Stop Thinking Of Yourself As "The Talent"

In the enterainment world there is this thing called "The Talent." What we mean by calling these people "The Talent," is that these are the folks who are the focus of everyone's attention. "The Talent," Don't have to worry about getting crap done like rigging lights and or setting up cameras or lugging amplifiers. That's not their job. "The Talent" only need to worry about showing up on mark and performing. 

Now often "The Talent" fall victim to the fact that everyone caters to their whims. Peope who think of themselves as "The Talent" can often become shallow and petty. "The Talent" may even have bad behavior and fly into fits of rage when things don't go their way. And in their defense, who can blame them since the entire industry caters to the needs of "The Talent."

The problem for me in advertising, though, is that many of the people in our industry are also called, "The Talent." And just like in the entertainment world, "The Talent" in our industry fall victim to their own press and believe that they really are something special. 

So let's get this out in the open: Advertising is NOT cool. It's a job.

They have cameras. We have cameras. They have craft tables. We have craft tables. I can see the confusion. But just because you are shooting a million dollar commercial, doesn't make you an auteur of great cinema. You're shooting another crappy advertisement. It's the kind of thing that real talent poop on and only do if they have gambling debts to pay off. Of course, you're work may be lucky enough to one day end up on one of those "Great Ads of the Past" shows that the networks pull together during the Summer schedule because the real talent is off in Thailand lounging on a beach somewhere. But most of us will be lucky if anyone even remembers what the commercial was for, let alone that witty bit of dialog you inserted in at the end.

I know some people are simply more important than others in business. It's the way of the world. But advertising could stand a little less of "The Talent" attitude and a lot more of "The Professional" attitude. We need more people with an understanding that what we do is just as much science as it is art. It's artistic, for sure. It's can even be creative. But it's business first and foremost.

I know that's a strange concept, but don't feel alone here. Most other lines of work require people to show up on time, get stuff done on schedule, justify the effectiveness of their work and play well with others. You'll have plenty of good company with the accountants and real estate executives. And who knows? Maybe being professional will actually produce better work. No one ever said that professionalism and creativity couldn't go hand-in-hand. 

Well, maybe someone said that. But I'm pretty sure they're wrong. 

The Net-Effect-Zero Revolution In Digital

Digital will change everything!

I was there. I heard it. I repeated it. I lived it. Yet after some 16 years of modern digital advertising we still rely on :30 second ads in YouTube videos and digital billboards at the top of web pages.

Let's face it folks, digital has changed nothing except the landscape. Even the billboards along the freeway are animated now. And you have to wonder if a 0.45% click-thru-rate is any better than the rate at which people hit your website after an ad runs on TV.

Yes, digital spending is up and it's an important media. I'm not foolish enough to claim it doesn't matter. But digital has not revolutionized advertising as it is often billed as having done. It has simply provided a new and important venue for those ads to run. 

Not even social media, the darling progeny of digital, is all that revolutionary. Despite the hype about conversation being the new way to market, Facebook is busy touting Reach Generator (which is just a way to do mass advertising) and the actual conversations that are happening are nothing more than faster customer service experiences and more convenient loyalty communications. It's cool. It's important. But it's not really all that revolutionary.

So we have to ask ourselves whether there really is a revolution waiting for us that we are just too blind or too stupid to take advantage of, or whether this is just a new media where we can run our TV commercials and print ads.

Now before you all go ballistic on me, yes I know there is really cool stuff being done in digital and social that is indeed revolutionary. Interactive video is super cool. I'm doing some consultancy work with Tremor Video and most of the agencies out there aren't even taking advantage of a fifth of what they are capable of doing. There's also very cool stuff being done in the transmedia space where stories evolve in the hands of the fans in a much more active and social way. But realize that these are the exceptions. Claiming these things as signs of digital revolutionizing advertising is like saying that TV is not a wasteland because there are Ken Burns films.

I do still believe that digital solutions can lead a revolution in how advertising and marketing is done. But we really need to decide to embrace some key changes to our thinking to make this happen. And frankly, the smart money is on us staying stupid.

