Planner Heidi Hackemer and her pickup truck. Soon to be far from New York City.

I suppose one could argue that given the current economy, the diminished value of most homes, miserably low interest rates and an unreliable stock market, the American Dream is on life support at best.

Add to that the high price of college education, the lack of jobs awaiting recent graduates, and the nagging sense that health care will probably eat up all of our retirement savings forcing those same grads to nix any expectation that an inheritance might help them dig out of their debt, and the old version of the dream — home ownership, two cars in the garage, a better economic situation than the previous generation, lives on only in TV shows and movies from the 1950s. And, perhaps, in Silicon Valley.

Then again, that could be too pessimistic a perspective. After all, hope dies last.

Maybe there’s no longer a collective American Dream. But perhaps there are thousands of individual ones to replace it. Maybe they’re simpler. Less materialistic. Perhaps they’re about downsizing, having more control, working for oneself, consuming less, giving more. It would certainly be useful to know.

A planner goes on the road

Which is why I am so excited for (and jealous of ) my friend Heidi Hackemer, planner extraordinaire (until today at Droga5  and previously at BBH NY) who is about to embark on a mostly solo cross country trip in her pick-up truck to find out. She plans on meeting and interviewing folks she’d never run into in a Manhattan restaurant or art gallery in quest of an answer.

She has a route — west from Florida to California then north to Alaska;  a plan — she’ll stop in diners at lunch, sit at the counter and open a road atlas, “works every time” she informs me; and a slew of social media connections willing to help from afar with tips and suggestions for where to go and who to seek out.

After that it’s just Heidi, a digital video camera, her iPhone, her charm and her curiosity.

As Heidi says, “I hope to understand this country in ways that living in my NYC bubble makes difficult.”

We should probably all do a little bit of what Heidi’s doing:  get out of our bubble; seek reactions from people different from us; observe someone else’s world from her perspective.

Heeding advice from Jerry Della Femina

It was probably 20 plus years ago when Jerry Della Femina, quoted in a WSJ legends ad, warned us about becoming isolated.

“Young creative people start out hungry. They’re off the street; they know how to think, And their work is great. Then they get successful. They make more money, spend time in restaurants they never dreamed of, fly back and forth between New York and Los Angeles.  Pretty soon, the real world isn’t people. It’s just a bunch of lights off the right side of the plane. You have to stay in touch if you’re going to write advertising that works.”

He concludes with this suggestion:

“Ride a subway. Stand up on a bus. Buy a hot dog on the corner. Stay in touch.”

Twitter and Facebook and Instagram may all work pretty well, but Heidi’s approach, following in the footsteps of Alexis De Toqueville or Studs Terkel, past chroniclers who made similar journeys, seems a far better way to heed Jerry’s advice.

I’ll be following Heidi’s journey closely. Sadly, it will be via her blog and Twitter feed, rather than from the road. Perhaps you should do the same.

And now, an added bonus for reading this far:

Excerpt from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, written in 1840

In America I saw the freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest condition that exists in the world; it seemed to me that a sort of cloud habitually covered their features; they appeared to me grave and almost sad even in their pleasures.

The principal reason for this is that the first do not think of the evils they endure, whereas the others dream constantly of the goods they do not have.

It is a strange thing to see with what sort of feverish ardor Americans pursue well-being and how they show themselves constantly tormented by a vague fear of not having chosen the shortest route that can lead to it.

The inhabitant of the United States attaches himself to the goods of this world as if he were assured of not dying, and he rushes so precipitately to grasp those that pass within his reach that one would say he fears at each instant he will cease to live before he has enjoyed them. He grasps them all but without clutching them, and he soon allows them to escape from his hands so as to run after new enjoyments.

Don leaves his copywriter's boards in the back of the cab and presents his own idea instead

Anyone who’s been watching MadMen Season 5 can’t help but notice the deterioration of Don Draper’s creative skills. He hasn’t had a good idea in a year. The brilliance once demonstrated in the Kodak Carousel pitch have blurred into distant memory. And as he sits in his office noting that the agency’s latest reprints (remember reprints, with varnished borders?) all prominently feature the name of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s newest star, writer Michael Ginsberg, not even a stiff drink can ease his anxiety.

