Digital Strategy and Social Platforms
Digital advertising is a bit of a minefield. The average user has an expectation that everything will be free. Advertisers want to do their best to reach users, but users have retreated behind ad blockers or have built up a sort of immunity to common advertising methods, often referred to as ad blindness. But brands can’t give up on advertising on the Internet. The Internet has become too important a part of too many people’s lives to be ignored. It has made major inroads into supplanting advertising’s old go-tos: TV, radio, and print. So there exists this tension between brands trying to find ways to reach their potential consumers in the digital space, and those consumers actively trying to avoid those brand messages while still benefiting from the free stuff that the brands are supporting.
One of the ways this has evolved over the years is that brands have begun putting more of their focus on platforms instead of ad buys. Why buy a bunch of banner ad space on some blog site that no one is going to see, when you could make yourself an undeniable presence on a social platform that millions of people are using? And even if you’re not getting enough free attention there, most platforms have options to pay to promote your content. So we see companies set up pages on Facebook and Twitter, and advertising agencies scrabbling to find ways for brands to inject themselves on Pinterest, Instagram, Vine, Yik Yak, Kik, Snapchat and so on. Brands are all afraid that if they are slow to adopt one of these potential advertising platforms they are going to be left behind. This is an incredibly dangerous way of thinking, for a number of reasons.
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The Issues Campaign
Most advertising is done in the name of commerce. Pure capitalism. But every now and again, agencies engage in (typically) pro-bono work for charities and non-profits. These are often seen as a great opportunity among the creatives to put their talents towards something other than the whims of the rigid and unfeeling marketing department of a Fortune 500 company; a chance to do some good in the world.
While it might be nice to work on a cause, in my opinion these can be amongst the most difficult campaigns that any agency team can develop. Non-profit work often shares many of the same challenges that working with a brand does, but with a host of other problems as well. Not only do they have to worry about cutting through and grabbing attention, but the way many chose to position, advertise, and set goals leave a lot to be desired. Combine that with a flagging economy that has more people looking at how they are going to solve their own problems, let alone the problems of others, and things are tough for agencies trying to move the needle for a pro-bono client.
Harley Davidson Brand Audit
Harley Davidson is a classic and quintessentially American automotive brand. Its name and logo are so widely know that just about everyone has an opinion about the bikes and their riders, whether they know anything about motorcycles or not. And yet, despite all this, Harley Davidson (the company) seems in trouble. Every few months, a new article comes out fretting about the company’s long-term position, and investment experts typically advise against buying Harley Davidson stock, even when it seems to be performing well on the market and the company’s sales are solid.
I confess, I don’t know much about motorcycles, but the Harley Davidson brand represents an interesting opportunity to explore why the strength of the brand isn’t translating into the kind of success that you might expect: the kind of success that makes people turn their heads and pay attention. How valid are the worries in these articles? Does Harley Davidson need to consider changing their image to court more buyers? Or are the investment experts out to lunch? I decided to flex my planning muscles and perform a brand audit to see what I could find.
Boardgames and Advertising
Trying to explain to people that I consider board gaming a hobby can be difficult. It seems very common in our society to segment things into those that are for kids and those that are for adults, even when the truth is far more complicated. Graphic novels like Sandman, Watchmen, and Walking Dead struggled to have their complex and adult stories respected by mainstream audiences because comic books are for kids. Outside of the Latino communities, Soccer lags behind other national sports in the US because it has been branded the sport for kids. Video games struggle with the ‘toy for kids’ identity, which has influenced everything from the decency debate in mainstream media to the ability of eSports to be taken seriously as a spectator experience. Similarly, despite a European-driven revolution in board game design towards more interesting and adult-friendly games, most Americans still think of board games as things for kids. But I’m here to tell you that not only have board games made huge strides in playability and strategic depth, but that understanding the parallels between the systems typically present in these games and the field of advertising will make you a better advertiser.
A few weeks ago, while coming home from a game night with my friends, I was thinking about game design, exploring in my mind how setting and theme could inform design and visa versa. I had also spent part of the night chatting with my friends about my career prospects in advertising. When these two thoughts converged, I found myself wondering what kind of board game would you make if you were going to make a game about advertising, in the same way that Monopoly is about wealth aggregation through real estate development, chess is about battlefield tactics, and Settlers of Catan is about colonization. Exploring this space led me to realize that the vagaries of advertising as a discipline share a lot in common with the strategic puzzle of a well-designed board game. It also led me to consider whether game theory had a place at an ad agency. Could understanding how systems behave when all involved parties act with rational self-interest be beneficial when making the hard decisions creative teams face every project? With all this swimming around in my head, I remembered reading a while ago about a project at DDB’s San Francisco office where a UX designer and an account planner teamed up to use the principles of pen-and-paper role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons to provide a template for bettering understanding UX design. If there were parallels between D&D and UX design, why couldn’t there be parallels between this new school of strategic board games and advertising as a discipline?
The #briefbrief Challenge
I recently participated in an event hosted by BBDOsf for junior planners, where they gave out three client briefs over three weeks, one a week, and aspiring planners were asked to come up with a creative brief that could be posted to Twitter. In other words, the brief had to be shorter than 140 characters. It also had to contain the hashtag #briefbrief, the name of the event, and be addressed to @bbdosf, all of which are counted against the character count, of course. The event ended on the 11th of March, and now that the event is over and talking about it is unlikely to compromise the integrity of the 140 character limit imposed by the #briefbrief, I wanted to write a blog post about my experience with the event, what I learned, and the thought process I went through while thinking strategically about each of the briefs that got me from big ideas to a single tweet. So without further adieu, the briefs!
What Freelancing Could Look Like in Advertising’s Future
Advertising agencies have always had an interesting relationship with the independent contractor. While the prestige of an agency is usually derived from its past work, and therefore from its talent, often agencies don’t feel that their current in-house talent has what it takes to get the work done for certain clients. Enter the freelancer. The role of the freelancer is determined by their area of expertise. Some freelancers work in the creative departments, as copywriters or art directors. These contractors are typically brought in to handle a specific kind of campaign or individual ad with which the agency has very little experience. For example, if an ad agency wants to run a social media enabled campaign but has only ever dealt with traditional media, freelancers with social media experience will be brought in to bridge the gap. Freelancers also get brought in to handle account problems. Expert pitchers with lots of experience, or at least a great reputation, with certain client industries will be brought in to help a shop land a major account. For example, an agency looking to land a new account in a prestige category, such as an automaker, might bring in a freelancer who is considered an expert at handling automotive clients to ensure that their pitch is top notch.
This relationship raises a lot of complex questions, though, which is why it is so interesting. When a client buys a pitch that was made with heavy input from a freelancer, who will leave the agency’s employ after the pitch is won, have they actually bought good work, or have they bought snake oil from an expert salesman? On the flipside, if an agency has the perfect campaign for Ford, but a lack of prior car experience could put up a roadblock, are they wrong going outside to get the help and support they need to make it the last mile? Some agencies have even started taking this thinking to the extreme. Why just hire these experts when your in-house talent is not up to the task, when you could hire only experts for projects on a case-by-case basis?