A Brand Is What You Do, Not Just What You Say

I had a chance over lunch today to once again harp on my favorite marketing point. Which, of course, led to me getting all riled up once more about why the almighty brand is still considered the province of marketing alone at most companies.

For the last time, people, your marketing message is not the brand. And if I'm handed one more graphic standards and copy guidelines binder and told, "Here's our brand," I may have to jump off of a tall building. The marketing message and look of your advertising is just an expression of the brand. The brand itself is something much greater and much more important.

If your company still thinks that only marketing deals with the brand, then consider this: What is the number one way that your customers or clients interface with your company? Because if it's your ads that they are dealing with most, then you have a serious problem. 

If your company is worth it's salt, the number one way customers are interacting with you is through your products, services or the people delivering these things. So if we want to talk about brand, it's there you need to start looking. Ad campaigns come and go. Some may be memorable and some not so much. But the experience with what you're selling and how you sell it is what will linger longest in the minds of a buyer.

A brand is not just what we say. A brand is how we do business. It's how HR interviews and selects new employees. It's how products are designed and managed. It's how customer service deals with each call. A brand is more than a few mere talking points. A brand is an expression of who we are at every point in which the customer comes in contact with the organization.

So please stop thinking of the brand as nothing more than a logo, tagline and PMS color swatches. A brand is the guide that will help you understand who your company really is. Find out who you are, then let this guide you toward being true to yourself and to your customers.

And while you're changing stuff, you might want to switch the covers of the employee handbooks with the covers of the brand guidelines and vice versa. It really would be more accurate.

How To Doom Your Innovative New Approach

I remember interviewing at one of the biggest agencies in the country a few years back, and during the discussion with the internal recruiter the subject of direct marketing came up.

"[Our Creative Director] made it clear that if we were going to do direct marketing, we were going to do it the RIGHT way," she said with a haughty smile.

I smiled back and nodded, thinking, "In other words, you want to throw out everything that makes direct mail work and put ads in the mail."

And, SURPRISE! That agency doesn't do direct marketing anymore. Go figure.

Then there was Steve Jobs' famous quote, "Most mobile advertising really sucks." To which he offered iAds as a solution to solve all the ills of mobile advertising.

iAds are great looking. But they also are having trouble finding buyers these days, now that the hype has faded and the CPCs are still too high.

The trouble with people who piss on the experience and expertise of others is that they usually don't know anything about the industry they dismiss. All they know is that they do not like the estetics or the creativity of the ads in questions, so they want to change everything. 

There is a big difference between innovation and reinvention. Innovation says that the radial tire on your car can now grip the road better in wet weather for better traction. Reinvention has Doc Brown saying to Marty, "Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads." And for the record, still no flying cars around these parts. How about you?

If you want to reinvent, you need to first know intimately what has made the old system work so well. Reinvention is arrogance. It dismisses much of the old way of doing things in favor of the new. But if you are going to reinvent something and have it work, you need to know how to preserve what works, while making what doesn't disappear. 

In the case of iAds, they solved big problems for consumers and developers, and giving creatives a better pallete to work with, but essentially are ad units that are too expensive by cost-per-click for most advertisers. And you can mock direct mail creative all you want, but plain golden-rod colored envelopes get opened more than your beautifully designed package.

Please understand, I'm all on board with changing and improving both mobile and mail advertising. But if you do want to reinvent these mediums, at least understand and preserve the benefits that aren't broken.

It's Hard To Fake Being Cool

Advertising! The glamorous life! Jetting to exotic locales to shoot amazing spectacles of creativity, then drinking the night away with clients in the most expensive, impressive spot in the vicinity.

Or you can own a percentage of the start-up, work insane hours and walk away a multi-millionaire.

The allure of advertising excess used to be pretty much all we needed to do to attract hot, young talent. That way-cool video game console in the corner with a faint layer of dust and the kickin' foosball table in the break room would set the tone. Then there would be the stories of flying to the Andes mountains to simulate the Russian winter in the middle of August — or the interior shoot that had to be done in South Africa. Then there would be tales of the drinking, the food, the practical jokes and more. And after all this, all we had to do was look that young talent in the eye and say, "What do we need to do to get you sign up?"

