When digital is part of the problem, but also the solution
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Rory Sutherland. president, Institute of Practitioners in Advertising
In case you wondered, the ‘A’ in IPA stands for ‘advertising’ not ‘all that stuff seminal ad agency CDP used to do really well in the 1970s’. When we use the word ‘advertising’ it’s in that broad way the public uses it: to encompass any commercially significant communication, digital or analogue. So if you wondered why my agenda for the IPA didn’t single out digital, it’s because digital is advertising, every bit as much as 30-second TV spots are.
Besides, in times like these it’s important to remind ourselves what we have in common, not what divides us. There’s no point having a trade body if people use it to pursue narrow ends.
Ironically, the very reason we need this call to unity is because of the emergence of digital. For what the internet has done wonderfully (but scarily fast) is to remove a lot of the traditional boundary stones which marked out the territories which the different disciplines occupied. For instance, the long-established dividing line between that part of the budget spent on content and that part spent on media, which traditionally separated media agencies from creative agencies, has been blurred to the point of invisibility by digital possibilities. The same goes for the old boundaries separating direct marketing from conventional advertising or advertising from PR.
This means each part of a client’s budget can be fought over and debated by far more agencies than before. In addition, as agencies become more readily substitutable, the problem of over-supply worsens, adding to the downward pressure on our rates.
One solution is to concentrate on widening the category of advertising rather than fighting an increasingly messy turf-war. Here digital is our salvation. Its power to blur or remove boundaries finally allows our industry to expand the definition of what it does, to grow the category overall. My own deliberately broad definition of what we do — using ideas to turn human understanding into business advantage — is intended to expand the scope and breadth of our involvement with clients, including selling our services to those businesses which have never previously been big advertisers in the traditional sense.
To do this we need three things. First, bigger, broader models of human decision-making and behaviour. Second, a widening understanding of how these models can be usefully employed. And last, a broader psychological mix of people in the industry to do the varied work. In the second and third of these aims, digital people are essential to success.
Ratings of the Top 100 interactive agencies
Directory of all Marketing Services companies
Readers' comments (5)
Simon Jenkinson | Sat, 6 Jun 2009 6:45 am
The ongoing introduction of ''Digital as a Service' into many advertising agencies has been something that has been around around for a while. A lot do it well... AKQA and the likes, and have proven to be very successful, but some do not so well, and don't get the point of digital at all, it's like adding another offering to your business, that will also sit as the underdog to the main discipline.
You don't see creative or interactive agencies bolting on an advertising arm to their business! Why because they know its not their strength. If advertising agencies are to offer 'Digital' services then they need to fully understand it, and not just offer it because it can make money machine. At the end of the day the end-client will be the most affected.
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Stéphane Brun | Tue, 29 Sep 2009 1:05 pm
I'm old enough to remember when everything was done by hand; bits of images cut out of magazines, headlines drawn on bits of paper and then everything stuck to an even larger piece of paper and marked up with pen to tell the printers DO NOT PRINT THIS BIT PLEASE; when the only thing that resembled a computer in our office was an original Macintosh that someone had hollowed out and was using to keep their pens in. Times have, obviously, changed and now that Macintosh is in my study filled with water and keeping the goldfish happy. Well, until it leaks once a week and the fish die...but you can't have everything can you?
I'm a designer who loves techie things, adores technology and avidly reads MacUser every month, pretending to understand what it all means when I have absolutely no idea. I just like the pretty shiny pictures of pretty shiny things. I love what technology can do for me in my job but not what I have to do to make it do for things for me. I'm a terrible learner, always have been, and what I know about computers and software has been a long ongoing process of simply having to get to grips with them to make my job easier. Sit me down with the latest version of ASP.NET 2.0 for Dummies and I'm more likely to have a nervous breakdown before I've finished reading the contents page. Sit me down with someone who understands this stuff and let me watch them explain it on screen and I'm like a kid in a candy store, gawping at all the stuff moving and changing and imagining what this cool new stuff is going to allow me to do on my next job.
In my business we have a digital team that does things I could not have dreamed of a few years ago. True, most of them wear glasses, have centre partings and speak in 'code' but I can forgive the occasional , and even the odd bit of as long as my eyes don't start to go opaque and that throbbing in the back of my skull gets any worse.
When I get a brief now and go to find a quiet spot to mull it over, I don't think in terms of I need an ad, a brochure, some DM and quite possibly an updated HomePage to sit alongside it; but rather do I need to print anything at all? Can I not do it all online? Or can the campaign idea be something that begins on paper but expands across the internet and begins to live and breathe on its own with scant help from me? How can I apply all I've learned in print design and apply it to the screen, what does that change in the way I think, the things I do, the outcome of it all?
I find the possibilities endless and endlessly exciting yet daunting in equal measure. I can no longer sit on my laurels and design an A4 Full Colour press ad and hope that it's enough to meet my brief any more than I can scale the Eiger in nothing but a pair of Louis Vuitton underpants and some flip-flops. I mean, I could I suppose...but I'd probably die of hypothermia and I'd definitely tear a toenail or two.
Probably get arrested as well but that's really beside the point.
In my day-to-day, my digital team are extensions of myself, helping and pushing me as much as I hope that I push and help them. They may be able to code up some sexy, filthy cool site that recognises someone from their keystrokes and adjusts the layout and colours to suit their style, orders some takeaway online from the closest Chinese and sends a signal to their curtains to automatically close them because the next-door neighbours may be able to see in and the site they're on is, well...let's just say some things should remain private and leave it there. But hopefully these same guys can benefit from my experience in print and from my...ahem...creative thought processes and together we can end up with a final job that really works better than either of us could have done alone.
The hardest part of agency life is what should really be the easiest: working together toward a common goal.
But if everything in life was easy, I'd be sitting in the sun on a deck-chair made from £50 notes watching the Michigan All State Bikini Dancers learn to River-dance in front of me whilst Christina Aguilera asks me if I want more Marie-Rose sauce on my Classic Prawn Cocktail and Gordon Ramsey gets hot and bothered because he can't get my deep-fried King Rib just the way I like it and it bugs him because he thinks he's so great.
But that's egos for you.
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Stephane Brun | Tue, 29 Sep 2009 5:44 pm
For the record...paragraph 3 seems to have been edited so it makes no sense. Just so y'all know.
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justin pearse | Tue, 29 Sep 2009 6:44 pm
HI Stephane,
Nothing was edited at all in your comment.
Best,
Justin, Editor, nma
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Stephane Brun | Wed, 30 Sep 2009 8:34 am
Hi Justin. Completely right...the bits missing were code references and my Digital wizard type people have mentioned that those bits would have gone missing as the web thingy would have seen them as what they are...just bits of code.
So as I was saying in my OP...the guys know all kinds of stuff...and I know nowt.
Regards
Steph
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