Ad world and the war for talent: the half-full glass

Coming from a traditional ATL background and working in a digital agency is proving to be a great opportunity to look both at the roots and the frontiers of our industry, and take sneak peaks into its future.

For example, I think that the advertising industry has a critical opportunity to gain ground in the war for talent, and this opportunity is provided by digital. For a number of reasons:

1. Digital is extremely new and extremely innovative in its nature. Give or take, tv ads haven’t changed significantly in the past 40 years. On the other hand, not only has digital been dramatically evolving and reshaping over the past 10, but we are all aware that it will keep changing over the next 10 (or 50), and that doing digital creative work in 5 years will look nothing like today. This alone is a unique catalyst for talented people

2. Digital is perceived as a “technical” discipline that requires specialist expertise. Marketers acknowledge a lack of such expertise, and recognise the added value of digital agencies, trusting their recommendations. In other words, digital agencies can enjoy a certain authority and freedom of movement, that again attracts talents.

3. Due to the combined action of these first two elements (a very high degree of innovation & technical sophistication) digital agencies are likely to exert a certain level of authority vis-a-vis their clients in the long term, something traditional agencies haven’t been able to mantain.

4. With computers and mobile phones becoming ubiquitous, all creative work will become digital-centered, and so will agencies. All agencies will thus enjoy a renewed sense of acknowledged authority and respect. (Unless they manage to screw that up, too, and honestly I can’t rule that out)

5. Finally, digital is trackable and interactive. That means that not only will we know if a crap campaign generates crap results, but we’re also likely to have consumers telling us it’s crap. That will mean the end of the “Buy into this idea because our creative director says so” business model. We will be forced to put more effort into our work and invest on merit and talent.

 

Final Burp: Glamour won’t save the ad industry. Geeks will. (Just like the Californian economy.)

Ad world and the war for talent: the half-empty glass

Advertising agencies, just like most other creative and consulting industries, base their success on one factor, one single asset: human resources.

Their business model is built on selling ideas, ideas are crafted by the workforce of the agency. The agency with the most talented workforce produces the best idea, thus resulting in a competitive edge on the only product that the industry is offering. It’s this simple.

Yet, advertising agencies often neglect this, and treat their human resources as a commodity. (Heck, lots of them don’t even have an HR department or program); therefore resulting in commodities themselves, since an ad agency is essentially made up of its people, and that’s about it.

If we look back at how the ad industry lost part of its standing and credibility (I assume we all agree it did), we can see a number of processes combine:

1. Client companies grew a marketing culture: all of a sudden, the same company that used to make cookies started hiring people that could sell them, alongside those who could bake them.
2. Seeing the uniqueness of their marketing expertise challenged, ad agencies could have resorted to establishing a sound and proven expertise in communication. Unfortunately, such a choice would have implied building an expertise in a number of disciplines, from behaviourial sociology to semiotics, and investing in research, training and talent.
3. Instead, ad agencies resorted to the tempting route of “advertising as art”, under the arguable selling proposition of “Buy into this idea because our creative director says so”. (Or under the best circumstances, “Buy into this idea because our multiple-awards winner creative director says so”)

Quite predictably, this only worked when creative directors could count on an already established reputation and they’d come up with a creative idea so brilliant that it could easily sell itself and clients were brave and confident enough to buy into it.

In absence of that, marketers started hanging onto anything, from past cliches that had always worked (and thus would not be working anymore by definition) to tedious focus groups, to assist them in critical decisions. And in today’s world, when any decision is critical, that means everything.

All this has been made worse by an industry that has refrained from investing in talent, in an effort to find the one or two star creative directors that would boost an ad reputation, letting everything else go: how many account directors can get a good understanding of a client’s business? How many of them are brilliant public speakers? How many copywriters could write an episode of a sit-com, and make it at least as funny as your average tv-show?

Not many, and quite a few of them would be tempted to move to other industries, where they’d receive higher salaries and opportunities.

Therefore depriving ad agencies of talent. Which in turn results in poorer ideas, and a poorer service. Which results in declining fees. Which of course results in less money for hiring and training talents. And so on…

Now, here are two more questions:

Why am I leaving planners aside? Firstly, lots of agencies don’t even have planners. As for those who do, sometimes they have made things worse:  hiring a handful of smart planners was seen as a good enough way to provide the agency with all the brains that it needed. (I always found an insulting stereotype that of seeing planners as “the intelligent ones”, creative teams as “the creative ones”, and account managers as “the reliable ones”. As if someone couldn’t be intelligent, creative and reliable at the same time. Hell, as if everyone shouldn’t be required to be intelligent, creative and reliable at the same time today!).

Why am I complaining about this right now? Because the IPA website is hosting an interesting (though very UK-oriented) view on training talents, by BBH’s Nick Kendall. It’s about IPA’s 7-stage model, but I see it as part of a larger debate on talent in the ad industry, one that deserves each of us spending some of our time and braincells on.

 

Final Burp: how many practitioners in advertising have done at least one reading in any one of the following: beavioural psychology, semiotics, neuropsychology, game theory, social movements,  organizational psychology, linguistics, anthropology…?

It’s not the economy of ideas.

If we look back at a few years ago, we were all pretty confident that we were entering into the economy of ideas: an age where mass production, a solid brand history and, well, machines, were going to become less and less relevant.

Ideas alone would become the one asset to drive business: because

1) talented people with brilliant ideas would find investors (may they be private equity, or countless-investors-with-little-money recruited on the web like some independent film productions did), and

2) new technology and media would allow for a virtual production, promotion and distribution system that would be as effective, but way cheaper, than the old one made of factories, stores, and all that lies in between.

Today’s bad news is: you can’t have a business model (let alone a whole economy) based on ideas, because ideas are out there for free.

And I’m not (only) talking about how copyright laws are proving to be ineffective in protecting intellectual properties, that are, in their own ways (films, music, software…), applications of ideas, as lately shown in the ripping of dvd-codes.

There’s much more to it: there’s plenty of more or less talented people willing to give away their best ideas, happily and consciously. They may do it for fame, recognition, contacts, desire to see their ideas made real (or our all-time favorite, to get laid*), but what matters is that no money is involved.

And with so many of them out there, you can bet that some will be talented and dedicated enough to be competitive at the highest levels.

And even in highly-specialized sectors where giving away your idea for free would be, well, insane, something interesting is going on: some companies (and once again P&G is one of them) are posting the toughest problems they’re struggling with on their website, encouraging any scientist/researcher/scholar to submit their own solutions. Whoever provides the solution that the company decides to invest on, gets a shitload of money. Everyone else, zero. This is like having a global R&D department with the most talented people in the world, in any field, but having to pay just for one of them.

Bottom-line is, ideas might not be the strategic asset for the future. Not only because they can be replicated. But because they can be given away for free, or because you can have a huge free pool to choose from.

(And yes, this is one of the issues that the industry that is currently paying for my mortgage will have to address)

In his talkmarks Simone disagrees with me saying that ”in a world where everything is extremely easy to publish, your ideas are the most important asset you may have. The thing that changes is that not only your commercially-valuable ideas (like patentable ones) have a value. Your opinions on how a DVD-cracking-code should be threated could be the reason why somebody takes you or leaves you. “

But see, those are not ideas. That’s an attitude. And yes, attitudes will matter. Even more than today.

Final Burp:Is it a coincidence that ideas were the last strategic asset that a company could manage internally, with no relation to the outside world?

*The author is aware of how little chances that particular aim stands, but that never stopped anyone.