This week Don resorted to the all too common practice of expressing his fear, insecurity and jealousy by trying to compete with his very own staff.  Sadly, most all of us who grew up in the ad business have seen this movie. Creative director can’t stand having the spotlight shine on someone else, even when it’s someone he hired and mentored.  So he becomes not just the boss, but the rival as well.

First Don pathetically tries to beat the idea with one of his own, a practice that might be among the most demoralizing management tactics ever conceived, not to mention absurdly unfair. How can you be the contestant and the judge and ever expect a fair outcome? And who in his right mind would openly criticize the boss’s idea unless it came with a resignation letter?  In this episode, the subordinates agree that the agency will present two ideas and the client will get to pick a winner.  Of course when Don conveniently leaves Ginsberg’s work in the cab and presents only his own, there isn’t much of a choice. You can guess the outcome and the effect on morale.

In a business where the best idea – not the person who had it – is supposed to win, competition is essential. It keeps everyone sharp, pushes teams to put in the extra effort, and eventually weeds out the weaker players.  But that’s when competition remains among peers and the creative director stays objective.

If you want to learn anything from MadMen this season, focus on Mathew Weiner’s story arcs, character development and attention to detail. All three features can make for great advertising. As for Don, the only lesson he’s sharing with us is how not to be a very good creative director.

Related Links:  MadMen through the Boomer Lens

Professor Tracy Tuten's new book, "Advertisers at Work"

Any day now, Professor Tracy Tuten’s new book, Advertisers at Work  should be released. Tracy conducted interviews with a host of professionals in the business, among them Mike Hughes, president of the Martin Agency; Luke Sullivan, chair of the advertising department at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD); Susan Credle, chief creative officer of Leo Burnett; and, surprise, me.

Thought I would post some of my long interview (in which I shared way too much, fortunately none of it damning) here.

To Tracy’s credit, she did ask some good questions and got me to tell some old stories ranging from how I got into the business, the journey from reporter to creative director to innovation chief to teacher, and even what I see in the future for agencies like Mullen.

A few soundbites.

On how Mullen built an agency in the middle of nowhere with a handful of people who had little agency experience.

We successfully created a culture that was inherently entrepreneurial, that embraced change on an ongoing basis, and that was rooted first and foremost in creativity. Those qualities served us well as the world changed around us.

We were big believers in rights and responsibilities, so we actually give people more rights and decision-making authority than they might get at the same age or with the same title in a lot of companies, as long as they were willing to embrace the responsibility that went with it. 

As a result we attracted a certain kind of person. We never, ever attracted people who wanted to be tenders or simply maintain the status quo. We tended to do a really good job of attracting people who wanted to take over, who wanted to build things, who wanted to make stuff, who wanted to assume that level of responsibility. That kind of person perpetuates our culture today. I think you could make an argument that the most valuable asset our agency has is this culture.

On the future and change

Many people believe that traditional media will become less important in the future than it’s been in the past. But when you look at the actual numbers in terms of where dollars are spent, there’s a tremendous amount still spent on traditional media, tv especially, and no real sign of it diminishing.

Another question is whether clients in the future be more inclined to want integrated agencies that do everything well? Or will they want best of breed, specialist agencies that do social or digital or something else?

Mullen may be at odds with the majority of people who think the specialists are still the way to go. But we believe that you can’t be best of breed if you’re not completely, totally integrated; you need hyper-bundled services because everything is interdependent. How can you have traditional advertising and not provide social media, digital, platforms, apps, and mobile. They all have to work together seamlessly.

When you ask where Mullen will be in the next four or five years, we’ll still be in advertising. We’ll still be an advertising agency. We will still be rooted in creative ideas. But we will apply those ideas to more new places and platforms — to mobile and social and community. The way in which we [create] will be informed by technologists and developers and programmers, not just writers and art directors.

I am also a big believer that the future creative person will come from areas other than the world of writers, art directors, and the traditional craftspeople who’ve defined our product in the past. Just look at the biggest creative forces of the last three or four years. Who are they? They’re Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and Steve Jobs. Programmers and nerds have changed media and content more so than communicators.

On rituals that inspire creativity

The only ritual I  have is to seek collisions. I recently read — it might have even been a Steve Jobs’s quote –that when you ask creative people how they do what they do, many times they can’t actually explain or give a reason or rationale. He argues that what creative people inherently do is combine things in different ways in order to create small explosions or yield something that is an unexpected result of two things. The create collisions.

