Redemption for evil, greedy banks?

I came across this post on Twitter the other day:

@agencyspy: "Mint.com tells me stuff about my bank accounts before my bank. #chasefail"

Agencyspy is a advertising gossip blog that I follow on twitter and RSS. Obviously he/she fully acknowledges that they are a person with a twitter account and can use Twitter for their own personal ends, including expressing his/her frustration with banks. Agencyspy’s 9323 followers are now aware of those frustrations – and the #chasefail hashtag.

Searching that hashtag only brings up four results, one of which is a retweet of agencyspy. Hardly damaging to Chase's reputation, but the seed has been planted, and the fire has been lit, to mix absurd metaphors.

If you're not a Twitter user that might sound like Klingon.

What this all means is that a 'key influencer' is upset with his/her bank and letting all his/her 'influencees' know about it. Some 9000 people now know that they can get better banking info from Mint.com than from Chase – and they believe it because this opinion comes from a trusted source.

When people create a hashtag like #yourbrandFAIL, they can quickly gain widespread adoption, (like the #pepsifail hashtag that gained popularity in response to Amp energy drink’s ‘Amp up before you score’ iPhone app).

So, what’s a bank to do?

First, they should be listening. If they’re not, they’ve completely blown an opportunity to engage upset customers, solve their problems and improve their services based on real feedback from real people who use their stuff.

Which leads to the second thing, which is to capitalize on these opportunities. They know they have one influential but pissed off customer. If an empowered Chase CSR sent @agencyspy a direct message, asking about his/her complaint, addressed his/her concerns and thanked him/her for their help in improving their services, @agencyspy might be sufficiently impressed to tweet about the experience, which in turn might make his/her 9000 followers feel a little bit better about the big, evil bank as well.

9000 followers is pretty pathetic in terms of traditional media impressions, but these tweets are powerful impressions. There are mystical forces at work here – Schadenfreude for instance. Everyone knows banks are totally evil and your normally quiet average Joe will gleefully rip a bank a new one if given the opportunity. This is compounded by the nature of the medium. Gladwell’s Tipping Point is another mystical force that will spread latent discontent across the twittershpere with incredible speed.

So, if I worked for a bank, I’d be listening very carefully to things like this. I'd address these concerns, both internally and the public perception of them. And I’d take every opportunity I could to steal the disgruntled customers of my competition who might not be listening as closely as I am.

Piss people off, make more money.

Face it: no matter what you do in this business, you're going to piss off someone, somewhere, sometime. Really, we are all trolls of every stripe lurking in basements all over the world. We scour the web for things we find offensive and we've now got the means to scream bloody murder when we find our tender sensibilities offended. The brands we scream about are listening, but how much do they really care about what's being said?

This week's great offense is Amp Energy drink's "Amp Up Before You Score" iPhone app which, according to critics, "encourages men to look at women as objects to be won, used, and tossed away after a "victory" is obtained."

Wow. You knew eventually there'd be an app for that.

Of course, last week it was Mr. Sub's apparently homophobic ad that upset the GLBT community, and ended up with the agency, Bos, losing the account. Before that is was NHL enforcer, George Laraque's sexist ad for Octane 7.0 drink.

Don't get me wrong, it's offensive if you're over the age of say, 17 and have any respect for women whatsoever. I'm not going to defend the questionable morality of any of these ads. But, frankly I don't care all that much. Like I said, no matter what you do, you're bound to piss someone off. In fact, the Amp app is tasteless, but taken tongue-in-cheek it's actually pretty humorous (and you'd have to be a retard to think it would do you any good with the girls).

The real point of all this is that these efforts are generally made by very smart agencies who are perfectly aware of what they're doing. R/GA, who made the Amp iPhone app, is a true thought-leader and pioneer in digital marketing and I've got a lot of respect for what they do . It's hard to believe that app went out the door without someone saying "uh, guys, that's truly offensive." To the contrary, I'd be willing to bet that's the point where everyone involved likely rubbed their hands together with glee.

