In 2007 everyone said ‘if you don’t have digital in your book, you’re a dinosaur’. Then what happened?
I’m just having a read of this FT article on how ‘Mad Men Lost The Plot’.
The gist of it is that we all rushed towards ‘digital’ advertising because it allowed companies to target their consumers with far greater accuracy than a TV ad. Why spend a huge amount of money communicating to ten million people when many of them won’t have the faintest interest in your category, let alone your brand? Well, apparently there’s no brand growth in targeting your already-loyal customers (the ones who sign up to your Facebook page); you need to target the light users and nudge them into making their use a little less light. What media are best for that? TV, press, posters and radio.
The other problem with much of ‘digital’ (funny how terrible human beings are when it comes to really important adjectives. Have you ever wondered why people describe so many things as ’emotional’ without even specifying which emotion? ‘Digital’ is the same: so much covered with a single word that it’s now virtually meaningless) is that it’s boring. Think of those little banners that follow you all over the internet after you almost buy a shirt from a website but change your mind before completing the purchase. Or the messages on the right hand side of your Facebook feed. Boring and annoying: two adjectives you really shouldn’t have anywhere near your brand if you want people to like it.
“Les Binet, from John Lewis’s agency Adam & Eve DDB, is one of the industry’s most respected experts on advertising effectiveness. In 2013, on behalf of the IPA, Binet, along with Peter Field, conducted an analysis of the most successful UK campaigns of the past 30 years. They found that “the most effective advertisements of all are those with little or no rational content”, and that TV is the emotional medium par excellence. An online banner ad, however smartly targeted, is unlikely to make anyone grin, gasp or weep.”
So why did we rush with such abandon towards this new frontier? A few reasons:
- The ad industry loves new things (see: ageism). Beyond that, it also hates to get left behind (see: the desperate openings of agencies on Second Life). Digital was both ‘new’ and ‘cool’; how could advertising not smooch its buttocks into oblivion?
- Human beings like things they can measure, which is why quantity so often wins over quality. Show me 50 ideas and I’ll know without any doubt that you did the work for which I pay you money. Give me a single, brilliant idea and there’s still a nagging feeling that you just came up with it while sitting on the lav in between games of Halo. Digital advertising can be measured with (theoretically) great accuracy, so the people paying for it feel far more comfortable with it. Alas, what they failed to measure was the huge amount of fraud in those measurements.
- We all do it. We’re all in the digital space all day: sending emails, visiting websites, liking pictures on Facebook. How could the idea of putting out messages in this medium be anything other than THE RIGHT THING TO DO? Perhaps we forgot that we spend all our time in the digital space doing the things we like to do and hating anything that interrupts that. Y’know, like ads.
Anyway, billions of pounds/dollars later, here we are. The annoying ads still follow you around, click through rates are still minuscule and TV ads are still alive, well and expensive.
Perhaps we forget that dinosaurs were around for hundreds of millions of years before they died out.
“we” didn’t run headlong into the digital mirage. the holding companies did. because the money was in digital confusion. nobody knew how to do a banner or a site. but everyone knew about how to shoot a TV ad. the money was in confusion and things that were too complicated to understand. nobody cared if it worked or not. it was a vacuum. and it got filled. with bullshit.
oh and, Adblock.
That’s a very good point: advertising made a lot more money back when TV seemed like much more of a mystery. We could pretend the higher budgets and longer deadlines were necessary because clients couldn’t quite understand it all.
By the time they did (ten years ago-ish), the budgets plummeted, and the spare cash to make good ads great had been whipped away.
Maybe digital is like bottled water: people started getting wise to fizzy drinks – that they’re very bad for you and don’t even quench your thirst – so Coke and Pepsi got into the even more lucrative bottled water market, selling tap water across the States for $1.50 a bottle.
It’s not a zero sum game and never has been because the two mediums are not at odds with each other. Or shouldn’t be. Campaigns need to become solution orientated. If you have a brief that inspires a good digital idea then it makes sense to go ahead and make it. Ditto TV.
I wouldn’t describe someone who has no digital in their book as a dinosaur but they’re probably not functioning to the best of their ability. It’s a medium like any other and the effectiveness of banners bears no relation to its value. No one who works in digital advertising calls that digital anyway because it isn’t, it’s just another form of display.
I think the writing’s on the wall when people are willing to pay good money NOT to see advertising’s digital offerings.
Completely unrelated but thought you may like this article about how useless life paint is. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/09/volvo-life-paint-hi-vis-cyclist-road-safety-review?CMP=twt_a-technology_b-gdntech
There’s another thoroughly depressing reason: Corporate buyers value social/digital/content agencies on a much higher multiple than ‘conventional’ ones.
So if you’re trying to keep a share price up, or sell an agency, it’s financial madness not to be as ‘digital’ as you can.
Three people outside the industry have sent me the link.
With comments like ‘smash the digital filth’ and ‘says what everyone knew all along’.
Interesting platform for such ‘heresy’.
Agree with @Vinny. The money was in confusion. It was also in the ‘mechanics’ of maintenaince over time.
Exactly right. We had people telling us constantly that we were in danger of being seen as ‘dinosaurs’, but we’ve stuck to doing what we think is right for our clients, rather than what happens to be fashionable or seen to be ‘cutting-edge’ at the time, and we’ve seen it work for those clients. It’s now quite funny to see the cracks starting to appear in this digital facade of advertising.
