I was born in the year 1954 when stamps were three cents.
If you thought, “Wow, three cents??” you’re a digital immigrant like me. You’re a digital native if you thought, “What are stamps?”
Unfortunately, there is a third group: digital rejectors — you’ve met them. The eye-rollers; the shoulder-shruggers; the print and TV addicts who need to go to some sort of media rehab. For the purposes of today’s article, we’ll dub them digital douchebags, but no laughter please; we’re at their funeral and it isn’t polite.
Worse, they don’t realize they’re dead. Like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, they continue to wander the brand landscape laminating their portfolios and waiting for a fax with the news they got into the local Addys. As my friend Kathy Hepinstall observed, there used to be a small bit of Dick-Van-Dyke-ian charm to a creative person being a technophobe; today, it simply means you’re a digital douchebag.
Full disclosure: I am a digital d-bag. Now in recovery. No one likes a laminated print ad more than I. But the first step in recovery is admitting your old print portfolio is basically Confederate money.
Case in point: From my collection of laminated ads, I offer this one. I wrote it in 1994 for a new website created by Time, Inc. called Pathfinder. Oh, this was the new-new thing, folks. Pathfinder allowed you to use your computer to look up text articles. Kid you not – text articles.
A print ad I did in 1994 for a new website. I still love the print medium for its clarity and simplicity. Headline reads: “Pathfinder Personal Edition brings back just the information you’re interested in.”
I still like the ad but the point here is that it was written in 1994, a brief fifteen years ago; when Netscape Navigator was the big browser and Mortal Kombat II was the hot game. Fifteen years later, Netscape is history, dusty MKII cartridges are available at curiosity shops and, up the street at 7-Eleven, they’re now selling Farmville gift cards which allow you to “buy” “acres” on a “digital farm” and then bother your “friends” on Facebook with that “information.”
Jesus.
(Oops. My d-bag was showing there for a second and I apologize. The thing is, we don’t have to like every nook and cranny of the web in order to embrace it.)
Here’s the point. Not only is the acceleration itself accelerating, the bus has left. Digital natives have most of the nicer seats, we immigrants are hanging on the sides, and for traction under the tires we’re all using the digital d-bags. This just in: the Visigoths are not at the gates. They are in your kitchen eating your lunch.
GO SXSW, YOUNG MAN.
Okay, so now we’re doing a slow dissolve from 1994 to April 2010. (Wavy lines, wavy lines.) And we’re in Austin, walking into SXSW Music/Film/Interactive. Here, where interactive once occupied only a wing of the four-floor Convention Center, it has engulfed the entire building and much of the adjoining Hilton. I enter bearing a Gold Pass, invited by my friend Damon Webster to chair a Core Conversation titled: “How Does an Advertising Pro Adapt to New Communication Techniques?”
On my iPhone, the “mysxsw” app reveals the details about our session’s focus: “With the advertising landscape changing at the speed of light, how do the traditional advertising pros adapt? Does the market now belong only to the tech savvy? How do you migrate what you know in other media over to 2.0? We’ll be gathering to share ideas, generate new ones, network, and then share the information digitally.”
I think it brave of Damon to host such a session. He admits he is not a guru. Once a producer on the agency side he’s managed to migrate his own considerable skill set online, creating among other things a site called Photoinduced.com: “The First Stop in Your Photographic Life.” What he brings to the table today (as I hope I do) are the fundamental creative skills learned over years in the advertising business. But we’re here in the eye of the digital hurricane today not to preach but to listen.
By 12:30, Conference Room J on the 4th floor of the Hilton is packed. In the crowd
we see some folks we’ve invited. David Slayden from Boulder Digital Works is here. So are a dozen kids from VCU Brandcenter’s newest track, Creative Technology. At my side is Nicole McKinney, digital native and friend from GSD&M, who’s capturing everything people are saying while keeping an eye on our Twitter feed (which captures what they’re thinking).