That's because it was probably designed to be offensive. The aim of the game here is to get noticed. It's Seth Godin's purple cow. It's disruption marketing--which, incidentally, is dead, according to pretty much every digital evangelist alive. Except it's not. It's alive and well and residing on your iPhone.

And it's not pissing off the group it was aimed at. It's making them happy as hell as they guffaw in the bar about the 20th girl who rolled her eyes at their juvenile passes that evening. Those guys love it because it pisses people off. And the more blogs and newspapers that write about how it pisses people off, the more those guys are going to like it. In the end Amp sells more energy drinks.

The only worry is that Amp gets connected to their parent, Pepsi. Then your average, joyous-yet-milquetoast Pepsi drinker gets offended and stops buying Pepsi. But really, isn't that something a bit of well-placed, soothing PR should be able to easily fix? Tweet out a quick apology, tsk tsk, we had no idea, so sorry. Regular folks are happy again and the bros are still macking and giggling away in the club.

It's all about getting someone's attention. There's a reason why brands segment audiences, why they listen to what people have to say and why they give people what they want. It's a hell of a lot easier to sell people stuff they actually want. But brands still have to grab people's attention first. And really, there's no better way to do that than getting lots of folks riled up and yammering about you.

Here's an awesome old video of my new idol, George Lois talking about advertising as 'poison gas'. Pissing people off isn't a new idea.

Herdsourcing and Crowdcrafting

Not too long ago Ad Age's Brian Sheehan took Unilever to task for their crowdsourcing efforts for Peperami. He railed that it's not actually crowdsourcing, at least not as it was intended in James Surowiecki's book "The Wisdom of Crowds." Of course that would imply that a crowd was actually wise. In fact, that crowd might even be wiser than its smartest member. He contends that mass collaboration is a key element of crowdsourcing. However that's not how crowdsourcing is being used in many cases these days.

I'm bringing up a semantic difference here, but to be fair to the term, what companies like Unilever, Brammo, Crowdspring, et al. are doing is actually crowdsourcing. In the simplest sense of the phrase, they're using a large group of people as a means to generate a large number of ideas, through which they can sift, curate and adjudicate to find the perfect solution to their business problems. They're sourcing from a crowd rather than the traditional approach of going to an organization specialized in solving those types of problems.

Sure, there's nothing idealistic in that and Brian Sheehan gave 'em hell for it. The ideal that comes from 'the phenomenon of collective intelligence iteratively brought to bear on a problem facilitated by the free communication of the internet' is a powerful one. But to be honest, crowdsourcing isn't really all that apt a term for it. I'd rather call it 'crowdcrafting'. It's got the ring of honest effort and valuable outcome to it. It's more apt for the wisdom of age and diversity converging to create something that might not otherwise exist.

I've also got a name for the bastardized process. The one that tries to get people to work for free, or better yet, because 'they want to feel like they're part of the brand'. That's more like 'herdsourcing'. It's a cattle call. It's an amateur talent show. It's not an iterative process and it'll only provide solutions that are as good as it's smartest member. In the end it's mostly a quantitative thing.

I can't help but think that herdsourcing comes from the same place committees do. Not that committees are inherently bad, but they're definitely safe and they produce similar results. A committee at its best is a collective of smart, experienced and diverse minds who come together to collaborate and shepherd a project. But they often lead to compromise and things tend to come out the other end of the process a little (often a lot) duller and tamer than they went in. But there's protection in a committee. Nobody takes the blame, and everyone can generally cover their own ass if shit goes south.

I think that's where herdsourcing comes from. If you don't trust yourself, trust your vision, then it's very difficult to make decisions. So you gather people around you to help you make those decisions. You hire an agency. But if you don't trust yourself it's hard to trust anyone else, so you don't trust your agency. "This idea is good...but is it good enough? Can't you guys show me another ten or twenty concepts? And incidentally, why is this costing so much?" So you do what Unilever did and you throw it out to the world in the hopes that you'll get ten thousand ideas that you can sift through like a gold prospector panning in the Yukon, hoping that somewhere in that big muddy stream of shit you can find a gleaming nugget that will save your brand. Or the diamond in the rough. Or the 'perfect' solution to your problem.

