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I feel the best advertising has always been heavy on art, with a balanced dose of science to ensure the right people are watching, but these days it's all about the science and the art is taking a back seat.
In order to become a media planner these days, it feels like you need a Ph.D. I'm exaggerating slightly, but it used to be a simple matter of reach, frequency and your negotiation skills. Now it's becoming a more complex, more engineering-centric marketplace!
Media planners and media buyers used to be the same person and were responsible for the ongoing management of the clients' campaign. These days the business is becoming more fragmented, more specialized and more focused on targeting: ISP-level targeting, behavioral targeting, profile targeting, etc. There are numerous technologies that layer over one another and are intended to reduce waste in your media budgets. Media planners must learn about these technologies and prioritize how they may affect their customer's campaigns; in many cases, these campaigns are being tracked through to a customer acquisition or some other direct response metric.
It feels like every new company that's being funded is basing their business on these targeting needs and the ability to deliver a more targeted audience. I see these companies as fulfilling the goals of science. Where's the art in all of this? Where's the consideration of impact and the creativity of the messaging?
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It all started with Google and the "textification" of the creative messages. As a result of Google AdWords and Google AdSense, I feel as though the art is getting lost and is getting squeezed out by the science. As much as 40% of all online dollars are spent against search, and search constrains the creativity and the impact of the messages offered up to the consumer.
What is happening to the old-school focus on creative and the development of messaging that has impact and can affect purchase consideration? What happened to identifying the needs of brand advertisers and affecting consumer views on products and services? What happened to paying a premium for highly targeted, highly sought-after content? The majority of the discussions these days are about the commoditization of media and the development of the marketplace model, but I see very few people talking about the art of online creative. I've sat through presentations at conferences and in boardrooms, but more often than not the ideas are gimmicky and are not deeply rooted in strategy. Strategy is the art, and the art is rapidly being pushed out of the business by the metrics.
Wenda Harris Millard's recent comments comparing media buying (unfortunately) to trading pork-bellies is what originally got me thinking on this topic -- because she's right! The prices are being pushed downward due to the direct response marketplace and at some point we will see a "correction" where prices will bottom out, with some premium inventory becoming more valued and supply decreasing, with more creativity being applied to the business. In this type of a marketplace, creative should again become valued -- I hope! The premium placements should command more creativity in messaging to the consumer, and the art should be brought back to the space.
Maybe it's partially my fault (and those of the other agency people in the marketplace) for being so focused on the numbers for so many years or maybe it's society's need for immediate gratification, but I feel the push for immediate metrics is affecting our ability to blend art into advertising .and I'm hoping that this will change soon. The closest thing I've seen online to art in recent months was the Apple placement on the Vista page of CNET. The media person who bought that placement (where there were live-action ads touting users to "Give Up On Vista" on the actual Vista page of CNet) should be commended for his/her effective coup. This was art applied to media and creative at the same time. I know those ads ran in other locations, but this was the perfect marriage of the two.
Rarely have I seen anything so effective in recent years. IPod advertising and Mini advertising also are focused on art, as Altoids used to be and some other perky, younger brands, but when I find their ads online I find ads that are less artful than those in other major media.
I love advertising and I want to see the art come back. The emerging media platforms -- online video, mobile, social media, gaming, widgets -- offer an opportunity for art once again without losing the science, primarily because these are fragmented media as well and have not reached critical mass as of yet. For them to be considered effective you need a big idea. You need a strategic reason to try them out and strategy breeds creativity, which demonstrates art. So here's to the art coming back into advertising, and the science becoming integrated once again
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I hate to be a black and white, scientific method type, but the industry needs it. Placement is crucial. Creative still has its place, an important place, the other off-shoot of digital that you failed to mention, we now see a glut of ads. Only unique, creative ads will differentiate.
Imagine now, going to the Cosmo web site and have just one of those incredibly annoying popover ads sits there for five second before you can get into the site. Even the magazine’s current cover, as crowded as it is, has an aesthetic appeal which the web site, with its set of rationally organized “click-here� options lacks. The point is that the information-driven drill-down-destination nature of the web (read science) works at cross purposes with the largely aesthetically-oriented imagery found in most off-line, brand-oriented ads (read art).
It also occurs to me that if no one liked it or it was not working, then things would change. So something on the science side must be winning out over art or we wouldn't be having this discussion.
From a devil's advocate pov, what if end users, aka people, are actually looking for what they need when they need it, using their own most efficient means of searching, aka reading text with their eyes? This does not bode well for advertising, but the solution to it, is in Steve B.'s comment.
