Last Monday, Diana and I have given this presentation at the Miami Ad School. It was pretty fun. To make things easier to understand, adding here the notes for each slide.
Slide 2: The arch of the story here is that ad agencies creative solutions are by default the product of the media of communication they use. The simple evolution of advertising creative supports this logic: when there was only print around, logos were important. With radio, slogans (jingles) took the center stage. With television, it became all about brand image communicated through the 30-second spot. Simply, creative has always been interchangeable with a specific media technology. Change this technology, and the rules of advertising creativity crumble. Why is this the case? Above all, it’s really hard to classify digital media as a communication channel. They are more of a behavioral platform. What is regarded as creative here? First, everything and anything that can modify, inspire, and introduce behaviors (think big behavioral platforms like Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, or smaller ones like thousands of Tumblr blogs, individual Facebook profiles, or just about any tool we interact with or interface that we come across online). Second, what’s regarded as creative is something that’s an inherent part of our activities. Messages are not part of our behavior, and not only because they are interrupting whatever we are doing at the time. They are external to it simply because they are not part of interactions that form that behavior. Do I need to click on an ad to complete some task, like booking a trip, online? No. Do I need to click on it in order to connect with my friends? No. Do I need to see it in order to explore maps, look at the photos, or read blogs to get inspired? No.
Slide 3: Now a quick trip down memory lane. First “forms” of advertising creative used to mark ownership (cattle branding) and to serve as assurance of quality (early product branding and logo design, like Campbell Soup, Coca-Cola, Quaker Oats) in comparison to no-name products.
Slide 4: Ok, let’s focus on mass media. Rumor is that mass media are on decline. People watch content on Internet. People fast-forward through commercials. Ads have become boring. There’s an interesting twist here, thought. It’s core is in the belief that while mass media (and traditional advertising) may be dying, but advertising creativity is here to stay. Simply, we just continued to apply the very SAME principles of advertising creativity to the new medium, and we are on our road to success. I will come back to this later, but for now, let’s see what these principles are.
Slide 5: What is advertising creativity in mass media based on? It can be boiled down to the following:
Slide 6: A creative solution is always a “thing” - a commercial art piece, an image, a great copy, a jingle, a slogan.
Slide 7: Leo Burnett also said that “big ideas come out of big pencils.” According to the mass media concept of creativity, creativity equals making something tangible: a great copy, an idea that makes a twist on the popular culture, or that captures the Zeitgeist, a piece-of-art logo and/or a print ad.
Slide 8: Bill Bernbach had a big faith in the individual talent of people working in advertising.
Slide 9: Mass media creativity also asks for and rewards the individual creative genius. If advertising award shows are to be trusted, there are people among us who are very talented in making pretty and funny stuff.
Slide 10: David Ogilvy believed in the killer agency - that its competitive edge resides in having the best-in-class creatives.
Slide 11: Finally, mass media creativity also asks for an advertising agency. Now, this being an unfair world, there are some agencies that are deemed to be more creative than others. That usually means that they are considerably better in making commercial art pieces for their clients that guarantee those clients meeting sales, brand, and audience goals.
Slide 12: Mass media creativity can be summarized in three simple steps.
Slide 13: Now, let’s fast-forward to the creativity in the digital world. If mass media fail to deliver brand messages - either because people time-shift through television commercials or because they spend more of their time online - then, the rationale goes, advertising creativity should reach them through digital media. Digital, it turns out, offers an unsurpassed opportunity for customer targeting: “we can deliver the right message to the right people at the right time.” That is, if people care to see that message at all - but that’s another story. In this approach, digital technology is treated as yet another channel for communication. The reasoning behind this approach is: we can still develop advertising creative, and now we have an additional venue where to display them. The only challenge here seems to be how to add this new channel to the already existing rooster of mass media channels traditionally used for advertising (i.e. how to create an “integrated” marketing strategy: “the question today is of how and why to integrate traditional go-to-market tactics with digital tactics in order to support the brand promise.”).