Special thanks to @noloveforbruce for helping to clarify the concept.

Screw you brand equity, I've got a point to prove!

I always feel it's a bit unfair to publicly criticize advertising. Without having seen the brief it's tough to know what the objectives were, what the key insights were, what the research showed. Without knowing the client, it's impossible to know how many committees the creative got chewed through and how many managers had to leave indelible fingerprints on the work. That said, I love to criticize advertising. It's what I do and if I have to run someone through the ringer every so often I may as well do it with gleeful spite.

Canada Dry Ginger Ale has recently launched an aggressive brand campaign and it's been gnawing at me for a while. What I've seen so far has been TV ads and new packaging, though it could be in other media, just not the ones I use. The TV ads are totally unremarkable. In fact I'm having a hard time remembering what they were--and I can't find any on Youtube. I vaguely remember something about a shopping cart and, uh, ginger ale. The slogan is "made with real ginger." Heady stuff.

The packaging is where it starts to bother me. One look at the old and the new and it's not hard to imagine a shiny new CMO or brand manager looking to leave their mark on the product. The consumer research probably said things like "feels too stuffy" and "not fun enough". So it's likely they ambitiously set out to re-design the packaging to show how "fresh", "vibrant" and "fun" the product could be. You can imagine they got really hot about "breaking out of the category" and "moving the needle".

At least that's how I imagine it.



So the key insights behind this entire effort could have been that people would buy more ginger ale if they knew it was made with real ginger and if it looked fun. This probably came out of a focus group. I can imagine asking a focus groupee if she'd buy more ginger ale if she knew it was flavored with real ginger, not that fake ginger flavor that nobody's been talking about. In my mind she answers, "Shit. I'd run out and buy a case tomorrow if I knew that!"

Right.

What bothers me about this is not unremarkable advertising and ill-conceived design work. That shit is everywhere and I've learned to ignore it mostly. No, I'm bothered by the prestige of an old, storied brand, with years of equity built over the effort generations, stripped away in one fell swoop by a well-meaning but ham-fisted effort.

You could say I'm being sentimental, but sentimentality is a part of brand equity. Same goes for nostalgic.

Canada Dry has any number of stories it could tell, yet they chose to tell the 'made with real ginger' story.

It also had class. I remember "the champagne of ginger ales". I remember a classy green bottle, with a bold but elegant, worldly logo. It was the kind of thing that Hemmingway might splash into whatever he happened to be getting 'tight' on. It was a part of history and culture. It was the mix of choice for sophisticated partiers. Yes, it had brand equity. At least it did in 1934.



So, this campaign grates a little when I think of the possibilities. It reminds me how difficult it is to build brand equity and how easy it is to lose. And it reminds me how hard it is to stick to an idea, when everyone at the table has to leave their mark on it. I just hope whoever came up with this stuff doesn't get their hands on Mercedes-Benz ("runs on real gas!") or Rolex (research showed consumers would buy more if it ticked.).

Check out this link for a seriously ugly page, but a great resource for historic Canada Dry ads.

The Death of the Advertising Industry: Part 3

Crispin Porter + Bogusky recently crowd-sourced a logo for their client, Brammo Motorcycles. It's a pet project of theirs and they appear to be looking to get good ideas for cheap. Apparently people are willing to give them away for cheap. The commodification of creativity really appears to be happening. Advertising is a tough biz to break into and those on the outside will do just about anything to get a foot in the door.

The way things are going, a lot more of us are going to be on the outside. In fact if agencies keep commodifying creative endeavors, agencies will simply become curators and facilitators. Creative will be a value-added service and it won't be vertically integrated.

Take a look at photography to see this in action. Photography has long been the realm of dilettantes and amateurs. But only a tiny fraction earn livings from the craft. Then along came iStockphoto.com and upset everything. Amateurs with chops could find their work being used by art directors and designers around the world, yet only get paid pennies for what a photographer used to get paid thousands of dollars for. But for the amateur it was satisfaction enough to see their work used. They were taking the photo anyway, so why not?

