Frankly Anything

Advertising, being a form of communication, is tightly coupled with media. One way to look at the history of advertising is as an evolution of our mastery of media. e.g.:

It started with printed copy. Then good printed copy.
Next came printed copy and images. Then good printed copy and images.
It evolved to spoken copy. Then good spoken copy.
Next came spoken copy and moving images. Then good spoken copy and moving images.

With digital, the smart ones figured out early (late 90s/early 2000s) that good copy and still images, combined with some utility, made for good communication and helped build brand equity. Want to learn about a product? Want to ask questions about a product before buying? Want to get support for a product? Want to find a community of others who’ve bought the same product and share tips or criticisms? Web1.0 enabled that.

Lately though (i.e. the last 5 years), it seems that advertising online has been more about entertaining, as opposed to communicating. It’s been about games and videos and, frankly, fluff that links tenuously, at best, back to the brand. Worst, it’s questionable to what degree it effectively delivers on its raison d’etre of entertainment. And digital agencies are usually stocked with graphic designers and Flash developers and architects who excel at creating games and animations and other kinds of entertainment.

But the agency of the future (and perhaps I’m really describing the creative director of the future), is someone who understands how to apply good copy (written and/or spoken), images (still and/or moving), interaction and data. It’s someone who can look at a brand, take the fundamentals of what that brand stands for, and using the data, APIs and open source frameworks available, build a tool that users of the brand find useful. By implementing best practices in terms of human interaction and design, along with creatively integrating visuals and copy, the use of that tool is elevated to an experience.

We need to find the technologists who understand the resources (the data, the APIs, the technologies that transform) and have new ways of thinking about how different technologies can plug together or have new ideas about new kinds of “glue” to build, and marry them with “creatives” (I hate that title) that know how to tell a story in a way that’s compelling, while at the same time delivering something useful to the consumer that connects with the brand.

Try to find an agency that embodies these characteristics and you won’t fine one. At least I haven’t (if you know of one shoot me an email or leave a comment). Or are we really talking about a new kind of marketer? One who can balance brand marketing, technology, psychology and social networking – a “technopologist” in the words of the WSJ.

i’ve started and dropped a number of blogs over the past several years. With Franklyanything I’m going to take another stab at it. I’m feeling optimistic about this time as I’m nearly finished with my MBA and there’s a lot of stuff happening worth writing about.

In the spirit of kicking this off in the right way I’ll start by quoting something I found earlier this evening that seems apropos:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

-Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles, Ted Orland

Here’s to quality via quantity.