Slide 14: The truth? Think 4Chan, or Tumblr, or Twitter, or Foursquare. Or, as a matter of fact, think whatever any startup is building right now. In this setting, an “advertising genius” holds no chance against the bulk of digital people who make their creative talent visible - and available - the moment they turn their computer on. Worse yet, the traditional creatives focus on coming up with witty, funny, pretty or smart piece can turn into a liability: this is not a templated world, and thinking limited to 30 seconds or 50x100 pixels or in any other given frame is bound to fall short. For an ad solution to be successful, it needs to fit with the network of stuff that people are already doing, talking about, and acting upon. With all this collective creativity connected in a network, what are the handful of creatives holding fort in agencies to do? When no one knows where a good idea is going to come from, why limit it in advance to a creative team?
Slide 15: Traditionally, development of advertising ideas has been the domain of creative; their implementation has been the domain of media. Complexity of digital technology tests this dichotomy. It exposes the challenge of strategy versus its execution, and the problem of making predictions in an uncertain environment. Instead of facing a simple task of coming up with a creative idea and then strategizing its implementation via media channels, marketing teams today have to come up with solutions that mirror complexity of the entire digital environment. In traditional advertising, everything is templated. There is a set format, and there is a certain way that an ad spot has to be done: it has to have audio, and it has to have visuals, and it needs to go on for thirty seconds. But, in digital there are no guidelines.
Slide 16: I gathered here some campaigns/digital efforts that I think can serve as good examples of what best creativity DOES - and that creative solutions should do - in digital media. My criteria were simple.
Slide 17: The best creative solutions inspire community - enable people to gather around the idea, contribute to it, mix it, and pass it along.
Slide 18: Pepsi Refresh mobilized meaningful contributions from the community both in terms of submitting ideas and of voting for them. It represents a collective & collaborative platform that makes visible issues that local communities deal with, and help solve them through crowdsourcing.
Slide 19: Another version of the community idea is for a brand to connect with the most passionate fans of an activity (running, cycling, endurance sports, or in this case, minimalist running) and work with them to make the brand better. Out of collaboration with Anton Krupicka, a minimalist ultra-runner, New Balance came up with its minimalist running shoe. Passions of exceptional people ignite passions in others.
Slide 20: Group dynamic & ad-hoc collectives can also be utilized for a purely commercial purposes. Group Tabs created a win-win situation, where if enough people check-in at some venue, all of them get a deal. The model creates incentives for consumers to come in groups, and for venues to offer deals to boost their traffic and popularity. Good for business, and good for customers.
Slide 21: The best digital creative solutions do not start from scratch - they build upon, re-invent, and remix things that already exist. After all, the history of art is the best proof of this evolutionary dynamics.
Slide 22: To promote its new POPPY handbags line, Coach came up with the Poppy Project, where plugging-in a code on a blog connects it with everyone else who have done the same thing. A simple plug-in creates a network of diverse content destinations. It also creates a highly interactive and engaging web “trail.”
Slide 23: These days, The Art of the Trench is almost as iconic as the Burberry Trench itself. It also proved the point that some brand stories can provide the endless collective inspiration. A combination of crowdsourcing, beautiful imagery, quality product, and individual creativity contributed to the popularity of this creative solution.
Slide 24: Visa RightCliq turned the best of the web - data visualization & community & taxonomy - and turned into a super-useful decision-making resource.
Slide 25: Best digital creativity combines things that no one thought of putting together before. For example...
Slide 26: A simple solution that utilizes the possibilities of digital media to the max, Stickybits finally made the interactivity between people and products mainstream. It also turned products into media.
Slide 27: Small things are usually the best. How many times have you been annoyed by having to type a nonsensical text into the little box? Well, nonsensical no more. Instead of random words, now you’ll be asked to type in ad slogans. There’s even a cognitive theory behind this idea: apparently, people tend to remember things better once they have written them down.
Slide 28: Zynga’s unlikely partnership with 7-Eleven created something new: use codes on products to accrue Farmville credits. Other retailers, like Target, have since jumped on the virtual currency bandwagon: Target recently started selling $15, $20, and $50 Facebook giftcards.
Slide 29: This is my personal favorite: never before have we been able to see actions, opinions, and emotions of others on such a scale than with digital media. An instant sense of community, a comparison tool, and a mobilization device, digital visibility helps us to literally and figuratively, see things differently. What are the benefits? From getting an immediate feeling of belonging to getting a map view of the trends as they are forming, we have never been more social.
Slide 30: Simple things, like exposing where a pack of chips originated, provides context for consumer goods and products. Behind every object, there’s a story. Why not tell it?
