• by Karl Greenberg , Staff Writer, October 16, 2015

Fear and loathing in Orlando, but that's my hotel room. This year's Association of National Advertisers conference is killer, with record attendance and presentations that kicked things into fifth gear right away. With 2,800 people in the room, Progressive Insurance CMO Jeff Charney — hitting the stage in denim bell bottoms and a black, untucked button-down shirt — did a kind of rock-star turn, concluding with a group singalong of Wilson Phillips’ “Hold On,” which a disturbing number of people knew really well.

He launched a theme that would be carried along by Dana Anderson, SVP and CMO at Mondelez, and Bradley Jakeman, president of PepsiCo's global beverage group: Advertising is dead. Warning at the outset that the audience shouldn’t expect to coast through the presentation, he invited us to take an eight-question quiz to gauge our Individual Content Quotient. First question: “Is Don Draper dead?” Yes, and no, but mostly yes. “You have to be full-service marketer. You will never outspend, so you have to out-create.” 

That sentiment was echoed later by Jakeman,, who said, simply, that the very word “advertising” should be buried at sea. “Can we stop using the word ‘agencies’; can we start thinking content partners? Publishers instead of brand managers? And stop saying “advertising”? That, he said, means paying to pollute content that consumers really want to see on their device. “I hate ‘pre-roll.’ That's something people have to endure. That's a model of polluting content that isn't sustainable. And can we stop talking about ‘best practices’ because it assumes what worked in the past will work in the future.”

Jakeman also got the biggest collective cheer when he showed a photo montage of his diverse marketing team, and asserted that innovation and disruption does not come from homogenous group of people. “We have to get women into more leadership positions in our brands. We have to drive diversity across all thinking; across race, backgrounds, gender.”

He said marketing culture at PepsiCo is, as Anderson certainly meant when she told the crowd that marketers had better not look to find answers within their cubicles, about outside thinking. “Which is why we avoid hiring people from packaged goods because they are trapped in our paradigm; and I avoid hiring people from big companies with big marketing budgets. When you have no money you have to think about how to spend it. People with the money to buy five Super Bowl ads a year are not likely to be innovative and disruptive.” 

Ah, disruption. A central “it” theme so far at the ANA. And there's the marketing Moore's law, where more has changed in the last 5 years than in the first 100 years of marketing, and more will change in the next 12 months than has in the past 5 years.
I can’t say whether Charney would agree that we should kick “advertising” to the curb, but he clearly sees Flo as filmic. He likens Progressive's mascot and her cast-mates as more situation comedy than advertising. “We run it like a Hollywood studio; behind her and her cast is a network strategy that centers around storytelling.”

And how about this: Charney said there is something archetypal about Flo and her fictive friends’ and co-workers’ travails, something that not only draws people in, but makes that relationship deeper over time. Their journey is, he said, informed (though to what degree we don't know) by none other than Joseph Campbell’s The Hero's Journey. “She has been with us for eight years and she's more likable now.” Proof? “Sprinkles are for Winners,” which became a meme and even found its way into Li’l Wayne's music.

As for Charney’s sing-along of that Wilson Phillips hit, it was a nice tie-up of some insight about the nice turn of phrase, “memory-lane marketing,” scientifically correlated with enhanced mood, increased self esteem, and nirvana (which in this context could include the actual band Nirvana). “It's bringing you back to great time and place,” is just part of what great marketing should do. “It's taking you to different realm.” It was almost a home run. Only thing missing — several people agreed with me on this — Flo was a no-show. A home run? That would have required Flo to come out and lip synch to “Hold On.”