ADVERTISING:THE LAST REFUGE OF THE TALENTLESS
In the litany of woes that mainstream, above-the-line advertising faces, a recurring moan reads "we dont get talented people into the industry anymore". Most admen, with their feet firmly planted in the air, beleive there is a solution. Palani Pillai, a star of the Singapore Ad circuit says "...as you can see, the problem is easy...." No Prizes for guessing. Mr. Pillai's solution is well.....to advertise! Why Advertise? Well, we have good relationships with Media Owners, so we can get free airtime, thats why ! Advertise, and we can change the world, and behold, ye shall have the rocket scientists at the gate, beseeching us to ferry artworks to our clients, ingratiating smile in tow.
The true answer is that there is no solution. Lets see why:
1. The results of advertising cannot be quantified. Hence the value seen by the client is subjective, erring on the side of Peanuts. Pay Peanuts, get monkeys.
2. On the same point above, agency thought cannot be protected, or patented. So Agencies give away the thought for free, and then get paid for the leg-work. The compensation for leg-work is again peanuts.
3. Even if the agency isnt paid peanuts, it pays peanuts to its staff. The bulk of the money is taken by the old farts, and the crumbs are handed over to the newbies who do the best they can. In my ex-company, strategy presentations were made by 20 somethings who had neither the training nor the experience to do so.
4. There is already so much mediocrity around, that any bright entrant will become mediocre sooner or later. Abandon hope all ye who enter here!
On the bright side, advertising is the last refuge of the talentless, the good-for-nothing, and the unskilled. Unemployable? Knock on advertising's doors. It may be your best chance.
Monday, January 01, 2007
DEATH OF THE ONLINE MEDIA PLANNER
Emerging from the attics and the basements of the full-service advertising agency a decade ago, Media Independents have an understandable chip on their shoulder. All innovation is driven by Media, they proclaim. Planning is paramount, especially in a situation of Media Fragmentation, and the death of the 30 second gazillion-TRP
TV Commercial. After all, what is advertising if one cannot "engage" one's consumer at the right place and the right time? For some of the old-timers, its more personal – "in 10 years time they (the Creative Agencies) will be on the rubbish heap of history" was how an ex-colleague from the Media business put it, rather grimly.
And so we saw the rise of the Media Planner. Using vast reams of data, and sophisticated software in tow, the Media Planner was the new Oracle. Communication was now a quantifiable science, using TRPs, OTS, Reach and Frequency. We saw the rise of Specialist firms like AC Nielsen, who did nothing but collect viewership and media consumption data, using some pretty advanced math. The method in the madness attracted some of the brightest minds we see in Media today – not ex-bullfighters and Dadaist Painters, but less bohemian, definitely more nerdy and more middle class, earnest, hardworking souls armed with the tools of the trade, Excel and Powerpoint.
Online, the poor cousin of TV, Print and Radio where most marketers spend 95% of all their money, remained neglected by the Media independents. There was very little money in it. Why bother investing when the quantum of spend so low, and the effort so high? As brokers, they'd rather focus on 3% of 100 Million USD than 3% of 10,000 USD, right?
But things are changing. With the recent growth in online media, driven by the Search and Contextual Media Networks, and that clients are increasingly curious about Online Media, Media Agencies are working hard to grow their Online capabilities, attempting to transfer their Media Planning expertise onto the online space – and we see the
role of "Online Media Planning" being staffed and invested in. And herein lies the problem: "Planning" as applied to the Online Media space is a redundant and obsolete construct, and the quicker the media agencies realize this, the faster they will evolve. To understand this provocative statement a little more, let’s re-visit a few concepts of Media
Planning:
Offline Media is Exposure-Based Media. Media Planners identify the Target Audience – either by Demography (In Singapore, everybody's Target Audience is the Ubiquitous PMEB, which means just about everybody who can afford anything, but that is another grouse to be dealt with later ), Psychography, or by their Passions (a term coined by New Media Guru Rishad Tobaccowala). They then figure out what media these folks consume, and then place ads on those media. The Planner would then quantify the Plan with some sort of Exposure Metric (TRPs, Reach, Frequency), with lots of charts and tables. The metrics stopped there. Response was not part of the equation, and whether consumers responded in anyway to this potential exposure was an unnecessary (and dangerously subversive) afterthought.
Early Online Media was kind of similar to Offline Media, but without the investment in the rigor of Rating Points or Audience Analysis, and the only data that typically existed was rather dubious Media Owner data on Page Views and audience profile (mostly not verifiable independently), So we'd have the Media Sales Rep, explain to the Media Buyer, who they thought was getting exposed to all the content on their site - and if the Media Planner thought there was a fit between the Target Audience and the Media Owners claim of viewership, they would buy Exposure – measured as Impressions Served. What was the desired result of the Impression served, again was something that fell through the cracks – that wasn't, the Online Media Planners job, it had never been! The client was also typically happy – they had spent 2% of their budget on Online, the boss was happy to see a good looking website with a cool Flash Movie (which unfortunately took 5 minutes to load, but once that happened, the effect was f***ing awesome), and the marketing department was slowly but surely getting to be cutting-edge!