Strategy counts...and a great story well told (preferably with a clear benefit illustrated) still counts. So count your clicks, but make sure it counts.
I wonder what the word count on "count" was in this missive?
best,
Chris Boak Cheil
Just curious, as a veteran agency media buyer, do you have any specific regrets regarding past buys where you diminished the value of the publishers highly targeted audience by running mediorce creative then negotiating down the CPMs due to poor performance?
Where does accountabilty start and end between publisher and agency/client?
What happens, unfortunately, is that information drives out speculation - and data, instead of freeing up creativity as it should, leads people to solutions that have always worked.
Creativity in advertising isn't confined to creating ads either. The media buyer/planner has as much, or more, creative responsibility today as any writer or art director.
And the formula for good creative advertising is as easy to state as it is hard to achieve. It has just two components - relevance and surprise. The data drives you to relevance but abhors surprise - and that's the problem.
The good news is there have always been people out there who don't have anything to lose by breaking the mold.
Great post - and kind of funny in that we did a whole bunch of science for MINI and BSSP supporting the last campaign! We did online anthropology for deep consumer insight and then we measured the effectiveness of the campaign (Online Promoter ScoreTM - a measure of Advocacy) once it launched. (Case featured in Groundswell - pp 89.)
More here: http://www.motivequest.com/res/mini_case_study.pdf
Tom O'Brien MotiveQuest LLC
I'm wondering as digital distribution becomes ubiquitous and people become less concerned w/ the source/channel/medium of their information in their multi-tasking ways, is "scientific" optimization by channel going to become less relevant. Unless, of course, it can tell me the effect of exposure from each screen's use on the ultimate conversion vs. assuming the last interaction wins.
Related to that, I'm starting to think that media mix is quickly becoming irrelevant in an increasingly digital media landscape constantly evolving at the pace of technology and people's expectations and needs. To that point, the ability to capture more information at the end of digital distribution is wonderful in proving our work's worth. However, the art of effectively capturing attention and quickly turning it into a relevant interaction at the beginning of that digital food chain - and across multiple channels - should be raised significantly to match people's expecations.
I think that what's happening here is that the economics of advertising are shifting. Art and creativity are still there - it's just that "attention" has become the engine driving the industry.
As media choices & clutter increase, the value of reaching someone when they're more likely to actually have interest your messages has increased exponentially.
That's what the science side of the equation provides - the ability to better tap into a user's attention.
What you do once you've got their attention is still very much an artform.
Search doesn't abolish creative; it simply relocates it. Sure, you can't do much in a text ad (or at least, you can't do much touchy-feely stuff). You're appealing to interest in a highly pragmatic way here. Poets need not apply!
But the creative possibilities of the landing page environment are practically unlimited. You can do MUCH more creative stuff here than you ever could in the old one-way 30 second spot days. I mean, Jeez Louise -- you couldn't imagine a better creative playground.
There are still big ideas, it's merely the mechanics that have changed. You can use search or whatever the heck John Battelle calls it (the database of intentions?) to better realize them. But most agency types don't get this, and my bet is that they never will.
As a marketer in SEO and PPC, most of what I do is very conversion-focused. I understand that concern that creative might get lost in the shuffle- it is easy to get consumed by metrics and ad test planning, especially since the technologies and processes are new and developing.
For budget-focused, and thus results-focused advertisers, the key is ROI and ROAS. It's easy to talk about the value of branding, but when the cost isn't quickly recouped, it's not a viable strategy for players who aren't the Cokes and Wal-Marts of their vertical. New and growing companies focus on results.
But I believe as time goes on, in the places where stunning creative really drives the results advertisers are paying for, creative will suddenly become sexy again... because it's too easy when focusing on the science of marketing to forget inspiration and produce simple cookie-cutter ads... and these don't always work and only go so far. There's no substitute for what Ogilvy called "the big idea" (or was it "big concept"?).
And it's no fun for artists- it's hard to monetize art, so it's tough if creative loses ground in advertising. But as I say, eventually the scientists will see they need inspired creative for their tests.
The people/shops who are equally adept at the art and the science will always win.
Readers of this article might enjoy these blog posts: http://www.clixmarketing.com/blog/2008/01/10/dont-be-a-marketing-loser-read-this-book/ and http://www.clixmarketing.com/blog/2008/01/13/dont-be-a-loser-part-2/.