It's been painful for the pros. It's been extremely painful for the big stock houses like Getty and Corbis. It transformed the photography industry and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Now istockphoto.com is about to do it all over again, except to the field of graphic design. I got an email today asking for my logo submissions. They're going to start selling logos. This isn't a new idea, but we've seen what istock can do. They have the capacity to transform industries there's no reason why their machine can't swallow up graphic design and illustration as well as photography.

I'll admit, I'm lazy-- and clients are always looking for a deal. So I use a lot of stock photos and illustrations. If I need an icon for a website, I could spend half an hour making it in Illustrator, or I could spend five minutes and five bucks and get something close to what I want from istock. I do it all the time and I've been doing it for years.

For some reason I think logos are different. I'm sure all the photographers looking for work right now would back me up here. A logo exists for one organization. I shudder to think that you can find the logo that perfectly encapsulates the essence of your brand by flipping through a catalog. But I know I'm wrong. One look at all the crappy logos out there and I realize that no-one cares nearly as much about logos as designers do, and that includes clients.

Saul Bass is probably turning over in his grave.

You get what you pay for.

My wife has worked for a big evil oil company for over a decade. I won't mention the name for fear of reprisal ( hint, they're dutch). In 2004 they got caught lying about their reserves. And are still paying the price for it.

Estimating reserves is mostly science, partly voodoo and it's fairly easy to get wrong. As such, it's easy to understand how they saw a 20% overestimation as a little white lie. This case however was systemic and shareholders and media alike punished the company for it. Ever since, they have been trying to gain share value through efficiencies. Outsourcing has been one of those attempts to become more efficient.

Recently a department my wife used to work for was shipped off to South Africa. All her friends there have been scrambling to find new positions in the company or have left for what closely mown greener pastures remain in late 2009. Some have found temporary work training their replacements.

Today Yahoo published an article claiming that a carrier pigeon is faster than the internet in South Africa. Which leads me to wonder how well this outsourcing idea is going to work. "Let me just email you this spreadsheet, document, etc. sir and your problem will be solved in no time." That's an easy promise to break when data transfer rates are such easy targets of hilarious, but poignant pranks. Obviously 'mission-critical' isn't going to be a key part of their service offering.

Regardless, we live in an age of fast answers, instantaneous solutions and it appears the South African infrastructure isn't actually set up to compete in that age. If companies keep moving customer service departments there it should eventually support the required infrastructure. But it snowballs from there and costs can only climb. Eventually it'll be cheaper to exploit another area and it'll be time to move shop again.

I believe in local economies. I like the idea of taxes going to local governments to support local infrastructure and profits going into the local economy. Of course I also believe in integrity. I can't help but wonder if some of this current, ongoing problem and many subsequent future problems could have been prevented in the first place by not lying about reserves.

Transparency is here, whether a corporation likes it or not. Advertising and marketing will not cover up lies in this day and age. Which means that being competitive relies at least in part on being honest.

Is a brand your friend?

If you were a company whose key differentiator was 'real relationships', wouldn't you embrace social media? When I think about 'real relationships' I think about someone I'd make out with, or someone I'd go get drunk with. Those are real relationships, at least within my narrow world-view.

But I look at my Tweetdeck and I don't actually see a whole lot of friends there. I see a lot of companies, magazines, bloggers, governments, etc., telling me a lot of crap I really don't care about. In that respect it's a lot like TV or radio. But there's a default column in the software called 'friends' and all those aformentioned things are in there. It's a bit insidious actually.

Facebook is only marginally better. At least there I can be a 'fan' of a brand, which distances me a bit. Although the software still shows me a brand almost the same as it shows my friends.

I'll admit to being a bit surly. Which explains my paltry 63 facebook friends. But to be honest, even that's too many. I could get along fine without half of them--just like I did before I signed up to Facebook. And I'm pretty sure I can live without the added noise of half the junk I'm following on Twitter.

So I wonder what kind of traction your favorite dish soap is going to get when it starts trying to be friends with you--having a 'real relationship'. You could go out and get drunk with your favorite beer brand of course, but you're still going to be alone.

