This post will make quite a few people angry. So if you are a mainstream advertising professional who can’t stand when people criticize what everybody else is applauding, and you don’t want to get angry today, you should stop reading above this line:
So you continued. Good. Now don’t blame me if you get angry.
Any mature industry is reluctant to change. This is also true about creative industries, and the advertising industry is no exception. This is fine when times are not changing. People can learn what they should be doing, they can figure out awards to give out to each other whenever somebody follows the rules. But in times of change, this model becomes quite openly navel-gazing. Awards in times like these become controllers that steer creatives in the wrong direction and holds back innovation and evolution.
I will now show you two clear cases when I think that this has happened and how it damages young creatives. Then I will propose a constructive idea on how to come to terms with this problem. Here we go.
#Fail 1: The Fun Theory Wins Creativity Online Best Work of 2009
The term Clownvertising was coined in 2009. This was no coincidence. It was a year of rampant clownvertising because of the confusion that always follows change. In desperate attempts to go viral “strategies” like trying to claim the ultra-generic “fun”-position (The Fun Theory) or “chocolate is just… fun.. let’s make a film that is just… fun” (Cadbury’s) were somehow sold to equally confused clients. Relevance and common sense was somehow shuffled out of the deck.
At the end of the year when the advertising industry gazes into it’s navel to figure out who deserves their highest honor, it will do so of course, using this very same reasoning. How can it do anything else? It simply takes something that it can understand. Like high view counts on YouTube. Everybody agrees that this is good. And since the jury represents “everybody”, these things win.
Personally, I think that the sales people who sold this thing should get the Brian Tracy-award for excellent salesmanship.
#Fail 2: The Church of Sweden Prayer Site Wins Epica Interactive Grand Prix
We’ve talked about this one before, but that was before something perhaps even worse than The Fun Theory Creativity Award-win happened – the campaign won the Epica Grand Prix in the interactive category. Hmmm… Let’s roll back for a minute and remind ourselves of what this debacle was about.
Forsman & Bodenfors launched a site where you are supposed to upload prayers to the site. The prayers are then indexed on different topics and you can navigate around the topics in different ways. The idea is brilliant because it makes The Church of Sweden relevant on a lot of good search terms from people’s everyday lives.
Great. Except for one thing. The reason this idea is so brilliant is that it targets search engines in a very intelligent way. But that must have been a fortunate accident. Why do I say that? Well – since the entire thing is build in non-optimized Flash Google sees nothing. Zero. Zilch. Or well… Google sees two pages. The container page (Swedish and English), and the Flash film.
As of this writing, and as you can see above, the decription of the film is STILL “…txt1..txt2..lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…” which constitutes negligence bordering on fraud if you’re gettin paid as a consultant expert on communication. To make matters worse, the site could have easily been made perfectly well with DHTML generating something like 20 000 relevant pages for Google to feast on instead. Because of this lack of knowledge, 20-50% of the traffic to the site is thrown in the waste basket. How much money is that? Read on.
The above clip is taken from SVD’s article about the campaign. For those of you who can’t read Swedish, the underlined number says 10 million Kronor, roughly 1 million Euro. This is the campaign budget. How can this site cost 1 000 000 Euro? Well – the site obviously doesn’t cost anywhere near that, but because such massive amounts of traffic are discarded, traffic has to come from somewhere else. And what does traditional advertisers do to drive traffic? They advertise on television! And BOOM, there goes the budget, and this is also the explanation for the 1 000 000 Euro budget. Making a rough estimate based on the available data, at least $200 000 is thrown in the waste basket for no reason at all but ignorance.
And this is what the industry awards with the Epica Grand Prix for digital.
And Now a Constructive Suggestion – The Golden Gut 2010
Now that we see campaigns like the two above being awarded, we all really need to stop, look up from our navels and think. How do we evolve? These kinds of best-of-navel-awards are not good for anyone. They are certainly not good for the clients of course, but in the long term, this also means that our whole industry will suffer.
So what IS good for the industry? Well – in a McKinsey report from 2005 it is suggested that 20-25% of marketing money should be spent on “structured experimentation”. This is probably just as true today. It also makes sense intuitively that this must be beneficial in times of change. But if we internally don’t award people who bring new know-how and cross-disciplinary knowledge into the industry, we will end up doing the wrong things while drinking Champagne and thinking we’re rockstars.
My suggestion then is that we set up an award called The Golden Gut, that we award to people who have taken chances with something new and innovative and had the guts to do it despite disqualifying themselves from Epicas and Cannes Lions, and despite taking a calculated risk with the marketing budget (20-25% perhaps being a good rule of thumb). Besides the obligatory trophy and awards party, there should also be price money chipped in that will go back to the client, thus encouraging brilliant risktaking and innovation. That’s one award I would respect more than any of the current pat-on-the-back trophys floating around left and right today. Play time is over. Consultant time is here.
There. I will now grab a helmet and a bullet proof vest and hide in a dark corner somewhere to make a sketch of how to organize this award. Who’s with me?
[Edit: Somebody asked me if I hate all agencies. The answer is no. I hate very few things, and I engage in these debates to help us all evolve. But the agencies I respect the most are not the ones you find drinking bubbly wine at awards ceremonies, but rather innovative agencies. Favorites include Anomaly, BBH-Labs, and Trumpet to name a few. ]
[Edit 2: Yes. I SHOULD have called this "The Golden Balls"-award in order to make it more viral, but I'm just not macho enough for that.]
[Edit 3: Here's my first nominee:
Found on the awesome Metacool.
]
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