Slide 31: OK Cupid’s trends based on personal profiles reveals all our differences and similarities. And it’s quite hilarious, too. Update: Mint.com has last week also jumped on the digital visibility wagon, see here.
Slide 32: Now a classic, Netflix Queue Visualization map exposes what your neighbors like to watch. That sort of collective information has always been every anthropologist’s dream. Part ethnographic study, and part statistical analysis, exposing taste and sentiment-based data is as business useful as it is satisfactory to our curiosity.
Slide 33: There’s an enormous untapped area for marketing innovation, and it’s called people’s behaviors. Transforming some mundane and ordinary activity into something that’s more fun/easier/better is a sure guaranty of both brand loyalty and product sales.
Slide 34: This one is not yet used by brands, but it should be. “How About We” matches people based on their shared interest in doing some activity: going for a walk in a park, solving a crossword puzzle, or biking through the city. No more boring obligatory dinner dates: now you can get to know someone by actually doing something you are both into.
Slide 35: One day, a free wi-fi will become a norm in air travel. In the meantime, Lufhansa will take care of your social networks while you’re stuck on the plane.
Slide 36: Probably the best product/marketing idea of this year, Groupon offered deals with a social twist: it provides venues with a guaranteed mass audience, and because of it, it allows everyone searching for discounts an opportunity to save big. Now, the model is spreading to other areas, most notably travel.
Slide 37: While games have been an inherent part of human behavior since forever, only with digital media they were allowed to achieve the scale needed for marketing to pay a serious attention. The findings of behavioral economics, sociology of role playing, and incentive system studies started offering inspiration for and useful insights into ways to direct and shape human behavior.
Slide 38: Old Spice entered the hall of fame with the never-seen-before churn rate of videos that respond to users’ requests. While we often may think of digital interaction in different terms, this was interactivity at its best: it utilized the possibility of the medium to further a creative idea. It doesn’t get better than that.
Slide 39: Always a darling of marketing people, Uniqlo failed to disappoint yet again: it created an enormous WOM campaign by simply telling consumers that their tweets lower the price. Both brand buzz and discounts soared.
Slide 40: What is the best way to promote an already established (and loved) brand name than to launch a giant blimp? A simple sighting gets you a badge - and right there’s the motivation to look up at the sky. Of course, the whole thing has been made more fun/interactive by employing Google Maps, livecam, and through tracking & broadcasting the blimp’s movements via Twitter.
Slide 41: While all these solutions are getting a lot of attention (and customers), at the same time they represent a perspective critically opposite to ad industry’s view of creativity.
Slide 42: Case in point.
Slide 43: The missing link here is that there is the equation between marketing and creative. Creative solutions of 2010 and beyond have to have a business plan incorporated in them. In other words, they need to be able to make money (and to prove that they are making it) in the most direct and causal manner. Inspiring pictures and funny stories may indeed change customer perceptions and give a boost to brand equity, but when it comes to the moments of truth (buying a product/using a service), it is what customers do that matters.
Slide 44: This means that today’s advertising creativity has as much to do with observing, utilizing, amplifying, aggregating, and curating, as it does with storytelling.
Slide 45: This new definition marks a critical shift of creative solutions from messages and stories to actions and experiences. Best creative solutions of 2010 are all trying, with some success, to provide value. This is a very different approach to advertising creativity. Not a single example above demonstrates creativity in terms of “image,” “message,” “trust,” “expectation,” or “perception.” Instead, they peruse dynamics that’s best described in terms like “search,” “explore,” “discover,” “learn,” “discuss,” and “experience.” In the place of advertising creativity as something tangible, we now have creativity as the long network of tools and actions that, in one way or another, become part of our behaviors.
Slide 46: Borrowing from Charles Eames, I came up with this definition.
Slide 47: Think of advertising creative as a medium of behavior. No matter what solution you come up with, always ask: is it going to somehow change people’s behavior? is it going to become part of that behavior? is it going to be flexible enough to evolve with that behavior?
Slide 48: What does it take for digital creativity to happen? If the list above offers any evidence, the task is not about creation of brand images, storytelling ideas, and media strategy for distributing them. It is about creating conditions that allow something unexpected, fun, informative, communal, or helpful to happen. Also, almost by default, a lot of successful digital solutions have marketing built into their product. To take the definition of digital creativity as a plan for arranging elements further, I offer here the possible routes for executing this plan.
