April 29, 2005
advertising and tech
There can be no technological solution without a cultural solution. Cultural solutions are more valuable and profitable than technological solutions.
This got me thinking to a recent conversation I had with the Chief Marketing Officer of probably the most respected and “creative” ad agency on the planet. He told me:
Our best ideas no longer come from the copywriters. They’re coming from the techies.
Hope you’re not a copywriter.
Marketing and advertising has always been pretty peripheral to the core business. They’ll need to find ways to operate deeper within the origanisation if they’re going to survive.
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Now that is interesting. It is interesting that the IT business is beginning to go through the creative change. We had the engineering phase, and now the geeks are being forced into the creative arena, or is it that the technology has become easy enough to use, and sufficiently attractive that the creatives are willing to become incidentally geeks?
Take an example in music — Moby, who has been very successful, and produces music I like very much, has moved to the point where he does all of his composition on a laptop. With a copy of ProTools or Cubase he has side-stepped the whole major studio environment. Now, that means that he has complete freedom in the creative process, in return for a not very profound investment in technology. I think it comes back the the “seven guys or gals” model.
In the near future, if Moby made the records (outdated concept), and he sent them to his mate who ran a music wiki, and then they got it onto a good podcasting network, he could hit as many people as he could on a major distribution label.
Questions for the alert of mind — how to get paid, and how to get known in the first place? (Does Moby have a blog? I should go look I suppose.)
http://www.moby.com/journal
Paid: touring, gigging.
Known: make good music, tour, gig.
Pyrotechnics and blogging.
Hugh,
Maybe if you’re one of “those” copywriters. But don’t throw us all under the bus. Great copywriters have a natural “challenge > critical thinking > solution” mindset, not just to copy, but to the question, “Why do they do that?”, where “they” can mean anything we set our eyes upon.
I couldn’t work for an agency today. Fuck awards and fuck what the client wants to hear. All of that is bullshit. Agency copywriters simply don’t take risks and don’t lead. Then again 99.9% of agency leaders aren’t change agents either.
Copywriting is only one of my hats, but it’s the discipline that drives my curiosity. Copywriting is simply one method influencing behavior. To do it well, you have to have a huge ego — you have to believe you can influence your audience to do something. It’s a power grab. And it demands getting to the kernel of the “why” — which is not to different than how the software developer works.
Speaking for myself, IT people (generally) love me because I’ve always included them in whatever I was trying to figure out. And we’ve built some tremendous applications for clients together.
You don’t have to be a tech to ask the question, “Is this possible?” But you need good relationships with techs to answer it.
But agency people are “above” that.
Just my opinion.
“They’re coming from the techies.” — duh
Advertising vs Tech / Tech vs Design
Evolution of the species
An ad agency with a CMO? Wow, maybe they are changing after all.
My question is what are these “best ideas”? Is he talking about technical solutions or communication concepts? Executional brilliance or the driving idea behind a campaign? Big difference there.
I see no reason why writers and art directors can’t understand technology and use that knowledge to produce better ideas.
Or so I hope, being a copywriter…
Hands-On Ideas
Something Hugh McLeod wrote got me thinking. Hugh said: This got me thinking to a recent conversation I had with the Chief Marketing Officer of probably the most respected and “creative” ad agency on the planet. He told me: Our…