The things that advertising agencies have traditionally done well are till the most valuable way they can help business; the ability to distil brands and products into simple and powerful themes, and communicate those in powerful, memorable and interesting ways to many people.
It’s a very good article and a reminder of what we’ve known all along (only with some handy data to back it up – there’s that ‘measurability’ thing again, Ben).
What’s most alarming is that the book that kickstarted this ‘movement’ was published in 2010. Five years on, I have clients measuring campaign effectiveness in ‘likes’ and ‘shares’… and so many agencies are still guilty of it too.
We need to go back to a really simple, measurable metric: sales.
Interesting article but I’d really like to know what this means in the real world and for the future of the industry. I don’t watch telly and I don’t read print media anymore so I am not sure how they can possibly be more effective than banners and whatnot.
Drew, me old china, you seem to have mistaken yourself for everyone else on the planet.
Millions still watch TV.
That’s how TV ads can possibly be more effective than banners and whatnot.
Pretty sure TV and print are in decline in this country. Printed newspapers are definitely tanking and I’m sure on-demand services are taking a big chunk out of the traditional TV market. Then there’s piracy, Tivo, Youtube, dicking about on Facebook… I’d be surprised if this stuff isn’t eating into TV viewing figures in a big way. Plus there’s second screening so even if people are watching TV they’re ignoring the ads.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d love things to go back to the way they were. It was way better. But I just don’t see it happening.
Get with it daddy-o. You’ve become the luddite.
I’m a designer, and I’ve been keeping an eye on this and other blogs with interest, and it’s been a real eye opener.
Some designers, have issues with “digital” design for different reasons. We’ve seen years of tech moving forward and big investments there. But the methods for creating website designs are much the same as 10 years ago. The web also followed the traditional “free & ads” model in its infancy. But with ad budgets reducing, money is now going into apps and platforms and away from creative work. I think the sticky middle ground between code and creative is why we’re here.
Think about how the music industry struggled with downloads and streaming. In theory, it opened up a lot of possibilities, but the big record labels didn’t want to know. People who couldn’t access certain artists in their local shops before, wouldn’t bother. Now they can via the internet. So to them a web platform (iTunes) is a better music shop than HMV. And as we see in music, the creatives (the musicians) suffer most of all.
Perhaps there needs to be more ideas about making websites (not apps) that people want to pay for. Then you can help define exactly how someone sees an ad within the context of that. Maybe this can be better than shoe-horning the old way of doing things onto a new platform? If the best of digital media is old media-lite, then it does set a low bar for everyone.
In my industry, designers have to help create ways of going beyond WordPress templates. Otherwise we’re just creating voids for (as Dave Trott would say) content, which is difficult to think about, but true. I’d love to hear ad folks talking about their web too. Like what it is, what it’s for, and how it can be better. I’m sure the web can do far more exciting things than monolithic platforms and apps. And that does present an opportunity of sorts doesn’t it?
I remember a few years ago when a client I was involved with suddenly started frothing at the mouth over things like digital and social. In a big meeting she went around the table and asked if everyone was on Twitter. When it got to me I said no. The look in her eyes – why has the agency placed this luddite tosser in my meeting on my business. They drank the cool aid, and now everyone’s realising what total bollocks it was. And a bunch of great, strategically savvy creative people hit the bin. Thing is, as a creative, and I admit an older one – I actually have nothing against digital. Like most people I want my ideas to exist and have a life beyond my layout pad (see, showing my age there). And if digital gets my idea into the consciousness of the audience then great. But digital is just another channel – nothing more. It has its place along side TV, print and whatever – not in place of. Digital is here to stay – but so too is TV. Embrace all equally – allow them to do what they are great at – and we might just sell some shit. As the guy from Diagio said in the article – people don’t give a shit about brands. No one will ever engage unless we persuade them to. TV persuades and digital (along with a host of other channels) closes the sale.
I’ve been in the Design & Advertising industry for 40+ years – from the end of the hot metal type era through to targeted digital marketing – but, am I a consumer sitting here with money to spend just waiting for a cleaver digital advert to make me spend it – or am I consumer sitting here with money to spend on something I actually want / need…….hmmm. The biggest mistake I see time after time is digital marketeers think that because you had an interest in a particular produce or service that you always will. Once I have bought a toilet brush – stop trying to sell me another one……..
I’ve worked for digital agencies since 1997 and seen the rise, fall, rise and now fall from the perspective of someone who gets paid to make people believe digital works. And the reality is it does in some respects. It doesn’t replace TV or Poster or Print, it can’t deliver big mainstream brand fame and it doesn’t deliver ‘engagement’ or ‘love’ or loyalty.
It does work if you use it to amplify something brilliant you do in a more traditional channel. And it does work as a place where customers can buy or do the thing you want them to do – as an alternative to having expensive high street shops or phone based customer service centres.
In some ways it does what the pub used to do, it gives people a place to discuss the stuff that has entered their consciousness and it can be a place where you get a good deal.
So for me, digital strategy should pretty much be – do really fucking interesting things that people want to talk about and share, put them somewhere enough people can see them and make it easy for them to share. And then have a really good product/promotion that’s easy to buy and accessible to as many people as possible.