• by Lisa Seward , October 2, 2008

What a difference a decade makes. This thought struck me recently while I was dining with some colleagues from the interactive advertising ranks. They were talking (okay, complaining) about clients and agency partners who spend too much time and money trying to perfect their ads - even relatively simple banners - on the front end rather than just putting them out on the Web and seeing what works best. Their experiences sounded surprisingly similar to those of my colleagues in more traditional ad arenas.

The most striking thing about this conversation wasn't that the same perfectionist behaviors are happening in the creation of Web banners. It was that they are happening today, in 2008. All I could think was that we are more than 10 years past what we thought back then was a game-changer: a new approach to campaign development, rooted in the realities and promise of the digital age, that prioritized taking action and learning from it over endless artistic futzing. It suddenly occurred to me that we have, by intent or simply habit, effectively buried the mantra of the '90s: "Do-Learn-Fix."

If you were in the industry 10 years ago, you remember "Do-Learn-Fix." Before the dot-com bust, giddy with the potential of digital communication and surrounded by 3-inch-thick issues of Fast Company and Red Herring, businesspeople talked of little else but how we would adapt to this new way of working. No longer would we consider our own creative taste the arbiter of good ideas; we would allow consumer behavior to tell us.

Metrics would be so readily available and data so cheap to collect and process that we would at last be able to discern The Truth about advertising effectiveness. We could stop guessing and finally put all our money behind the half of the plan that wasn't wasted. Everything we did would effectively become R&D. It was a heady time, filled with both excitement about a new way of working and fear of how we would adapt to so much change.

Today, it's apparent that excitement and possibility didn't win out; fear did. Well, that and the very real fact that nothing about digital transformation has occurred on the timelines we expected back in the '90s (a slowdown that one could argue to be either the cause or effect of said fear - but that's a whole other column). With the exception of some smart, successful direct marketers, as an industry we've not only failed to adopt "Do-Learn-Fix" as our guiding principle, we have failed even to give it much more than a halfhearted try. At a time when we can let consumers tell us in no uncertain terms what they'll respond to, we too often still rely on our own taste and predictive powers instead of real-world learning.

Media people are guilty, too. Think of all the energy and talent spent in pursuit of new media metrics. Sure, today we all eschew old-fashioned measurements like impressions, but what do we replace them with? Engagement. And when you get right down to it, isn't engagement just another attempt to predict responsiveness to ads? Instead of spending all this money trying to predict what will work best, why not get some ads out there and see what people actually respond to?

I know I'm overlooking lots of legitimate reasons why "throwing ads out there" isn't as simple as I suggest. Some media aren't nearly as far along in their digital transformation as we thought they'd be by now (TV being the obvious culprit), so discovering what messages people respond to isn't easy without a response mechanism in the ad itself. Production costs haven't dropped enough to toss ads after only a couple shots. Optimization can take more time and labor than it should. Yep, I get all that. But remember where this whole train of thought started: a recognition that even simple banner campaigns are suffering from creative perfectionism. This is a case where "Do-Learn-Fix" should be easy to apply - production can be fast and cheap, metrics can be gauged on just about anything we want to measure, and software can do the optimizing. Yet we still resist taking action in favor of noodling with the work. This makes me think what we have here aren't just some legitimate practical obstacles, but a more deep-seated cultural barrier within our industry.

It's almost like we think of ourselves as artists instead of businesspeople. Yet we wonder why our clients do the same.

Lisa Seward is the founder of Mod Communications, a strategic media consultancy. (lisa.seward@modideas.com)