’ is practically infinite online - so there will always be deflationary pressure when it comes to ‘ad units/ but nothing considered interesting usually lives in them anyway.
Passion - sure, in a way but these aren’t big passions. Mostly. All products are boring [to most people]. We try to make them interesting. Trainers: Boring. Japanese cars: Boring
Obviously I back transmedia planning a narrative model…
Anyway - I guess - if I’m to contribute anything - ALL WORK IS INTERACTIVE.
Even TV ads must be considered as such. Content to be remixed and spread.
But, for some good ‘interactive work’
http://www.crackunit.com/2009/03/17/9-reasons-japanese-interactive-work-is-awesome/
right - have to go give a presentation about digital and that
Faris. You wrote much, but didn’t say anything. Sorry man.
Maybe part of the reason there is no “knockout” work is because creatives and interactive folks are really speaking to themselves.
ACTA NON VERBA
Best wishes -jm
Yeah - you’re probably right about that
rockonfx
in fact ignore me and just click on the link
Seems to me that too much online marcoms is about interruption and not enough is about engagement. Even where there is an attempt to engage it through the medium of quick gags, not longer lasting emotional/imntellectual connections.
No knockout creative? That’s interesting because even the offline guys these days are continually looking at and getting inspired by the work shown on thefwa.com, for example.
Want one to start? How about http://www.gettheglass.com/? Knockout by North Kingdom
Great example, thank you for the reminder. Also check out Mike Arauz’s own post responding to Ben’s provocation here. Amongst other things, he cites what he sees as strong work in the interactive marketing space http://bit.ly/M17uJ
Love these two posts, thanks for sparking the debate– it’s one that I’ve been curious about for some time.
While I think there has been great creative work in the interactive space, largely the examples people site are elegantly executed or concepted campaign microsites- a breed that while not dead, is certainly not the main piece of the puzzle anymore. More difficult to measure is the connective social fabric that is so crucial to great creative in digital.
In addition to all of the factors above (RISK being the most weighty, I believe, with very few clients willing to embrace great, but risky, ideas) is that the very power of great advertising work as we’ve known it to date is in SIMPLICITY. Single-minded ideas that resonate without a ton of bells and whistles.
The inherent challenge with interactive is to not be distracted by all the amazing executional possibilities that exist to the point where it no longer comes from a single fountainhead– a big idea that resonates. Granted, today that idea will subsequently be chopped up into a thousand pieces, edited, and re-mixed by consumers, but without a single-minded concept, we’ll never really stand a chance.
The great creative work I’m anxious to see in digital will start from a single insight and action statement, be informed by but not lured by the “shiny new objects” du jour, and most importantly, LEAVE ROOM FOR CONSUMERS to own the idea themselves. Giving the consumer credit and a leading role is crucial to this.
To use an analogy I’ve used of late quite often- for the music folks out there- think of it as syncopation. Only when you leave spaces in the rhythm is there a groove, and only then do the audience members move into it. And that’s called dance.
I’d like to see consumers dance.
Alex, I love your use of dance as an analogy.
“Dance will bring the dead world to life and make it human”
Herbert Marcuse
(this via our own Mr Malbon’s PhD on clubbing which I can tell you is a chewy read, but worth it if this whole subject interests you http://bit.ly/1Acx8)
As I see it, most great creative, whether interactive or not in fact, has always allowed the audience space to draw their own conclusions, to fill in the gaps. The resulting sense of reward is not just for kicks, it creates a greater emotional connection between audience and brand.
The obvious relevance of your dance analogy to interactive is that it’s kinetic, behavioural. But what makes the analogy particularly powerful is the sense of humanity, connection, energy and inspiration it brings with it. And here I think we’re getting closer to a definition of what constitutes truly ‘knockout’ work.
You may be right about microsites, but I find format per se the least interesting thing. I am much more interested in what Alex Benady says above about lasting emotion connections, which - whilst by no means limited to this - builds on the point in Ben’s post about disposability and the lack of involving narrative or storytelling culture amongst brands on the web.