Also, if you read Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From, you get the same lesson. Johnson demonstrates that cities are more creative than suburbs. [And he explains] why New York is more creative than Paris. It’s because Paris pushes the congestion of the new city out to the ring and they try to preserve the history of the old city, and as a result they have fewer people, less diversity and lack the collision of ideas and thinking that is evident in a city like  Shanghai.

You see the same thing in a way in companies like Pixar and IDEO and other creative companies that now work in purposely congested environments. My ritual is to mash up things that don’t belong together, that come from different places. It might be literature and advertising, or physical space and theater, or sources of content from different disciplines, or even just the people that you try to interact with and engage. I prefer to hang out with developers, journalists, even venture capitalists than with traditional advertising people.

On what’s next for me

There are three things that I’m interested in. I would love to do more work with start-ups, something I am getting a taste of with Springpad.  I’m still interested in changing this industry or helping it stay caught up and relevant. And I have become really excited about teaching, which has been a result of doing an executive-in-residence at University of Oregon, co-running the BDW workshops, lecturing in a bunch of classes, and teaching a full semester at Boston University. Teaching is something I am really drawn to.

I am flattered that Tracy included me in her new book. You can find the rest of my rambling interview in this PDF. Enjoy.

With Otimizely, I could even A/B test this blog post.

A few years ago, when Facebook engagement ads were just taking off, Kevin Colleran, at the time still working for the social media behemoth (he was employee number 10 and its first sales executive; now a venture capitalist, what else?) told me that the way to make your Facebook ads really effective was to give the network three or four versions and let Facebook test them in a real environment.  That way Facebook could virtually guarantee the efficacy of your brand message.

He mentioned that you’d be surprised what performed best. For example, you may have thought that videos would drive deeper engagement and you’d be wrong. You could hypothesize anything, in fact, but why bother when it was so easy to get proof of what worked simply by trying a few options.

I asked Kevin how many agencies took Facebook up on the offer and he answered hardly any. Unless they were a direct response firm, it just wasn’t in their DNA. So Facebook would themselves initiative comparisons for brands in order to prove the value.

This week Wired had a great piece on A/B testing and how it has become the “open secret of high-stakes web development.” It’s the formula by which almost all of Silicon Valley (maybe not Apple) improves its online products.  Real time focus group testing in real life environments.

It’s really just a technique that derives from classic direct marketing. Beat the control. In the days of envelopes and stamps, however it took multiple tries and that could take many months a you had to conceive, write, print, mail, analyze data and try again.

On the web, of course, the process takes but a few hours. Change a color, an image or a headline and the impact on action taken could be significant. You may never know why, but that’s not the point.

Yet many ad agencies now getting into the digital business – creating websites, apps, online experiences and more – remain averse to A/B testing, or at least unaware of its potential. Why? For no other reason than the old linear process by which we made advertising – strategy, concept, approval, production, distribution – remains embedded in muscle memory. Or even more likely, because most ad agencies, along with plenty of companies in other industries, still practice HiPPO decision making; the highest paid person’s opinion determines what to do.

But read the Wired piece. Consider not only the dramatic improvements that A/B testing can yield – as well as the frequency with which the HiPPO’s are wrong – and you certainly conclude the strategy has a place in anything we ever do online. Ads, websites, apps, social engagement.

Maybe I should have done two versions of this post to see which one gets the most traffic.

Your thoughts?  Are you using A/B testing for any of your online initiatives? Why not give it a try?

Victors & Spoils has had no problem attracting clients

When Victors & Spoils was first launched two-and-a-half years ago, the company had more detractors than fans. (Note, I was among the latter.) Much of the industry dismissed the idea that the model could ever replace the traditional agency/client relationships. The more vocal members of the creative community found all kinds of reasons to condemn the new company. The talent wouldn’t be as good. The whole idea of crowd sourcing would undermine the value of the creative person. The best people wouldn’t submit to this kind of process and platform.