Slide 49: Management consultant Warren Bennis said: “There are two ways to be creative. One can sing. One can dance. Or one ca create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish. At the end of the day, to create something needs both.”
Slide 50: Well, that’s a good question. Digital space is rife with unpredictability. With each new technology, the unexpected behaviors only multiply. There is so much going on simultaneously and things change so quickly that no one, absolutely no one, can know everything that is going on. Making predictions on what people are going to like and respond to, in this situation, is close to impossible.
Slide 51: Still, it may be good to remember a few things.
Slide 52: It’s not enough just to release some commercial art piece and count on it to stir up consumers emotions; the hardest part always happens afterwards. In order to get a brand to be talked about and interacted with, an idea is only beginning of the job. The rest of the job here means coming up with solutions that build upon emotions long-term: for every idea that plays upon consumers' emotions, there needs to be a set of follow-up tactics that give it legs. Sometimes that means 24/7 engagement (Twelpforce Best Buy), sometimes facilitating a community (Ford Fiesta Movement), sometimes making something useful (Lufthansa's MyFlightStatus) or informative (Frito Lay's Chip Tracker). Same token, I wonder where New Balance is going to take its Anton Krupicka partnership, and how Old Spice is going to continue interacting with its now considerable fan base.
Slide 53: Having a very narrow view consumers’ actions based on them rating something, updating, RTing, checking-in, clicking on, etc. prevents from seeing impact that our solutions have on the larger behavior that we want to change/inspire. Too often we think about the most effective communication channels for reaching consumers instead of asking how to align diverse behavioral tactics in order to achieve a desired change.
Slide 54: It’s always useful to wonder how different creative solutions will help consumers choose between different products/services/brands. That’s a good perspective that shifts the focus from the brand and its story to consumers and their point of view. To avoid the over-simplified model of consumers as beings with “limited info-processing capabilities” leading to the “cut through the clutter” requirement, the best is to think about creative solutions as resources. How do you help people make decisions? This sometimes means aggregating and curating stuff that already exists online (eBay, Lookbook, Nike+ Foursquare), using group dynamic as a resource (Groupon, Pepsi&Food52 recipes on Stickybits, Barcode hero), visualizing info (OK Trends, Hunch Taste Graph), or amplifying some behavior (Don Q’s Lady Data).
Slide 55: This means always think what comes next: how some particular tactic or solution can be linked to the next one, and the one after that. Think the rules of improv, and apply them to digital (COACH Poppy Project and Jonah Peretti’s Start The Adventure are good examples). The point is: address a campaign as an interconnected system, not as a story (DonQ’s Facebook page, DonQ’s Lady Data on BuzzFeed). Then, keep it alive.
Slide 56: Rather than chasing the latest digital gimmick, it’s always good to think about digital as a network of relationships that are made both of behaviors and technology. Then it’s possible to explore how to make some relationships visible (Netflix Rental Queues Visualization), how to create new relationships between people (HowAboutWe, RunKeeper, SKVNGER + BuyWithMe), how to create a new relationship between people and products (Tesco iPhone app, Uniqlo Lucky Counter), or between people and the brand (GroupTabs, Best Buy Shopkick), how to amplify/improve existing relationships (Pepsi Refresh Project), or how to simplify them (Rightcliq by Visa).
Slide 57: Any combination of digital/physical (Nike Livestrong Chalkbot, Schnitzel & Things iPhone app), brand/community (Burberry Art of the Trench), communication/behavior (MTV VMA’s Twitter Tracker), mobile/web (7-Eleven + Zynga partnership), game/activity (RunKeeper) is allowed. Especially the unexpected ones. The point is to stick together different things to develop something new. It would be easy to think of it as a simple recombination: what’s great about bricolage is that it uses bits and pieces of radically different media and behavioral dynamics to create new formats.
Slide 58: If you remember one thing here, it should be this: instead of facing a simple, clearly formulated task of creating an advertising campaign that “extends delivery of what the brand promised” to digital media, digital creatives are challenged to develop something new whose value they have yet to discover.
Slide 59: Or, in Mark Zuckerberg’s words: “We don’t know yet what it is. It’s like fashion. it’s never finished.” The same applies to our creative solutions. Never forget that web doesn’t have an expiration date.