Undoubtedly, they have it easy in this sense, but entertainment brands are often the exception here. By way of example, say what you will about Watchmen, the marketing content around the graphic-novel-turned-film was, in my opinion, damn well near flawless. It built an immersive world a fan could lose themselves in happily over a prolonged period of time. More on this another day, but for now check out Dan Light at PPC’s candid & riveting account of producing it all here http://bit.ly/ajiU
Tim (@malbonster) of Made By Many has just posted his response to my pair of posts - definitely worth a read as it comes from a different perspective than most of the comments to date - “How to be better at digital, or interactive, or new media or whatever” http://bit.ly/4bxd7e
I’ve read this post a couple times over the past week, and I keep taking different things away from it.
Agreed we’re not yet seeing the best we can do with these new media tools, and agreed some of your reasons are bang-on. I especially concur with point 8 — too many of us are still hung up on creating ‘original stuff’ that we are missing the (possibly, biggest) opportunity interactive offers — rebuilding and reworking what’s already there into something new and visionary. The folly is obvious when you apply the thinking to another realm of creativity: if we had kept on reinventing the wheel, it is likely we would have reached the point where we could mount a chassis on four and call it a car.
More of a meta comment:
I wonder if your — and mine, and our — frustration about not seeing a lot of really great stuff in interactive, and wanting to see AMAZING stuff, doesn’t have something to do with the fact that it is, as far as communication tools go, a totally new discovery. It’s huge. And while we media insiders can see and imagine all it could do, we’re all (creators, consumers, those in between) still finding our feet with it.
An inherently frustrating process, but surely the I-can-almost-taste-it of knowing we are improving and getting closer, and that when we do get there, we will be the ones who did it, makes it worthwhile and exciting?
typo amend — apologies — end para 2, that would be ‘unlikely’.
I totally buy the point about new canvas. I bet things took a while to shake down and warm up when TV advertising was introduced; ditto radio. We live in an impatient world full of people judging everything, all the time.
If Interactive is, in fact, a new canvas, then why are so many websites just clickable print adverts? Why approach such a powerful tool/medium/canvas/channel/whatever with such 2 dimensional (old skool) mindset? New canvas, new thinking. I think.
@Conrad — (how can you tell I’m a twitterer, huh!?) — TOTALLY! And I think that’s part of the challenge — it is really, really hard to think of something totally new and different.
New canvas, new thinking, sure — it makes sense but I’m not convinced it’s so easy to do. I think most people, bar historically notable exceptions, get to innovation by climbing — working with and through the tools they have and know. For most of us it’s a case of ‘new canvas, evolving thinking’. So that’s why we’re still using buttons and clicks and other techniques borrowed from print, tv, radio, etc etc. It’s the rare thinker that innovates with a great flying leap, and while I think we should all challenge ourselves and our industry to do just that, I don’t think we should necessarily expect it.
All in, I think we WILL get there… just, you know, bit by bit. Sign me off as optimistic with a chaser of realism.
Ben, in all of this “interactive” talk, no one (including me) really mentioned mobile. We just assumed that “interactive” = “online” = “computers.” At some point, making a distinction between “online” and “mobile” will be irrelevant. The digital natives of today and tomorrow won’t go “online” to do stuff. Instead, they’ll just do it – device agnostic. Simplicity of experience, how seamless it is across devices (message transfer) and whether it is engaging no matter the venue will be cost of entry. Folks looking to up the interactive creativity ante should take this shift seriously.
Aren’t we missing an obvious point? Most “normal” advertising is bad. And that’s the stuff that has been around for years, is easy to understand, has loads of companies that can make it.
This stuff is hard. For all of Ben and Tim’s points.
Why would you expect there to be loads of good digital work?
We can’t figure out how to sell bad TV in less than 6 months.
That’s a vary good point Neil.
And I believe, in ‘digital’ or ‘the interactive space’ or whatever, we’re trying to break new ground much of the time. Otherwise we’d just carry on making films and ramming them down people’s throats through the telly.
The work will just keep getting better in the same way that poster, press and TV have done over the decades, and we’ll probably also grow to better appreciate it.
And, I would like to mention some great digital work - I’m amazed noone has pitched in with any.
Here’s a few that have stuck in my head.