We never used require actual coolness when recruiting. All we needed was the window dressing of cool. We needed to make them think they would be living the glamorous advertising lifestyle and we had them. But now we are competing against genuine cool. Because the dream of being a billionaire by your 30s is a whole hell of a lot cooler than a little-used dart board.

This story in Adweek about these recruting problem inspired Peter Shankman and I to discuss the topic of attracting bright, young talent to our agencies during the 2 Minute Rundown for Thursday this week. And as Peter points out in the segment, start-ups have many of the trappings of agency cool (aka, the breakfast bar and the beer truck), but also offer the carrot of ownership. So when you compare career paths, why would you choose the ultimately thankless world of advertising that values the young, but offers very few any hope for the future, when you could take a risk and maybe walk away rich?

Skin in the game is a huge motivator, after all.

What's more, if you have no mortgage nor dependents why not take the risk and think bigger than the message? You've got nothing to lose when you're young. You might as well aim higher if you have the talent.

This issue is only going to get worse for the agencies until we start moving away from our big company mentality in favor or scrappier pod-based models of business. We need to embrace structures that value innovation and reward entrepreneurial thinking again. Or else we will always be struggling to fill these developer and technology positions.

If any of the big agencies leaders are reading this, you may want to take a look at what Joe Jaffe is doing with Evol8tion as a good example of adopting a venture capital approach for symbiotic investment and growth. Because until we invest in the talent, they have little to no incentive to even consider advertising as a career option.

Social Media Is Slower Than Your Bartender

Every time a big event happens, everyone always crows about how fast Twitter or Facebook beat the traditional media outlets.

"I get all my news from Twitter," I've heard more than once. Which brings up more than the issue at hand, but we'll set that aside for the moment.

The thing that bothers me most about the social media juggernaut in advertising is that we ignore the fact that Twitter is just a tool, as are all the other social platforms. We don't get our news from "Twitter." We get it from people.

Remember people? They're the vaguely unreliable things that you have to deal with at work, at home and occasionally at the mall. They are also the source of all those Tweets we love to hype. And they are the real power in spreading the word about news, products and pictures of running Bassett Hounds.

Why is it that my local bartender already knows the latest news whenever I try to impress with my Twitter speed? Because a person told him or her. They may have got the news from Twitter, but more than likely they got it from some drunk who got an email from a guy who knows a guy. 

Social media is great. It does connect us and accelerate the spread of ideas. But maybe instead of a Facebook campaign or a Twitter-fest, we should be remembering that it's people that spread ideas. And maybe we should remember that if we inspire them offline first, maybe that will be the best way to get them headed online to share the news.

Everyone Thinks They're A Writer

I don't know a single writer in advertising who got into the game just to write ads. We may love the advertising we write or hate it, but we all become copywriters as a way to keep some other dream alive.

Maybe it's a play. Maybe it's a novel. Maybe it's journalism. We all have a writing goal beyond the tagline. We are more than just advertising copy hacks. We are artists — at least in our own minds — masters of our craft. And we have worked hard to perfect our craft.

Now certainly our enthusiasm is usually beat out of us along the way, but we never lose sight of the fact that every line of every copy deck is a labor of love and balance. Which is why when you bring your last-minute, petty changes that play with with the agreement of the sentence in an effort to shove one more irrelevant talking point about the product's gear ratio, we want to stab you to death with a fountain pen.

There's an old joke in advertising...

Q: How many copywriters does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Changes? What f*&$ing changes?!?

In all my years in the business, everyone has joked about the tempremental copywriter. But there's a reason that the writers are so abrasive. Where the art professionals may get annoying requests for color changes and logo size increases, they essentially have a skill that is obviously beyond every account executive or marketing manager. An AE can ask for an art change, but most can never hope to go into Photoshop and makes those changes themselves. 

But everyone can write. And thus is born the delusion of grandeur that makes everyone believe that because they can write, they are qualified as a writer.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Just because you can breathe, it doesn't make you a cardiologist. You are simply using the equipment. And the same is true of your writing. We ad writers really do know what we're doing. So make your suggestions, please. Most of the best of us welcome criticism. But understand that your changes are never simple. They always take careful thought and more rewriting than you expected. And don't try to write it for us. Because if you do, we may have to kill you.