That’s Damon. I loved his tweet advertising the session. “I see dead ad jobs.” I thought it made a good title, too.
After our opening remarks, the session begins with a few longish speeches, people talking about their own companies, and the Twitter feed gives us our first lesson in adapting to the new world — which is: “No commercials. Let us talk.”
Like consumers everywhere, the people here don’t want to be the audience. They want to be the actors. They crave interactivity and want an immediate response. Which they get. We start moving the microphone faster, encouraging people to step into the middle of the circle, say their piece and move on — itself another lesson. In today’s back-and-forth with consumers we need to worry less about message strategy and more about a conversation strategy. This isn’t an audience; it’s a community.
CONTENT IS KING.
CONVERSATION, QUEEN.
The microphone is passed to a young woman, a recruiter named Andrea Andrews
“The people with traditional skills still have some catching up to do on the digital side,” Andrea observes. On the other hand, she continues, people with digital expertise don’t always have the skills associated with traditional media like TV. “You need tech skills, yes, but agencies still need storytellers.”
Andrea says most of the calls she gets are from agencies looking for “about a 70/30 split in digital skills versus traditional. A ratio that, to me, represents the ideal candidate, actually.”
As she speaks, I am reminded of a recent interview of Avatar director, James Cameron. Asked what permanent changes technology has made in filmmaking, Cameron answered, “Filmmaking is not going to ever fundamentally change. It’s about storytelling.” Which may also explain why some of the Star Wars prequels kinda sucked — it was special effects over storytelling. (Storytelling as metaphor here leans a bit to a “push” platform, but you see my point.)
The microphone is passed to a young man from BBDO Canada.
“If you want to adapt to the new world, you need to understand it. And if you’re not actually on Twitter, if you’re not on Facebook, if you’re not uploading videos to YouTube, well, you’re not digital.”
He goes on: “I’ve been watching movies for years and I talk a lot about movies. But I have no idea how to make a movie. Just because I consume content like that doesn’t mean I know how to create it.”
Another attendee agrees, weighing in later via email: “A lifetime of TV watching helped make me well-versed in broadcast advertising. But now I need to acquire the same amount of exposure to digital content in order to become as savvy with it, to understand its nuances.”
It is advice we hear over and over again throughout the session. Yes, the digital waters are deep and cold, but the answer isn’t to tiptoe down the steps into the pool, torturing yourself every razor-cold inch of the way. Dive in, headfirst, off the deep end.
In fact, most folks suggested going for a one-and-a-half; do a cannonball; risk a bellyflop. In the online space, a sense of play is important, and part of play is failure; the skinned knee, the black eye. Everyone, to a person, said to push past the pain and “fail forward, fail harder, fail gloriously.” Whatever flavor of fail you get, our group said, walk it off and go for it again.
I expected the people giving all this great advice in today’s group to be the goateed and the tattooed — Gen Y’s, full of ironic remove — but that was just my own 3¢-stamp world-view talking again. A woman who could be your mom has the mike now and she’s telling the audience she’s frankly a little tired of that deer-in-the-headlights look some creatives give her when she assigns a job with digital components.
“Get over it, you know? It’s not like I’m some expert. I fail a lot, but I’m doin’ it.”
It appears to be as Kathy Hepinstall said it was. In her talk about attending Hyper Island’s master class she observed, “When it comes to digital there’s not an age problem, only a curiosity problem.”
A CONSTANT BETA MENTALITY
Years ago, again in 1994, Lee Clow was our guest at Fallon’s creative retreat. We met at an old hunting lodge on a lake in northern Wisconsin and to this day I remember Lee leaning against the fireplace as he talked about Apple, talking about the changes wrought by this amazing company and what they meant for traditional creatives like us.
“Throughout history, the technology always comes first. It’s just technology for awhile. Until the day we artists inherit it.”
