Can the iPad bring back print advertising?
The print world may owe a debt of gratitude if the iPad helps save it
I got my start in this business making print ads. I loved everything about them: the challenge of the blank page; the possibilities of the two-dimensional plane; the art of combining an image and words to yield an idea greater than the sum of the parts; and the chance to create pictures in a reader’s mind with nothing but a perfectly crafted headline.
In the early days, Mullen was known for its print. Campaigns for Timberland, Smartfood, Swiss Army, LL Bean and many others were a perennial presence in local and national award shows. We built arguably one of the best studios in the business, worked with renowned photographers all over the world, and attracted art directors who were obsessed with the craft.
Then, thanks to the web, it all came crashing down. We got all kinds of new creative platforms — video, social, mobile, applications — but the rapid demise of that age-old form so many of us loved was (for those of us over 40) shocking. At least at first.
But now, the medium is about to get a second life. Thank you iPad. It will give us back all of things that made print great:
- A large two-dimensional space on which to create a piece of commercial art that captures one’s attention.
- A palette onto which we can place stunning visuals.
- An environment (digital magazines) where a reader may actually welcome something remarkable rather than simply look for the little “x” to close the ad.
Of course, it will also inspire something entirely different: a totally new digital form of print. Think Bernbach meets iPhone meets Wired meets UGC meets social media. All potentially combined into a single execution that’s conceptual, engaging, user friendly.
Consdider what Pentagram has to say:
“The conventions of online advertising—banner ads, pop ups, and so forth—aren’t popular with readers, with advertisers, and certainly not with designers. But the iPad is a new medium that will create a whole range of opportunities. Once people start exploiting what it can do, we may see the kind of creative renaissance that will deliver the next George Lois or Lee Clow. People will start subscribing to certain i-mags just for the ads alone.”
If you’re not already thinking about the possibilities of the iPad and the creation of a new form of digital print you should be. I imagine all of the following as possibilities. Eventually you’ll be able to create ads that let consumers:
- View a product from every imaginable angle with the flick of the finger.
- Change the colors and patterns of anything from shirt and tie combinations to the interior of a car.
- Upload and incorporate images of themselves into an execution so they can try on different outfits or pieces of jewelry.
- Instantly link or connect to back stories about how a product was made; learn its carbon footprint or its nutritional information.
- Find all their Twitter and Facebook friends who have bought the same brand or product to get their personal opinion (new application for Blippy?)
- Explore a brand via digital games, back stories, or through integration with other media, i.e. TV shows.
- Decide which version of an ad or which ad from a brand he even wants to see.
- Share, vote, rate ads in real time forcing creators to get better and more responsive
So, while we’re still a couple of months away from the first shipments, there are a number of things you could be doing right now. For starters, order your iPad and while you’re at it reserve at least a few for your creative department. Then consider the following:
- Make sure your current iPhone app developers are in touch with Apple regarding what will be possible with the iPad and have them share that with creative teams.
- Learn what Conde Nast and other major publishers have planned for their magazines’ conversion to tablets and how you can create advertising that will work in their new digital formats.
- Assemble a team made up of creative technologists, UX specialists, media planners, social media thinkers and creative people to start thinking about the possibilities.
- Identify the brands and clients who are most willing and excited about re-inventing how to tell their stories.
- Avoid simply migrating old content, images and OLA type executions to this new platform. It’s a chance to create something entirely new: executions that change daily; that include digital games; that incorporate real-time conversation.
I don’t have my iPad yet. (It is on order, though.) I haven’t seen a Conde Nast presentation in person. And I don’t have a team assembled internally as of today. But it’s all on the to do list. What about you?
Links and other articles of interest.
Sports Illustrated: Tablet Demo
Made by Many: Content design with cojones
CNN Tech: Print media hails iPad potential
Daily Illini: iPad could save print media
Pentagram: Five ways the iPad will change magazine design
C-Change Media: Why ads on the iPad and other tablets won’t make a difference
Steve Jobs photo by: curious lee
The future of advertising agencies: learnings from Forrester
Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy, James Walter Thompson: ad agencies have been around a long time
It remains the topic du jour. We talk about it from every conceivable angle: the future of advertising; the future of advertising agencies; the impact of digital on advertising; the new consumer-control; even the death of MadMen.
But when Forrester talks about it people listen.
A few months ago I participated in Sean Corcoran’s research on where it’s all going. The Forrester analyst interviewed more than 60 agency leaders, clients and media in pursuit of the answer.
Well last night, at a MITX-sponosored event here in Boston, he debuted some of this findings, all of which Forrester will eventually turn into advice for both agencies and marketers as they continue to navigate the turbulence brought on by digital technology, the social web and changing consumer behavior.
Here are some of the findings from Sean’s presentation, due out in final form in a couple of weeks. Anything in italics is my take or conclusion. In the next week or so I’ll develop additional thoughts and share examples of what people are doing and or struggling with in light of his observations.
