Well, whatever. It's interesting anyway--a long article from Ad Age's Bob Garfield talking about the disintegration and reinvention of the way people sell soap and razor blades to a mass audience. I barely understand any of it [okay, none of it], but it's still fascinating reading, and disturbing, too.
There seems to be quite a bit of happy chirpy sounds from Big Media types, but for some reason it sounds way too much like what you would imagine the conversation to be like, had the bewhiskered moneybags directors of the Amalagamated Federal Whale Oil Company and the Columbia Whale Oil Lamp and Whalebone Corsetry Company decided to rename themselves Pollyanna and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, donned pretty red sunglasses, and traipsed arm-and-arm through the graveyard whistling all the way.
In other words, they must be high from licking small-dog-sized Australian cane toads, or giddy that no matter what happens, they've got a nice buyout clause in their contracts.
As a consumer, I couldn't care less how these guys try to get me to buy something, but I can tell you right now that just because it's in a slick magazine or on TV doesn't mean anything. For better or worse, the Internet makes it a lot easier to shop and compare, and bad product will have a much harder time getting anywhere, and even bad product makers know better than to spend money where it'll do them no good. Again--eh, whatever. I just hope the guys in the article were simply lyng through their teeth about how pretty and shiny things are, and when they go back to work they're at it hammer and tongs to survive. Desperation tends to clarify things for folks.
Posted by Terry Oglesby at March 27, 2007 01:52 PMThe clients are starting to push the agencies, but slowly.
They come in and wonder, like farmers deciding which kind of cow to farm, 'Should we have an ad on the Internet?' and the agency says, 'You can have an ad on the Internet but you still have to have one in the paper because you can't clip a coupon out of the Internet.' (Because they want the commission and how do you charge for a 'net ad?)
Then the client goes away with a puzzled look on his face and comes back in two weeks looking a little less puzzled and says, 'But you can unload one. And anyway, you can't clip a coupon out of a radio ad neither.'
And the agency says, 'Sure, you can download a coupon out of the internet but more people read the press ad. And radio is theatre of the mind.'
It's the dance of smoke and mirrors. They get there by degrees, slower than the kids in suburbia.
Meanwhile, all the creatives in the back office are on YouTube stealing their next idea.
I think Garfield (the article's author, not the cartoon cat) had it about right when he noted consumers don't want to be driven by someone else, but if companies will just make the tiniest of effort, consumers will drive straight to you.
I think a lot of ad agencies are like a lot of other Old Media-related companies, and still--going on twenty years of the Big Boom of the Internets--still have no real firm grasp on what to think of it. It's sorta like watching conquistadors mow down a bunch of Incas using their thunder sticks, and then after it's over, the surviving Indians get together and try to come up with a better spell against thunder sticks.
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at March 28, 2007 09:59 AMExactly right.
On the other hand, some of them are starting to get it right. I occasionally do some work for an internet advertising consultancy here that handles a London-based client - a British company - via a New York agency. Yes, the New York agency sub-contracts the London creative work to a consultancy in Melbourne, Australia.
There's a lot of conference calls at weird times of the day. Someone's always asleep.
Posted by: kitchen hand at March 28, 2007 06:45 PMAnd no one at the client's office has ever mentioned cutting out the middleman?!
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at March 29, 2007 07:30 AM