Mad Men: Proof Of Our Own Self-Loathing

There's something pretty funny about the way the advertising industry has embraced wholeheartedly the AMC show, Mad Men. It's a good show, for certain. But only advertising could see it as a glorification of what we do, when it clearly despises the industry it depicts.

I mean the star of the show is so much of a liar that he's not even a real person! You don't need to be Karl Jung to figure out that archetype. It's fascinating TV, but it's scathing in it's depiction of advertising being run by whoring, drunk, white men.

And here we thought it was a period drama. 

A psychiatrist would have a field day if we could put the entire industry on a couch for an afternoon for some much needed analysis. Just consider the vast self-loathing we must feel to identify so richly with characters like Peggy Olson, the increasingly bitter and hypertensive writer edging toward her own inevitable nervous breakdown. Or the future holding company chairman, Pete Campbell, who knows no boundaries in his quest to compensate for his diminutive stature and the wife who won't let him keep his firearm at home.

For godsakes, Ad Age does a friggin' recap of the show every Monday! What's up with that, people?

Now I neither suggest we stop watching, nor stop capitalizing on the program. But we may want to take a look at this love/hate thing we've got going on with our jobs. Because this is just getting embarrassing. We've become the abused spouses of the business world, finding escape in our own version of the romance novel. It ain't pretty, folks.

Why We Don't Ask Why

A funny thing happened on the way to the strategy today. We all forgot to ask, "Why?"

Look, you've been in the meetings. You know how this goes down. Everybody gathers around with the client and the client asks, "How do we go about this?" And everybody struggles to come up with the solution.

"How do we manage Facebook?"

"What kind of ad should we do?"

"Where should we target the creative?"

These are the questions that get asked. Then we go to work to solve the problem. But no one seems to ask, "Why the hell are we doing this in the first place."

Okay, correction. We do ask "why" behind closed doors as we walk aways grumbling that the client doesn't know what they're doing. But so few times do we ask "why" in a meaningful way that affects the resulting programs.

It never ceases to amaze me that we don't stop and really question why we need to do things. Everything from the TV campaign to the banner ad should be examined with rigor these days, and every massive crisis to troubling issue should be subjected to careful scrutiny before we act.

It's not enough to just solve problems in advertising. Any vendors can solve problem. But it takes a partner to step up and confront the truth. 

Maybe that's why we're talking to procurement more than the people in charge these days.

Your IP is BS

I understand the need for non-disclosure agreements. When it comes to things like customer data or some as-yet unreleased new technolgy you kind of need them. But advertising? Really?

I am going on record as saying there is nothing new in advertising. Period. We just repackage and rework our same old methodoly to respond to the changing needs of the market, then call it our "Intellectual Property" and act like God smiled down on us with his divine providence.

Further, agencies can't possibly own the "thinking" of their employees. It's like a bad zombie movie. I picture a balding white guy in a suit shambling after me murmuring, "Brains! Need brains!" A paycheck doesn't entitle you to all of me. It gets you projects completed, not the rights to everything that comes out of my head.

This obsession with owning IP — having some sort of proprietary right to a new way of stirring the soup of old ideas — is crazy on so many levels. But the biggest problem with it is that it fails to recognize that the biggest asset an agency offers is not its ideas, but rather the people that come up with those ideas. 

Right now the model is that we pay the employee to develop cool creative or innovative strategies or cutting edge anlytical models and then we own that. We may say our employees are important to us, but that's a lie. We couldn't care less about the employees. They are only as valuable as the next idea that we can take from them. And once they stop producing good ideas they are expendable. 

We fail to understand that nurturing smart people means valuing the person as well as the work they produce. This is how innovation happens. If a person knows that they are not valued or that their idea is worth more than you are paying them, they will always hold back or start looking elsewhere. And when they leave we're left with empty IP that doesn't have the brains to grow and nurture it.

So tell me, is that IP really all that valuable without a brain to back it up? And why do I have a sudden urge to watch a zombie flick?