AKQAs Nike iD site which allowed you to create and customize your trainers online and get them sent to you. I spent hours on this and bought a pair at the end of it.
Agency Republic’s BBC Music Cubes. Super smart I thought to give people customizable badges to flaunt on their myspace pages. This meant all their friends saw it and it snowballed like mad.
Glue’s Mini ‘Ave a Word’ - I saw a friend receive a personalized message and literally turn pale with shock and amazement.
Subservient Chicken - This delivered a product proposition (Chicken done your way) in the most surprising and seemingly magical way I can remember. It’s still receiving millions of hits every year.
Starburst ‘Berries and Cream’ - This understood it’s audience and the youtube environment and delivered relentless surreal stoner humor in a film that was passed on millions of times and imitated countless times out of sheer affection.
Deadmau5 released his latest album as an iphone app as a kit of parts making it easy for his fans to play bedroom producer.
Anyone else seen anything they like?
I loved this post for so many reasons. Digital has suffered because of the relationships that have been formed in the production process. Smaller digital shops have been feeding off of the low hanging fruits that the agencies have dangled for so many years and have been able to get away with delivering what you so beautifully referred to as MICROWAVED solutions. These shops have always lacked real creative minds and have stockpiled on flash developers who produce absolutely wonderful work but add very little to the BIG IDEA. The problem was that in order to execute something online that was compelling, the Idea Folks fooled themselves into thinking that it was the Flash folks who were the only ones to bring those ideas to life because there were so few really good ones and they were all stockpiled in these digital shops. As we all know that is no longer the case. Now that social media, WP, HTML, Video and other venues have emerged, Flash is no longer the only sexy kid on the block. Digital shops now need to rethink how they do business and either completely submit to the larger agencies or to offer up real idea based solutions as a supplement to the agency offerings. We all knew this was coming and that in order to create good work we would need to be strategic and think along the lines that our MAD FATHERS thought and to get back to the foot in the door and the fedora peddler roots that advertising originated from. A used car salesman wakes up every day, knowing he has to put on his A game, get his ass in gear and sell the shit out of his lot, to seduce the moms, college kids, down and outs and up and comers that his product is what they need and will provide them with value and usage. We have all succumbed to the thinking that we are any better than that guy, we are not, we need to realize this in order to set things straight. There is a humility to what he does and we need to adopt that same humility when selling our clients products. The web is a very big place, tons of room for everyone to thrive, lets not pollute it with empty ideas. Interactive is revolutionary, it now gives us the ability to get immediate feedback and then act upon that just as immediately. It lets us interface directly with our audiences in a so much more intimate way than every before. I agree that the narrative and story telling is what will breathe life into the web and what it desperately lacks. the code/narrative ratio is way off. There is just as much importance for a great story teller as there is for a great coder or designer, but show me one interactive shop that employs a great copy writer, I have met very very few. So lets not let the technology of our new medium cloud our notion that old school disciplines like writing and selling are no longer needed, sometimes youth’s ego is its greatest downfall.
Craig, thanks so much for your comments and post. I think humility is a key concept that I hinted at but didn’t touch on overtly in my original post; it’s critical.
There seems to be nothing short of a turf war going on between various factions of the industry, almost certainly driven by a dangerous and inflammable mixture of fear and pride (see, for example, this extraordinary exchange: http://bit.ly/hDRUw). Those obsessed with margins and / or credit will surely have to come to terms that they’ll end up empty-handed on both fronts if they don’t change their attitude. We start with that simple mantra that I’ve mentioned elsewhere: ‘no matter where you are, most of the smart people are somewhere else’. We believe it’s not possible (& probably not wise, even if it were) for a single company to ‘own’ all the skills required to produce greatness. So to ‘content’ and ‘context’, we’d add ‘collaboration’.
Cheers for the comments. Watch this space for the next chapter on this theme. Ben
So true Ben, the turf war is infectious and its become more about who can grab up the most fruit rather than making sure that the layer of production that this industry goes to thrives with great creative and innovative solutions.
Thanks for the insight, love this blog!
[...] This guy from BBH Labs has written an article for why he thinks this is and I think he actually has quite a few valid points and links to a few other big thinkers, it is well worth a read. [...]
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