So I'm not sure I'm ready to cuddle up with my toaster. Honestly I share all my feelings and all I ever get in return is toast. Tasty, but not very fulfilling.

Brands who claim to have real relationships with their customers are going to need to do some hard thinking about what that means, and whether it's a commitment they can actually live up to.

How Dumb Can Art Directors be? Part 2

In yesterday's post I edited out a smarmy line about how people still weren't cracking a lot of Hitler jokes, even 60 years later. I realized it didn't contribute much so I cut it.

But I just came across this doozy. And what a doozy it is. The DDB Brasil ad was insensitive and misdirected, but I actually think Das Committee, who made this Hitler ad, are just plain stupid. Seriously, who comes up with this shit? And worse yet, thinks it's a good enough idea to actually approve it?

I get PR. It's part of what I do every day. People say outrageous shit to get attention. In fact it's the single biggest problem with the blogsphere. But I understand taking the Marilyn Manson approach to delivering a message. Just maybe try to have an idea that makes sense or even has an ounce of thought behind it before you try to shock the world. Idiots.

The big idea, again.

I came across another blog post talking about a blog post that talks about the death of the Big Idea. To the contrary, Edward says:

"...I’m referring to things like The Ultimate Driving Machine, Just Do It, Got Milk, or Dove’s campaign for Real Beauty.

My guess is there’s not a brand in the world that wouldn’t die for an idea like that."

And here's the root of a lot of the bullshit surrounding this -- are those big ideas really dying because we live in a 'new age'?

The Dove campaign is one of the most awarded campaigns in Canadian advertising history. Sure, it's a nice sentiment. Give yourself a hug, you're beautiful in your own way. Maybe it could have won awards simply for that. But I think the real reason it won so many awards is because it pushed the boundaries of advertising in the current age. The Big Idea worked amazingly well across a huge variety of media, events, and anywhere else Jancy and the rest of Ogilvy could think to put it. It used media, pr, the web. It used traditional techniques and new technologies equally well. It built communities and it became cultural. It engaged consumers and solicited opinions. It never lost sight of the big idea, it transformed a brand. And it helped to sell soap.

I'll admit the campaign for real beauty is the exception, not the rule. But it suggests that the Big Idea is not dead.You just have to be exceptionally creative to come up with it, be smart enough and resourceful enough to evolve it, and have the courage to believe in it through its life-cycle.

How Dumb Can Art Directors be?

The answer is: Pretty damn stupid.

The furor over DDB Brasil's poorly thought out WWF ad has hit the mainstream media and Joe Average is pretty up in arms about it. It's a sensitive topic.

I'm an art director and I'm sensitive about stupid ideas. For life of me I can't figure out what this ad is about. All I can get out of it is an art director with the resources of a big outfit like DDB jerking off without really thinking about what the ad says. Because other than that it doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Which leads to why this ad was done in the first place. It was an art director jerking off so they could win awards. Dog & Pony show wrote an excellent post, with some great follow up comments so I won't belabor the point. My question is who thought this ad was a good idea in the first place? The AD and copywriter obviously did, and they're idiots. WWF did according to an Ad Age article. And a CD must have as well. Why did they all think this was a good enough idea to win awards?

Art direction is about good ideas, not just good execution. Maybe people who read Luerzer's Archive too much forget that every now and again. But senior creatives should be tuned into the 'big idea' and have the experience to recognize a bad idea glossed over with nice execution.

Which ties back into something I touched on the other day. The big idea is not dead. Despite what social media hypesters will tell you. If you lose sight of the big idea, like DDB Brasil did, your brand will suffer. Sure, an idea might not survive across every execution in every media. Something culturally accepted in one market might get torn apart in another. But someone, somewhere should be keeping the big idea in mind and looking out for the brand's best interest. That shouldn't be a committee. You'd really think it should start with the art director and copywriter and move up the chain.