It is a new world defined by technology and consumer control
- Consumers today have a complex relationship with media: it poses challenges as to how and where to engage with them
- Despite Edelman’s recent findings, Forrester insists that consumers trust consumers more than they trust brands: it means we need to mobilize fans and followers to evangelize on our behalf
- The Groundswell has gone mainstream: the consumer is now a creator/sharer/distributor; learn to harness and inspire that
- WOM reigns again: your content and the experiences you create must stimulate it
- 3.5 billion brand conversations happen every day, all of them in public: time to master the art of listening
Consumers hate most advertising
- Only 5 % agree with advertising claims: start being honest and authentic
- 50 % say brands don’t live up to advertising promises: really, start being honest and authentic
- 67 % complain there is too much advertising: forget messages, create experiences and conversation
Adaptive marketing is the new model
- Everything is powered by digital: hire digital, think digital, learn digital or die
- Real time response, as in political advertising, is the future of marketing: monitor social media regularly and get everyone a Flipcam
- It’s all about pull not push: the formula is SEO plus value equal traffic
- Addressability is here: you should be thinking versioning, customization, options
- Intelligence and analytics will drive everything: make it part of your strategy before and after creative development
Media needs to combine paid, owned and earned
- Paid: for scale and reach and speed: social can’t do everything, reach, scale and speed come from paid
- Owned: for content, relationships, listening and co-creation: open source opportunities are everywhere so create great content, utility and apps
- Earned: social, WOM, PR, bloggers, influencers: paid can’t do everything; you need a social and conversation strategy, not simply a presence on Facebook
Successful agencies will move well beyond campaigns
- Build campaigns PLUS platforms: you need both, Nike-plus without a brand behind has no plus
- Stop thinking in terms of audience and think about a community of participants: a brand’s consumers may be your best creative resource, or at least your best medium
- Undo unbundling: unbundled won’t work anymore: agencies need to find ways to integrate; become curators; and learn co-creation, curation, and crowdsourcing
- Embrace and master new technologies quickly: you are working on the re-invention of print ads on the iPad, right?
Clients will look for three things
- Ideas: note this does not mean messages or ads
- Interaction: engagement, connection, community, media
- Intelligence, as in you need to collect, report, analyze and predict: if you don’t have robust analytics, you’re in big trouble
Sean has other findings and conclusions, but I’ll leave it to him to package, reveal and explain. Suffice it to say, this is what’s been released as of last night.
Finally, the photo above (stole the idea from Sean who talked about the history of agencies as well) is a reminder that this is an old business. Agencies have been around for a long time. They have adapted from being agents who sold, to owners of the brand, to creators of the big idea, to specialists in advertising, DR, CRM, PR, design and digital. It’s time to adapt again. And quickly.
Creativity: can a new book inspire it?
The week before last I had the privilege of being an interview subject for a comprehensive study on creativity. Thomas Vogel, an Emerson College professor currently on sabbatical to research and write a book on the topic, inspired me with questions for well over an hour. Thomas has a very specific hypothesis and framework for his project that I’ve promised not to reveal, but suffice it to say he’s interested in the following:
Techniques for identifying creative talent.
Whether a culture or environment can encourage creativity.
How to evaluate creative ideas.
Ideally, Thomas’s book will deliver both a report on how great creative organizations do what they do, as well as offer a blueprint for companies striving to become more creative themselves.
There are plenty of people who’ve written about creativity as it relates to our business. There are the classics like Bob Levenson’s The Bill Bernbach Book, filled with quotes from the master and remarkably relevant to this day; The Book of Gossage, arguably the genesis for the creative perspective that defines Goodby, Silverstein and Partners; and Richard Wilde’s Problems: Solutions: Visual Thinking for Graphic Communications, lessons that have helped teach two generations how to think visually.
More recently, anyone interested in creativity has been rewarded with Sir Ken Robinson’s The Element, a brilliant thesis that admonishes the public school system for confining us to such narrow definitions of intelligence; instead it implores us to find our personal passion and a tribe that can foster it. IDEO CEO Tim Brown shares his insights in Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. And, of course, there’s always Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers with its simple message and evidence that it’s all about practice. Lots of it.
But thinking about organizational creativity – is that an oxymoron? – makes a lot of sense in an age where ideas, stories, technology and media aren’t simply converging, they’re crashing into each other.
Yes, Jaron Lanier, in his You Are Not a Gadget, reminds us that group think won’t yield the kind of original creative idea that one brilliant individual can conceive, but the fact is that we create more and more in teams now. Take a look at Pixar for example. What comes out the back end is so much more than a writer’s or even a director’s original vision. Sure someone has to be the benevolent (or not so benevolent) dictator, but the finished product requires not only lots of individual creativity but a culture and organization that fosters it. One that accepts diverse opinions and doesn’t suffer the “not invented here” syndrome or tolerate the ugly kind of competition where people feel compelled to stand up and declare, “that was my idea.”
When we made ads, it was easy. A writer and an art director had an idea and executed it. But today, the possibilities of technology, the difference UX can make, the need to design, program, and build something complicates matters.
It’s hard enough to identify creative talent. Getting different kinds of talent to work together, toward a single goal, all welcoming each other’s contributions to make something better is a challenge. Whether or not one book can help remains to be seen. But an effort to explore how creative companies foster originality — comparing techniques for hiring, identifying common characteristics, understanding how leaders inspire — is a welcome one. It will be both fun and interesting to compare one company to another and learn each other’s tricks.