Co-founder/CEO John Winsor and I had numerous conversations about why the critics were wrong. Great ideas can come from anywhere. Plenty of people would welcome the chance to have their ideas considered. (After all, how many of us encounter a daily dose of rejection already?) Clients had tired of paying for overhead and some of the excesses of the advertising industry.  And since agencies could only sell the talent they had on staff, by definition they were limited in the number of ideas they could generate to solve a problem.

Clearly, John and his partners were a step ahead of the critics. From day one the agency met with success.  Thousands of creatives from all over the world joined the community.  And the agency’s pitch resonated with lots of clients. Dish, Discovery Channel, GAP, General Mills, Harley Davidson, Virgin America, Levi’s and a host of other brand name advertisers signed on.

And why not?  They could get a slew of ideas — curated, filtered and on strategy — for a lot less money than they would pay in a typical retainer relationship.

From the very beginning I thought this was the perfect acquisition for a holding company. Think about it. Holding companies serve large global clients. They make the claim — sometimes actually true — that they can harness the collective the resources of multiple sister agencies to serve a client’s total needs. Yet they really don’t have a model, infrastructure or software platform for doing so. Ask anyone who has participated in a cross agency (there’s a more disparaging word for it) shoot out and they’ll tell you it’s among the more miserable experiences in which you could ever participate. In many cases it wastes time and resources. And for the individuals encouraged (if not forced) to participate it often results in nothing more than demoralization.

But with Victors & Spoils platform — the community, the software, the process — it could be so much more efficient. A holding company can tap into an existing community, create a new one, invite more people to participate with less time and effort, and effectively manage and evaluate more submissions. Add some incentives or gaming dynamics, make it easier for people to throw in ideas, and it’s likely that participants might even welcome the opportunity to help the company cause. Perhaps more importantly, clients might have a genuine reason to believe that multiple agencies could work together on their behalf.

Until now, most ad agencies have been threatened by Victors & Spoils. They’re perceived to undermine the value of individual creatives, diminish the role and impact of the creative director who hires and guides them, and convey to clients that there might be a better idea outside the walls of the agency.

But if, in the end, our job is to solve big problems, deliver the best and most effective idea, and leave no stone unturned in determining it, maybe we should all acknowledge that community, software, and yes, crowdsourcing techniques, are the way to go. Maybe not always, but certainly sometimes. Add to that the fact that we really only have two choices — resist progress or embrace it — and we have even more reason to welcome the innovation that V&S has pioneered over the last two years.

John Winsor, Claudia Batten and Evan Fry had the vision and the courage to try and change how ad agencies work. Looks like the big holding companies — at least one of them – is starting to believe they’re onto something.

Idea first, engineering second.

By now everyone has seen or at least heard of Google’s Project Re-Brief. In order to showcase the potential of online advertising – after 18 years we ought to be able to do something better than the ubiquitous banner ad – Google had the brilliant idea of re-creating some of the advertising industry’s most famous ads and making them digital.

In typical Google fashion, they spared no expense or effort. To re-create Coke’s then epic 1971 Hilltop ad – it feels so small now – Google grabbed art director Harvey Gabor out of retirement, brought him to New York and taught him what the Internet – ad servers, HTML5, accelerometers, touch screens, and real-time video – can do.

If you watch the making of film you can see the reverence that Google shows for Harvey and the respect they convey for the “big idea.” They even let Harvey present using foam core.  (Anyone other than me, and Harvey, remember what that is?)  Granted part of that is the show — after all this is about demonstrating to ad agencies what they could do with Google and its cool tools and toys – but the real point is that a great ad idea is even better when executed to include user participation.

From ads to experiences

The finished experience, while not yet a scalable idea, is very much Nike Chalkbot-like; it connects the user, the web and the physical world in a seamless, magical way. Five Coke machines around the world are tied into Google servers. From a simple online ad that takes advantage of Google’s location services, a laptop video camera and YouTube, it lets a computer (or tablet or phone) user record a message, send the gift of a Coke to the machine of her choice, and include a video greeting. At the receiving end an unsuspecting passerby hears a machine singing the former hit, “I want to teach the world to sing…….I want to buy the world a Coke and keep it company,” as it dispenses the free Coca Cola and the video message from the sender. The recipient can then send a message back and the entire system creates a composite video of the event and uploads it to YouTube. Wow.