Top 3 TV Ads of All Time

I complain a lot. To counter that, I'm going show what I think makes the advertising industry great -- critical problem-solving done in highly creative, imaginative, innovative and interesting ways. Obviously this is highly-subjective. But if I can't spout subjective, irrational, unsupported crap from time to time I wouldn't be much of a blogger.

3. McDonald's - Lonely Burger (sorry, have to link out. It doesn't appear to be on Youtube. Damn you Cossette.)

2. Ikea - Lamp



1. Honda - Cog

The Death of the Advertising Industry: Part 2

In part 1 I talked about a guy who's out to convince clients that agencies have no value. Part 2 is about a client who's been convinced.

I came across this article in The Guardian recently. Unilever in the UK has dropped Lowe, their agency for 16 years for Peperami meat snacks. Happens all the time. What makes this interesting is that they've convinced themselves that they can get better work by crowdsourcing the creative.

"We believe Peperami is a brand that deserves radical creative solutions and are confident taking our brief out to thousands rather than a small team of creatives will provide us with the best possible idea and take our advertising to the next level," said the Peperami marketing manager, Noam Buchalter.

Their 'radical creative solution' uses the Idea Bounty website to source creative. They have put up $10k for the winning idea and opened it up to pretty much anyone with an email address. And agencies were up in arms about the Zappos cattle call.

In some ways I like the commodification of creativity. The very notion is a challenge to me. It makes me ask "am I really better at this than the uneducated, inexperienced chump next door?" Which is actually a pretty good question to ask every once in a while, because a lot of the time marketers are much too clever for their own good. Though I'd probably change my mind about it pretty quickly if I lost my steady paycheque and actually had to submit my creative to Idea Bounty and it's ilk just to pay the rent.

One of my clients has been crowdsourcing creative for over a decade. They run an annual tv commercial contest that's open to the public. They hold a huge, campy gala event where they screen the finalists announce the winners and drink a lot of beer. It's a lot of fun, with some pretty good ideas making the cut. However, my client will be the first to tell you that most of the submissions are junk. Poorly thought out, wildly off-brand, often off topic, sometimes in frighteningly poor taste. Most of it is not unlike what happens when you let a 24 year old CEO come up with the ad concepts.

I'm not too afraid for my job just yet.

The Death of the Advertising Industry: Part 1

No question, things are changing in the marketing industry. The multinational conglomerates are in a feeding frenzy, eating up digital shops and rolling them into their agency networks as fast as they can. They're buying bright minds on the leading edge of new media and figuring out ways to roll them in as part of their vertically integrated service offering. They're doing this because that's where the money is moving to. Surprise, surprise. This is nothing new.

Last week, some guy wrote an opinion piece entitled 5 Reasons You No Longer Need an Agency. I've been loathe to talk about it because it's such an obvious sensationalist ploy for blog hits and retweets. Regardless, the author brings up a couple interesting points worth discussing.

I'm going to paraphrase reason 1: There's no longer a need for 'the big idea'. Media fragmentation, content distribution and things like "consumer conversations" have fractured the 'big idea' into many small ideas.

My retort: The ‘Big Idea’ is as relevant or perhaps more than it ever was. The big idea is your brand. I don’t agree that the big idea needs to come from inside an organization. It’s great if it does, but I can’t see any reason why that kind of insight can’t be generated externally from information provided internally. (Communications theorists might disagree, but nobody listens to those guys anyway.) Sure media is fragmented and content can now be created for specific consumer subsets. But you still need the skills to accomplish that.

Then there’s the matter of execution. You need to outsource all the separate pieces of production and you still need to increase the skill level in-house to accomplish what most agencies can do. An in-house marketing team with Wordpress isn't likely to replace Razorfish any time soon.

Paraphrase reason 2: Websites are too big and expensive. Clients are getting talked into buying more than they need.

My retort: He has a point here. It’s like realtors—given their fee structure, what incentive do they have to sell you a cheaper house? However, it’s also incumbent on you to determine at least partly what you need and how much you want to spend. An agency can help you with some or all of that. And the end of the day you determine whether you want to spend $500k on a site or $5k on a Wordpress site. As a marketer you still have to be informed enough to make that decision.