My guess is that Professor Vogel’s ambitious project may not give aspiring creative organizations all the answers, but it will at least force them (and us) to ask questions about what they’re doing and whether or not it’s fostering more creativity, or just getting in the way.
I wish you luck with the project Thomas. Can’t wait to read the results.
Photo by: Lisa Dragon
Advertising in the age of social media
Today's ad campaign has messages, platforms, social media
In a recent presentation, as a joke, but to make a point about the new power enjoyed by individuals and consumers, I attempted to demonstrate what the Volkswagon of the 1960s would be up against if they were marketing today in the age of social media.
The anti-brand fan group is growing in popularity
Not only would the agency, the once great Doyle Dane Bernbach have had to expand the print ad (above left) into a micro-site (or Facebook app), YouTube channel, and Twitter feed, in all likelihood they’d have had to deal with the fact that not everyone was as fond of the ad as its creators. I refer, of course, to the wives noted in the headline, presented not as co-decision makers but as nothing more than a reflection of their husbands’ good judgment and wisdom. No doubt their anger would be expressed in a rapidly populating fan page condemning the sexist (by today’s terms anyway) message.
Well wouldn’t you know it, not two days after debuting this contrived case study, this appeared: a video response to Dodge Charger’s Superbowl ad, title Man’s Last Stand. Featuring lines equally as clever as those in the original spot — I will catch you staring at my breasts but pretend not to notice. I will put my career on hold to raise your children. I will watch TV shows where fat, stupid, unattractive men have beautiful wives. — the spoof was created and uploaded by McKenzie Fegan, apparently working on her own.
Will it dampen Dodge Charger sales? Probably not. Will it inspire looks of scorn from certain women when their date shows up driving one? In all likelihood the original Superbowl commercial already accomplished that. In fact you could argue that based on the type of guy Dodge appears to be “targeting” whatever attention this video generates is a good thing, reinforcing the brand’s desired image. You could even go a step further and argue that Dodge and its agency Weiden and Kennedy would have been smart to inspire the creation of this and similar opposing messages in order to generate buzz and call further attention to the original spot. Alas it turns out they’re not quite that clever or surreptitious.
Either way, McKenzie’s minute of brilliance is a vivid reminder that while some things (i.e. the battle of the sexes) never change, others (i.e. the ways in which consumers find to express and distribute their opinions) definitely do. So whether you view the new consumer controlled media environment as an opportunity for expression that brands should encourage, or a liability that they should try and limit, one thing’s for sure. You can’t market anymore, you can’t create campaigns or ads or messages without taking into consideration that you’re surrounded not by an audience, but by a community of creators.
What do you think? Should Dodge start posting links to the Women’s Last Stand video? Or duck.
Links: Full script for Women’s Last Stand, MacKenzie’s parody of Dodge’s Superbowl ad
Can Twitter make you a better presenter?
While I'm talking the audience is tweeting
One of the cool things about giving a presentation about marketing or advertising or social media in the age of instant feedback is you know pretty quickly how you did. Did people respond? Agree? Find anything compelling in what you had to say? It’s all there within minutes, if not seconds via Twitter. After all, the audience isn’t simply listening, it’s tweeting, posting, commenting.
On Monday, I had the privilege of speaking in Minneapolis as part of MIMA’s ongoing series Conversations About the Future of Advertising. The program has featured a number of impressive folks: David Armano (formerly of Dachis Group, now Edelman), Michael Lebowitz, (Big Spaceship), Bob Thacker (Office Max), to name but a few. Hosted by Tim Brunelle, MIMA’s president and the CEO of Hello Viking, held at pretty cool venue called the Fine Line Music Cafe, the event always draws a crowd, attracting ad agency types, local digerati, social media enthusiasts along with marketers from local companies like Target, General Mills and Cargill, all of them equipped with a mobile Twitter app.
On this particular night, with no signs of a day-long snow storm letting up, a good size crowd still showed. And with iPhones in hand the tweeting began. I supposed one could find this terrifying. Think how almost all advertising creative types dread showing their work to focus groups for fear of rejection. But I find this new form of instant reaction liberating. Right away, you know if you sucked or if you rocked. Perhaps more importantly you know specifically what resonated. If you told five stories and all the chatter echoed two of them, that’s good information to have. Next time you can lose the other three. If the majority of tweets captured one or two of the same points, maybe they’re worth building on.
Among the points most referred to in blog posts, this suggestion that we rethink the labels and tactics we use to market in the age of conversation
My presentation – A Conversation About the Future of Advertising: Inspiration, Exploration, Transformation – covered the changes in media that I’ve experienced in my lifetime; an overview of the trends characterizing the new-found influence and role of the individual; and the new practices agencies need to embrace if they are to survive and prosper in the years to come. There were lots of stories, and a number of examples. But I now know what mattered most. What people took away. What they chose to share. And repeat. And pass on. And that’s pretty cool. Thank you MIMA, @catfoa, Tim Brunelle and everyone else who joined in the presentation. No, make that conversation.
Photo by: Andy Santamaria