Once we had a message, controlled, produced, and delivered by Coke. Now we have an experience enabled by Coke, but created and controlled by consumers. Once Coke said “we’d like to buy the world a Coke.” Now users are actually doing it for each other.  Once we had an old fashioned ad.  Now we have a new kind of ad.

Creating experiences vs messages

Change the team, change the process

But of all the changes evident in the above example, the most important one is the composition of the team needed to create it. When Harvey made his TV spot he worked with Bill Backer and a director. But if you take a look at the team in the room to make something like the Re-Brief version of Hilltop, you have IA, UX, tech, engineering and production.  And you have more of those kinds of creatives than you have of the old fashioned kind.

Many advertising agencies still start the process with a team of writers and art directors who conceive TV like ideas then ask the digital team to come up with something digital to go with it. If an agency is descended from the likes of Harvey Gabor and Bill Backer it’s in their DNA to work that way. (Let’s face it, none of us would start the kind of agency today that we may currently work for.)

But it’s probably time to embrace a totally opposite approach. Put five technologists and one writer in the room. Or gather four developers and one art director.  Or change the qualifications for the title creative director. It’s the only way to create executions – or platforms, or behaviors – this innovative.

My favorite shot in the case study video is the one that says “Engineers build vending machines that connect to display ads,” suggesting that after the creative idea was conceived, the team then told engineering what it needed.

This is the antithesis of the way the world usually works. In the typical sequence R&D comes up with an idea based on what’s possible, engineering builds it, marketing learns what they have to sell, and the ad agency – despite being closer to the market and consumers than most anyone – finally gets handed the product and the story to be communicated. They’re at the end of the line virtually all the time.

Yes, Re-Brief teaches us that old ads can be re-created digitally. And yes, it recognizes the value of an idea. No doubt the traditional advertising holdouts can point their finger at this and say, “See you still need the concept.”  Yeah yeah.

But both of those lessons miss the real points.

If we want to build new, interesting, interactive experiences, we need to change the team dramatically.  Not simply add a token technologist to the traditional creative team, but perhaps take the opposite approach. Add one traditional creative to a full-blown technical team.

And two, we should put engineering at the end of the process, not the beginning. Rather than build something and then convince a consumer to buy it or use it, maybe should start with the ideal consumer experience then back up and build it.

What are your takeaways from Re-Brief?

I’ve been here a day and half so far, and have only started to make my schedule, but have already had incredible encounters with people I know and others I met for the first time.

It even started on the plane. I don’t think there was a single person on Jet Blue Flight 1263 who wasn’t headed to the nerd convention. In fact most of us knew each other.

I ran into Scotty Henderson and got an update on New Empire Builders, a collaborative venture to discover the start-ups, non-profits and companies making the world better.

I sat next to a young entrepreneur Scott Dubois, co-founder of Pidalia, a software company disguised as an ad agency because if you make stuff for marketers rather than for IT departments it plays a bigger role in a company’s strategy. Interesting to see all the ways that tech is infiltrating marketing and advertising.

In Austin I caught up with Musa Tariq, the global head of Burberry’s social media initiatives. We talked for a couple of hours about the need for better social metrics and an understanding of how to leverage likes and engagement in more effective ways. Burberry uses the new platforms as well as anyone and has mounds of data as you would expect. Further validation that the interest graph platforms are the future.

Over drinks I had the pleasure of meeting Edelman’s Managing Director of Europe, Middle East and Asia Marshall Manson. I got a crash course in how social media does and doesn’t work in different countries around the world.

And finally, this morning Conrad Lisco of Co:Collective invited me to join him for breakfast and a rapid fire discussion of new business models, the future of work, and the role technology will play.

I haven’t even been to a panel and I’m smarter than when I got here.  I know more about how to counsel brands and clients on mobile development. I have a more vivid understanding of where analytics has to focus if it’s to help social marketers make better decisions. I have further validation and also a better perspective as to how the interest graph can help brands segment their communities and emerge as trusted experts. And I have a new insights as to how social media differs from one country to the next.

And to think I only came for the parties.

Note the percentage of "talking about this" to "likes." Even Mashable's is a mere .03 percent.

Facebook’s new advertising strategy and the launch of brand timelines has received no shortage of attention. And deservedly so. The platform is about to reach a billion users and its upcoming IPO could be the largest initial offering ever. Which makes anything Facebook says or does big news.