And so it goes. Television sets came along and for years all TV advertising sucked — until the artists inherited it. Same with radio. And now it’s time we artists fully inherit the technology wrought by Tim Berners-Lee.
This advice was echoed by everyone in our smart audience. Don’t wait till it’s raining to build an Ark. The web has made creating content as easy as accessing it. “The tools are all around you,” said one. “Pick them up.” Just do it. Embrace the learning curve. Don’t worry about being an expert because in this space you never will be. You need to adapt what’s been called a permanent beta mentality.
Watch, too, for old mentality creeping back in. So warned David Gillespie in a brilliant speech I found online where he described the “classic McLuhan-esque mistake of appropriating the shape of the previous technology as the content of the new technology.” Many early efforts in digital did exactly this; direct mail became email; billboards were resized as banners. My friend Stephen Land here at GSD&M agrees, calling digital efforts which don’t leverage the interactivity of the platform mere “print-eractive.” But this was understandable, says Gillespie, because at the time the alternative was standing still. Now it’s time to push through.
JUST DO IT.
This is how we learn. By just doing it. In fact, this cool quotation I just wikied makes the point: “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” It’s from some guy named Confucius, probably an ECD at Tribal or something.
How you do-and-understand is your business. For now, I tender this small list from our talkative group at SXSW as a starting point.
• Embrace low fidelity. Make things yourself. Example: Boone Oakley’s YouTube website. A junior creative team did it.
• Start your own blog, Twitter account, or video channel. Example: A Twitter account called Shit My Dad Says and launched just last fall was recently optioned for TV by CBS.
• My partner, Damon Webster, said: “Get yourself an HD camera. Learn Final Cut Pro. There isn’t going to be a two-day class that will change your life. Put the work in and make it happen. If you don’t have the experience, make the experience.”
• Take a Flash class and learn the language. Download apps. Play with tools like Gowalla and foursquare. Click, you analog bastards, click!
• Start a never-ending education online, today.
To aid you in your education, Damon and I asked everyone at our session (as well as in the Twitter and Facebook universe) to send us their favorite websites, those great places where they get education and inspiration. We gathered all those URLs and (for now) have parked them all on Damon’s website. Visit http://tinyurl.com/sxswadpro for a full clickable list. And if you have a new one you want us to add, feel free to tweet us at @sxswadpro.
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.
Okay, we’ve heard all the warning bells. Yes, we know 100 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day. Yes, we know Facebook’s population is now bigger than Japan’s. And yes, we read how Fast Company predicted “ad agency executive” will be among six jobs that won’t exist in 2016. Fine. Enough already. It’s time to remember what we traditional creatives bring to the party.
As a traditional creative, I know the fundamentals of presenting brands in compelling ways to the right people at the right time. I can write. I can think clearly. I can condense a complicated brief down to a few words and then architect the information into the short flow of a 30-second commercial. I can make a 3×5 space interesting. I am creative, which is something they don’t teach at Hyper Island and you couldn’t learn it if they did. I have the fundamentals, and the thing is, there are no new fundamentals.
So it’s a fantastic time to be in the business, traditional or digital be damned. Creativity matters now more than ever. We can’t buy people’s attention anymore. We can’t keep interrupting our way into their lives. We now have to be so stinking interesting that people put down what they’re doing to come over and see what we’re all about.
In fact, Alex Bogusky said recently that for the first time in history the most important entity in the whole media world could feasibly be the ad agency, being as we are at the nexus of where people who spend money for brands connect with people who spend money on brands.
But it ain’t all unicorns and kittens for traditional creatives. The ROI on our innovation is survival. And there is no safety either in declaring traditional a “specialty.” (“Well, we’ll just do the TV, print, and outdoor and we’ll team up with the digital guys to finish the campaign.”) Ask the Chief Financial Officer at your agency if she can keep paying for two groups of creatives — traditional and digital. She can’t.
So what do we do?