Paraphrase reason 3: Traditional marketing is ineffective and online marketing is complicated, so you need to simplify--just use Facebook, Twitter and a blog.

My retort: I'm pretty sure he's just making this point up because '5 reasons to ditch your agency' is way more impressive than 4. However, I’ve heard the traditional is dead argument enough times to start to see how wrong it is. Traditional has a place. Facebook isn’t likely to move a lot of socks or dish detergent, no matter how stoked your friends are about it.

Paraphrase reason 4: Focus groups are evil and expensive.
My retort: I agree. The focus group was never reliable or accurate and much better ways of gathering that kind of information are emerging. I think Twitter is better than a focus group and significantly less costly.

Paraphrase reason 5 (and this is a doozy): You need to rebuild and restaff your organization in order to take advantage of the first four reasons.

My retort:I hate to say it, but I agree again, despite how preposterous the idea is. If you can hire and retain top-tier talent for any length of time, and also remove the management-imposed shackles that are systemic in your organization, then do it!!! Good luck with that.

The Value of Content: Part 1

Last post got me thinking about a whole bunch of things, not the least of which is how content is valued once it's separated from a specific channel. And then I got distracted by the news of Les Paul's passing. Here was a man who not only created unique content, but he helped create new tools that would utterly transform that content.

Les Paul was a unique voice in jazz music. His style pushed guitar up from where it strummed quietly in the back of the orchestra, right up to the front with all the other soloists and showboats. And to keep up with the horns, he electrified it to make it louder, which changed the music world by opening the door for rock and roll. And if that wasn't enough, he went on to invent multi-track recording, which transformed music yet again. Sometimes the influence of a single great mind is truly remarkable.

On cue it seems, the Globe and Mail published a couple articles today about how well Cineplex is doing. The Canadian entertainment giant appears to be where laid off auto-workers and realtors are spending their EI cheques. Content and channel again. The public thinks movies and the cinema experience are worth paying for. You can download it from iTunes if you want. You can pick it up at Best Buy, but apparently suburbia is still piling the kids into the Aerostar and lugging them down to the bank-branded mega-entertainment complex to ooh and ahh at the exploding sphinx and frickin' laser beams before the film. Compelling content, sticky experience provide by the channel (not just the floors) and people are still willing to pay traditional prices, and extra for real butter -- digitally distributed competition be damned.

The best part is that Cineplex doesn't even need to market their channel. They don't run campaigns touting the benefits of the movie house experience. The don't have to 'connect consumers with the brand'. The movies do the blanket marketing for them and for every other channel. Cineplex just reaps the benefits and value-adds with popcorn.

Goodbye Media, Hello Media

The recording industry has been dying a slow and painful death for years. The NY Times recently published a piece that showed some staggering and thought provoking numbers. Almost all fingers pointed to piracy as the culprit. However piracy is just a symptom -- it was digital distribution that allowed piracy to happen. Digital distribution is Pandora's Box because it doesn't just affect music. It affects a whole bunch of digitally distributed content with a cascade effect reverberating into traditionally distributed content.

In this age of near-infinite digital content a NY Times op-ed writer could quite easily be confused with just another blogger with a well respected blog (Huffpo anyone?). It's becoming very easy to confuse opinion with news -- similar information, similar presentation, and in some cases, similar credibility. And on the web both are free. That leaves the average consumer wondering how important that information is that it was worth paying a buck twenty-five for at the news stand. Meanwhile the newspaper is giving it away on the web just to keep doing what they do, all the while trying to figure out how to make a buck off it.

At risk of sounding like a ten year old Wired article, I'll get to the point. Now that pretty much anything that can be digitized has been, the curtain has been pulled away and consumers are starting to perceive the value of the things they're seeing and using the way they want to, rather than how they're told to. The consumer is now helping decide what is worth paying for and how much it's worth. Why buy a whole album when you just like the one song? Why buy a newspaper when you can just graze through your favorite blogs? Which leads to questions about whether the medium itself has much value either.