But the timing of the new brand page announcement to coincide with the upcoming IPO is no coincidence. Obviously Facebook wants to position itself as more relevant than ever to the advertisers who will fuel its future growth.

This appears to be a smart move, as brands need some serious help on Facebook. Despite the fact that most brands have a huge Facebook presence and generate $3.7 billion in annual revenue for the social platform, the dirty little secret is that most people don’t visit brand pages and miss a full 84 percent, at least, of brand posts. Basic math quickly shows that only a tiny percentage of those who’ve acquiesced and granted their coveted like upon a brand pay any attention at all – half a percent of Ford likers pay attention, significantly fewer Old Spice clickers seem to care,  and not even a full one percent of Nike fans engage. Why even mega-passion brand Lady Gaga gets just .01 percent of her fans to listen. Likes as currency? Not yet.

The problem of course is that most brands use Facebook the wrong way. They come for the size of the audience more than the social behavior that users exhibit. Marketers show up with old tactics and techniques, posting messages and updates, rather than creating stories that merit attention and embrace the platform for its social qualities.

To its credit, Facebook has worked tirelessly to educate those willing to listen on how to be a social brand, rather than a brand that uses social media. But without much success.

Conversation strategy remains little understood by most brands

Consider some findings from recent research conducted by Mullen. We surveyed 160 CMOs and discovered that the number one metric for success remains likes. Only 34 percent of companies have even developed a conversation strategy. And by far the majority of content created by social media marketers consists of little more than product promotions and offers.

The thinking behind the Facebook changes is that it might get brands to do a better job at telling stories, creating the kind of content that works in the stream, and learning to earn attention engage more effectively, once and for all eschewing the tendency to broadcast content as Facebook were a TV channel.

The question is whether or not the changes alone will get brands to modify their behavior. Venture Beat reports that, “Facebook’s changes will do a lot to help marketers shift their thinking about social marketing. In particular, it will help them appreciate the power and the effectiveness of the user’s news feed.”

This will wean marketers from apps, forcing their landing page to be the new timeline. But it won’t guarantee that marketers learn to use the news feed effectively.

The only way that can happen is if advertisers stop thinking like advertisers and learn to think more like users themselves. Sharing stuff that’s useful, interesting and makes a contribution to the conversation. (Can you believe we still have to say stuff like that?)

Success will come from handing Facebook over to people who know how to engage in real time, who understand community, and who start their thinking with their users. Traditional media thinking – buying and audience – and creative – let’s make something shiny and clever – may become less effective.

My colleague Sean Corcoran offered some useful suggestions in a recent column.

My suggestions are similar with a few additional guidelines.

1. Learn to earn your way into the newsfeed by creating content that starts conversations or inspires participation.

2. It’s not always about a big, clever creative idea, but about the moment and real time conversation.

3. Master the analytics that will help guide you. Determine who among your community matters, learn what content is working, prioritize the results you want to see. Most importantly, think short term and long term.

4. Be present all the time.

5. Put the right people in place; you need a fast-acting, hybrid team comprised of digital strategy, content production, and community management.

6. Don’t assume that Facebook despite its size is always the answer. I personally believe that as the interest graph platforms (Pinterest, Springpad – where I also work – and others) take off and grow their user populations there will be additional platforms that work better for connecting with people who share your brand’s interests.

The bottom line is simple. Facebook can’t make your ads, or your story, more effective. You have to do that.

Facebook changes explained quite well.

My favorite slide from Daniel Stein's #BUSCD presentation

Daniel Stein, CEO of EVB, shared that thought last night with #BUSCD, the class I teach at Boston University. Arguable, certainly. But as Daniel put it, “Give an agency $200,000 and they will come up with endless creative ideas. Give them $20 million and you get a TV campaign. Give them $200 million and you get really big TV campaign with celebrities and Superbowl spots.”

His lesson, of course, was that creative teams should welcome smaller budgets. The tighter financial reins won’t restrict your creativity.  On the contrary, they’ll liberate it. Take away that extra zero and you won’t have to satisfy expected solutions and media buys.

