Commentary

Media X: Big Is Beautiful

by Jack Feuer , November 3, 2009

This week in 1954, Godzilla brought 20,000 tons of serious hurt down upon the screaming heads of the citizens of Tokyo. And ever since the film's premiere, those poor bastards in Japan have been regularly stomped into red slime by an endless series of city-smashing mega-monsters.

The imagery, in fact, has become the analog version of a viral video, spreading out across the planet to be used whenever some worthy wants to make the point that big is bad. But when it comes to gigantism in the media business, we frequently hear something a little closer to home. I refer to Jay Chiat's famous line about his goal for his half-eponymous shop, which was to see "how big we can get before we get bad."

Somebody should have called him on that bullshit. It wouldn't have been me -- Chiat was a god to all of you, but a bully to those who worked for Adweek, which he despised (not without reason). Jay was being his usual snarky self when he made that crack. No doubt he already knew the answer: If you're big, you're bad.

Ipso facto, right?

Well, it is true that ad agencies persist in the belief that success equals size. Why they believe that has always escaped me. Of course, I still can't figure out why a dog would lick its balls. Even a gay one. But I digress.

The ancient blogger George Parker has made a career out of hammering away at this "big is bad" trope. While they wait for their first genital hair to appear, the digitards at Internet shops do it, too. Clients also delight in the practice. Not necessarily because the big shops on their roster are bad -- How would a client know? -- but, well, for the same reason a dog licks its balls.

Big is bad is easy to remember, has a nice alliterative ring to it, is a selling point when your agency just laid you off and you're scrambling for freelance work, and makes a dope poster to wave around when you're screaming at the top of your cracker lungs at a Congressman.

But it's not true. Not for government or for communications companies. Big is not automatically bad. Bad is bad.

As Jay Chiat also famously said: "It's all about the work."

There is plenty of that still at the big shops. There may be nimbler competitors. More digitized rivals. More emphasis on measurement and less on imagination. But in an ecosystem in which content is again key, branding is back as a priority in a marketer's strategic thinking. And no one understands brands better than the Big but Not Necessarily Dumb Agencies.

agency, communications

2 comments about "Media X: Big Is Beautiful".

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Kevin Lenard from Business Development Specialist, November 3, 2009 at 4:25 p.m.
Hm. Other than myself in self-deprecatory moments, no one has ever called me dumb, Jack, but I'm struggling to get your point here. "Big agencies aren't necessarily dumb?" (Or bad?)
Sure, a lot of folks rag on the big players -- it's easy to target them, they're big. What's going on today is not really an attack on 'big is bad,' but rather on 'big has tons of momentum,' and like an oil tanker, that makes big tough to turn around. I regularly refer to them as the 'dinosaurs' in part because they are big, but more so because they seem incapable of change during what now amounts to a 'marketing ice age'. By the latter I don't mean merely that spending on media has cooled, but rather that, regardless of the economy, the Internet has given the consumer a voice and what they're saying (they actually always said the same thing, but we could drown them out) is that they don't want any more 'push marketing'.
All the recent hoopla about 'social marketing' is nothing more than rabid excitement about experimentation with something new and therefore mysterious. 'Social' communication, regardless of the technological 'channel,' is merely 'word-of-mouth', and getting consumers to talk about brands amongst themselves is what our industry has ALWAYS done (hence the power behind a 'testimonial'). Just as there is really no such thing as word-of-mouth advertising efforts with integrity (note the last two words), there is also no such thing as 'social marketing,' unless you are a big proponent of telemarketing as a brand-building tactic.
But I, too, digress. Even the biggest agencies are now trying to inject 'social' efforts into their plans, so it is not really about whether or not the big players are actually nimble enough to begin adapting to 'emerging media.' To your point, there's plenty of imagination, commitment to 'the work,' branding experience, smarts and strategic thinking at the dinosaur agencies. The reason that the clever people today are saying 'big is bad' is that 'big is moribund.' These agencies are trapped by shareholder demands for profit -- they cannot abandon a commission on media spend model that paid out handsome dividends for almost 80 years, yet the world is moving on without them, adopting newer, better models.
There is, however, one thing that makes big good. Relationships and power. If a couple of the principle players, or the holding companies, can use their clout and connections to secure a new 'break-even retainer' model that is complimented by what should turn into a LARGE commission payout for sales increases over expectations, then big could not only be good, but big might actually be able to reinvent themselves:
• Not as 'advertising agencies,' but as 'marketing agencies.'
• Agencies that don't hand over their creative IP to clients for an ever-shrinking margin, but license it.
• Agencies that don't invent campaigns, but invent new business models for their clients' brands.
• Agencies that don't muddle along cranking out the same one-off 30 second 'mini-films' that get run ad infinitum on broadcast TV, but who produce an endlessly flexible and adaptable series of video in lengths from 3 seconds to 3 hours (use your imagination) that run on an ever-expanding and evolving 'emerging media mix.'
Now THAT would prove that 'big is beautiful.' Just a thought.
For more on what ad agencies might do to evolve: http://advertisingbusinessmodelredefined.blogspot.com/2009/09/future-of-adland.html
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Stephen Schwartz from Vanguard Systems Inc., November 4, 2009 at 7:58 a.m.

To me big usually means "short-sighted". I was in the industry for over 30 years, supplying media buying software that competed with Donovan Data. During that time I had only one or two major accounts. When all of the consolidation took place during the 90s any of the holding companies could have come to me and said "Look you need to expand so Donovan has competition or our rates will skyrocket". About a million bucks would have done it. Instead, they do the same thing they did 25 years ago and re-sign long term contracts with what they know is an inferior product. I think the God of all adverising said it best, "What me Worry?"