November 26, 2004
scobleized
One of my favorite blogs is Steve Hall’s Adrants. Which explains why I’ve had a blogad running there for the last year or so.
Every month it drives a couple of hundred, sometimes thousands of ad-folk to gapingvoid. After a year of this, it’s adding up. A lot of people in the ad biz know my work now. Not bad, not bad at all.
One of the perks of Adrants is that it spots new, whacko trends in the advertising world just about sooner than anyone. It’s a good place to get the early word.
Somebody decides tattooing ads on people’s shaved heads in exchange for cash is “the hot new medium”, Steve will write about it.
If Paris Hilton ever gets around to renting her upper-inner thigh out as a billboard (no, it wouldn’t surprise me), Steve will write about it.
Rock on.
Having spent a good portion of my early career in has-been, stuffy, conservative agencies, I’ve done my fair share of fantasising about what I’d do if the has-been, stuffy conservative client ever got around to letting the team and I come up with anarchic, crazy, cutting-edge stunts, the kind Steve writes about so well.
Of course, it never happened.
But maybe that’s a good thing. The older I get, the less these crazy stunts seem like career-building exercises, and the more they just seem like “re-arranging deckchairs on the Titanic”.
I think the game has moved on.
Here’s an example. Ask me to name what I think is the most brilliant piece of new advertising I’ve come across in the last 5 years.
My answer would not be some big, funky-dunky campaign from a company like Apple or Volkswagon.
My answer would not be something from some edgy, hipster, in-your-face creative hot-shop in downtown Manhattan or London.
My answer would be Robert Scoble, a regular guy with a regular job who blogs regularly about the company he works for. That company happens to be Microsoft.
I seriously believe Robert, on Microsoft’s behalf, is making more advertising history at this very moment than all the creative hot-shops combined. He is changing the game beyond all recognition. The hot-shops are not.
And he’s probably doing it at less than 1% of the price the conventional agencies are used to charging.
So if you find yourself working in advertising, you now have two choices:
1. Try to prove folks like me wrong or
2. Get with the program.
A lot of people will opt for Choice Number 1. A lot of them will lose everything.
I think you’re right.
But then there’s those damn New York-like “who-knows-who’s” that you’ll have to sell such a new idea to.
You are 100% Right!! When Scoble can sell me Microsoft and he has, I for one know he is doing things right. He is the best advertising Microsoft ever had.
You guys make me blush. Thanks!
The blogger in me couldn’t agree more. However I don’t thing Scobe is enough just yet. Sometimes those of us that blog, and are influenced by blogs, forget that we are still a teeny weeny pimple on the ass of the world. I find my self quoting Scoble, Doctorow, and even MacLeod to people, and am surprised when I get just blank stares in return.
Microsoft is a software producer for the masses, thus probably still requires marketing for the masses…!
Point taken, Rich.
But it’s early days yet…
The Cluetrain has left the station. It may not have arrived at its destination yet, but… maybe there’s no destination to arrive at. It’s just an ongoing, fractal, organic proccess.
The genie’s already out of the bottle. People who try to put him back in are just going to cause themselves more grief.
And sure, I get plenty of blank stares back at me as well. Their loss.