Well, this time let’s dissolve back to the year 1519. (Wavy lines, wavy lines.) Cortez and his marauders have come to pillage and destroy Mexico. The way forward is unknown. The size of the enemy, unknown. So to rally his men, the dude gives a pep talk of just three words. “Burn the ships.”
He removes the option of going back.
What if you burned your ships? What if you had to advertise a brand and you couldn’t use TV and print? Don’t ask me. I don’t know the answer. But I do know it’s probably time to burn the ships and step into the jungle.
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Hey Whipple 
Random Thoughts on the Word “Viral.”
Posted in Advertising, Commentary, General Crankiness, tagged Advertising, viral, YouTube on April 16, 2010| 10 Comments »
“Go viral”? Please.
Take the Beatles. The Beatles didn’t hold a meeting in the 3rd floor conference room and decide, “Okay, we’re going to ‘go famous.’ Ideas, people?”
No. They became famous by roasting our minds with rock and roll. The mind-roasting came first, the famous next.
So, can we please retire the word viral? And perhaps, even temporarily, use that old stand-by term “earned media”? It may not be as poetic but it hits closer to the truth. It describes how a good idea earns its coverage by being cool enough that people actually talk about it and pass it on to friends.
This is basically the idea behind a notion (attributed to Crispin), that goes like this: “What is the press release of your idea?”
What a marvelous way to think about advertising. Don’t show me the TV spot. In fact, don’t show me any advertising ideas. Show me an idea worth advertising. An idea worth advertising. Such a key difference.
What is the press release of your idea?
Show me an idea that – on paper – is interesting. Show me an idea that is so fun, so unusual, so….so somethin’, that the idea is in and of itself worth tellin’ to a journalist.
Now that…. that is the way to get to some stuff that’ll “go viral.”
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A few additional observations on “viral videos”, if you please.
The word “viral” comes with some baggage, probably from its use in describing popular YouTube videos.
Here the word actually makes some sense, describing as it does the ex post facto popularity of a given video. What makes something popular is a subject that’s always intrigued me, so I recently studied several sites that rank the view-counts of popular online videos. The results were not encouraging.
Those of you who’ve seen the movie Idiocracy can probably guess where I’m going here. In the stupid future envisioned in this movie, the world’s most popular TV show was called “Ow! My Balls!” – a user-generated reality show full of accident videos, not unlike the worst of America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Well, a quick study of the view-counts revealed that if you want viewers, show animals. Show otters holding hands, show sleepwalking dogs, piano-playing cats, and prairie dogs givin’ the evil eye. Hot on the heels of cute animals is cute babies: talking babies, Charlie bit my finger babies, and laughing babies.
Wow.
Perhaps that ancient advertising maxim, the one about how effective ads need babies or puppies … perhaps it’s true? They sure get the most clicks. If it is indeed true, again I find myself getting weepy.
Also depressing was the popularity of videos featuring people misbehaving, getting hurt, or doing something embarrassing that we can all have a good laugh at. People having bike accidents, the swearing Winnebago salesman, the Star Wars fightin’ kid, the angry German kid screaming at his computer, the bad sportscaster (Boom-goes-the-dynamite), the mentally challenged Miss Teen South Carolina, and of course Christian Bale and Bill O’Rielly screaming at people off-camera.
These were the videos with some of the very highest view-rates. The world of Idiocracy? It’s here. Such were my thoughts as I inched along the ledge outside my office window looking at the street below.
Eventually, however, I crawled back in my window. There were enough encouraging signs to buoy my spirits. Like the popularity of President Obama’s YouTube message. Or Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture. Or Christian the lion meeting his old friends again. These too were some of the most viewed videos.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. All of life is a bell curve, isn’t it? For every America’s Funniest Home Videos on television, there’s a Breaking Bad. Okay, maybe it’s not 50-50, but I just need to remind myself, “Walk towards the light. Walk towards the light.”
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