Of course Daniel told his now famous story of EVB’s Elf Yourself. The casting call for a dancer went out over Craig’s List. A repainted wall in the office served as the green screen. And the entire production cost well under $30,000. That’s a pretty good price for one of the more popular brand icons of the last five years.

There’s no shortage of examples that demonstrate how a tiny budget can yield both big ideas and real results. A few memorable favorites (particularly because they were among the first demonstrations of new social platforms) include Poke’s Baker’s Tweet, CP&B’s Shocking Barack, Fallon London’s Tate Tracks, Mullen’s Will it Blend, and the Milwaukee burger joint AJ Bomber’s Swarm Badge event.

In every case the budget was the advertising equivalent of pocket change. In most cases TV would have been the wrong solution. And as a result, creators were forced to use digital and social media in ways that invited users to be part of the story.

I should give Daniel a shout out for another reason. He kindly took the Red-Eye from San Francisco to Boston specifically to speak to 25 students eager to hear and learn from the best. It’s a wonderful example of someone who has succeeded and prospered taking time to give something back and help the next generation of advertising thinkers and creators.

Thanks, Daniel. Twenty-five students, and one instructor, are all smarter for your visit.

Note:  Will share Daniel’s #BUSCD deck once we get it online.

E-Marketer worries that too many screens and distractions fragment our attention

I had an interesting interview yesterday with E-Marketer. They’re working on a project to explore the implications of too many screens and too little attention. It appears that consumers these days are flipping through digital pages on their iPad or fiddling with an app on their smartphone when they’re supposed to be paying attention to the TV commercials. What’s a marketer to do?

Interestingly the questions alone suggested that too many of us are still stuck in an old way of thinking and aren’t leaping quickly enough onto the newer platforms that call for engagement and collaboration rather than advertising.

The questions

“Should advertisers be trying to elevate a consumer’s attention level? Or should they instead accommodate themselves to current behavior and try to craft messages that will make a positive impression even if the consumer isn’t paying much attention?”

“Research has shown that many consumers check their e-mail during them commercial breaks of TV shows they’re watching. If they’re not looking at the TV screen but haven’t bothered to mute the sound while the commercial pod is on, does this mean that (for reaching this segment of the audience) the sound track is more important than the visual element of a commercial?”

“In the age of distraction, does consumption of ad content need to be more a lean-back activity (thus accommodating other simultaneous media usage) or can it be a more immersive, lean-forward activity?”

 A response

Such questions suggest that marketers are still in the business of buying attention. Fat chance. The idea of actually creating a more memorable soundtrack because someone’s looking down at their iPad instead of up at the screen in hopes of securing recall is ludicrous while the thought of making a positive impression on someone who isn’t paying attention strikes me as incomprehensible.

There are three things we can do, however. The first is simple. Be so damn interesting and entertaining that consumers not only welcome out content, they seek it out and pass it on. This is hard, but essential. The more choice a viewer has the better an ad has to be.

The second, of course, is to forget all about buying attention and focus entirely on adding value through utility. Years ago when we had no remote control to save us Charmin’ could force Mr. Whipple into our living room. Today, however, the brand has graduated to utility like Sit or Squat, an iPhone app that crowdsources the locations of clean, public restrooms. Clearly a better way to think about the second or third screen is to create content that considers context.

The third, and perhaps most promising approach is to go where we’re wanted. If a marketer is paying attention at all he or she knows that the newest trend in digital behavior is the interest graph – new platforms that encourage consumers to express their interests (Pinterest) and better yet their intentions (Springpad*) in ways that practically invite brands to connect, inspire and incent people who actually want their presence.

Granted the latter once again calls for marketers and advertisers to learn new tactics, master yet another form of conversation and figure out how to add value on a user’s term (hint: that requires more than simply posting your content on those platforms or adding a “spring me” or “pin me” button to your site) but who wouldn’t make the effort if there’s access to people who opt in. (I’ll be writing and speaking more about this over the next few months.)

As we’ve discussed lots of times, advertising in its traditional form won’t go away. At least not enirely. But thinking that we can meet the challenge of new behaviors and technologies by simply moving old tactics to new mediums is a sure way to accelerate its ineffectiveness.

*Note that in addition to my job as chief innovation officer at Mullen, I also work as CMO for Springpad, thanks in great part to Mullen’s willingness to let me experiment more and explore the startup world.