Vast printing empires were built by newspapers and magazines. Incredibly powerful television networks were built to distribute entertainment. This is real infrastructure, with giant presses and studios and editing suites. And now digital distribution is stripping away a lot of the purpose and value that infrastructure once had.

Newspaper is dying, like the recording industry. But when you look closely content isn't dying (it's getting beat up a bit), but many methods of distribution appear to be mortally wounded. Think of the recording industry and the movie industry. Sure, the movie industry isn't losing money like the newspapers or record companies, but it started changing way back in the VCR age and that transformation keeps gaining momentum. The movie industry just has content that people are actually willing to pay for, unlike news or music.

Things start to become clear when you break apart media into content and distribution channel. Traditional distribution channels are being pecked at, and in some cases totally devoured by digital distribution. And this leaves content standing alone, cold and naked for everyone to see in the light of day. This is pretty dreary stuff.

The flip side is the fresh new digital distribution channels that are doing the pecking. Put in that context, a blog is content and twitter is the medium. The new newspaper -- story and source. You can do this with any number of combinations of other new digital media. A corporate website and Digg. Youtube and Google. And it's just going to grow as we discover new tools and new ways of connecting with each other. This doesn't bode well for traditional media, especially since web advertising doesn't pay nearly as well as print and TV advertising do. Maybe the value of advertising is tied to perceived value of content. Will all newspapers die? I doubt it, but some definitely will. And until they find ways to create valuable content and connect it with a convenient method of distribution they'll all be living in a very shaky world.

Global Advertising, Local Testing

The Ad Contrarian has spent the last couple days railing about the laziness of the big global shops. His point is that local audiences are unique, not global, and advertising is more effective when it recognizes that. While transposing global messages is cheap, more business opportunities can be leveraged by addressing the unique qualities of locality.

I was taught that advertising was about showing consumers a need. For example, people with teeth can benefit by cleaning them with toothpaste. So does that mean we can leverage business opportunities by localizing the message? Calgarians who have ‘Stampede Breath’, should use Colgate toothpaste. That’s glib, but there’s a whole range of product and service categories that don’t offer up much opportunities for leveraging with local spin.

To prove his point, The Ad Contrarian mentioned Pepsi’s advertising in Quebec, which, according to the New York Times is one of the only markets in the world where Pepsi outsells Coke. As a Canadian, it’s hard to dispute that Quebec is unique. Tell a Quebecer he’s not and you’ll likely end up with a oeil noir. So it’s not much of surprise the Association of Quebec Advertising Agencies (AAPQ) is launching the Yul-Lab - an advertising test-bed that leverages Montreal’s unique media opportunities. Strategy Magazine writes “that Quebec, and Montreal specifically, are isolated from the rest of North America. All of this making it the perfect place to experiment new communications solutions, such as finding the right media mix.”

So if the Ad Contrarian is right, how successful is Yul-Lab test-bed likely to be? Testing the media mix is one thing, but how well are messages adapted from global campaigns likely to be in a place as unique and insular as Quebec? And if they test well in that audience how well will they translate back to global audiences?

An Allegorical Tale Pertaining To Civic Politics and Bridges

You need a car and you whine to Dad to buy you one until he relents. He gives you his Platinum card and tells you to buy what you need. You and your friends head straight to the Audi dealership and sit in the R8. Damn, yo. Your friend Blinky starts ragging on you and you start to feel a bit guilty. So you go to the Chevy dealership and sit in an Aveo. You begin to wonder if you need an R8, or if an Aveo will do the trick. It dawns on you that you could buy 10 Aveos for the price of an R8. You could give one to all your friends! Or you could buy 1 Aveo and spend the rest on crack. So what do you do?

If you buy the R8 you’re a selfish prick.

If you buy 10 Aveos for all your friends, you’ll be stuck driving an Aveo -- exactly like all your buddies -- until Dad ponies up for a new car, which might be never. And you’ll be a communist.
If you buy one Aveo and a lot of crack you’ll end up broke in rehab and still have a shitty car.

The moral of the story? I’m a selfish prick and Calgary is full of Aveo-driving crackheads.