The growth in Online is being driven by Media whose metrics are not Exposure based, but Response based. What this means is that Exposure has no value anymore – the marketer is only charged when people respond to their ads by clicking on them with every single click being identifiable by source (which keyword, which ad, which form factor), what time and so on. The sudden shift in paradigm from Exposure to Response has led more marketers to look at Post-Click activity (after the click, what did the user do, did they download a whitepaper, call up a number, buy something).
With this granularity, coupled with the causality that the data lends itself too, any self-respecting Online Media Plan needs to start with the question: What is your marketing objective, and how does the consumer need to respond to your message so that this marketing objective is meaningfully met ? (unfortunately, this still forces most marketers to get into a fetal position and gnash their teeth)
Secondly, and equally powerfully, the growth in online media is being driven by Zero Fixed Cost, Auction Based networks. Very simply, this means that there is no Fixed cost to testing a hypothesis. In Fixed Cost, CPM based banner advertising, the client has to spend a large chunk of change – typically spending USD 10,000 and then finding that no one clicked on the ad, or no one clicking on the ad and doing anything meaningful. In the new Media, which is entirely variable cost, the approach is: develop a hypothesis, throw in small money(quickly, no need to do a PhD on audience behavior), learn what media is converting into intended action, and keep iterating and scaling as you learn. This new mindset I call, the Media Experimenter mindset – a mindset of endlessly experimenting and figuring out consumer behaviour in the crucible of the vast sales machine that is now the Internet.
Being an Experimenter is no longer enough. Experimenters need to know what to test for. So they need to be marketers as well. What action would we like the user to take? Is it sales or marketing actionable, or simply good to know? Is the response data quantifiable in near-real time, so that they can can quickly learn and modify their buying strategy? So I'd like to change the title of Media Experimenter to "Marketing Experimenter". Of course the Marketing Experimenter has to have a bunch specialized skillsets that the Offline Media Planner doesn't have (and never needed). The need to be experts in Web Analytics, the software that measures everything, and they need to be experts in website usability and conversion design. And as a first starting point they need to be Mavens – the term made popular by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point – people with an insatiable curiosity on just about everything - since in the new media, theoretically, every question and hypothesis is testable.
So if your Media Agency tells you that they have Online Media Planners, fire them.
Look for someone who has Marketing Experimenters. You can contact me for starters - my newly minted designation, Chief Actionable and Real-time Marketing Experiment
Officer should be all the credentials you need.
Emerging from the attics and the basements of the full-service advertising agency a decade ago, Media Independents have an understandable chip on their shoulder. All innovation is driven by Media, they proclaim. Planning is paramount, especially in a situation of Media Fragmentation, and the death of the 30 second gazillion-TRP
TV Commercial. After all, what is advertising if one cannot "engage" one's consumer at the right place and the right time? For some of the old-timers, its more personal – "in 10 years time they (the Creative Agencies) will be on the rubbish heap of history" was how an ex-colleague from the Media business put it, rather grimly.
And so we saw the rise of the Media Planner. Using vast reams of data, and sophisticated software in tow, the Media Planner was the new Oracle. Communication was now a quantifiable science, using TRPs, OTS, Reach and Frequency. We saw the rise of Specialist firms like AC Nielsen, who did nothing but collect viewership and media consumption data, using some pretty advanced math. The method in the madness attracted some of the brightest minds we see in Media today – not ex-bullfighters and Dadaist Painters, but less bohemian, definitely more nerdy and more middle class, earnest, hardworking souls armed with the tools of the trade, Excel and Powerpoint.
Online, the poor cousin of TV, Print and Radio where most marketers spend 95% of all their money, remained neglected by the Media independents. There was very little money in it. Why bother investing when the quantum of spend so low, and the effort so high? As brokers, they'd rather focus on 3% of 100 Million USD than 3% of 10,000 USD, right?
But things are changing. With the recent growth in online media, driven by the Search and Contextual Media Networks, and that clients are increasingly curious about Online Media, Media Agencies are working hard to grow their Online capabilities, attempting to transfer their Media Planning expertise onto the online space – and we see the
role of "Online Media Planning" being staffed and invested in. And herein lies the problem: "Planning" as applied to the Online Media space is a redundant and obsolete construct, and the quicker the media agencies realize this, the faster they will evolve. To understand this provocative statement a little more, let’s re-visit a few concepts of Media
Planning:
Offline Media is Exposure-Based Media. Media Planners identify the Target Audience – either by Demography (In Singapore, everybody's Target Audience is the Ubiquitous PMEB, which means just about everybody who can afford anything, but that is another grouse to be dealt with later ), Psychography, or by their Passions (a term coined by New Media Guru Rishad Tobaccowala). They then figure out what media these folks consume, and then place ads on those media. The Planner would then quantify the Plan with some sort of Exposure Metric (TRPs, Reach, Frequency), with lots of charts and tables. The metrics stopped there. Response was not part of the equation, and whether consumers responded in anyway to this potential exposure was an unnecessary (and dangerously subversive) afterthought.
Early Online Media was kind of similar to Offline Media, but without the investment in the rigor of Rating Points or Audience Analysis, and the only data that typically existed was rather dubious Media Owner data on Page Views and audience profile (mostly not verifiable independently), So we'd have the Media Sales Rep, explain to the Media Buyer, who they thought was getting exposed to all the content on their site - and if the Media Planner thought there was a fit between the Target Audience and the Media Owners claim of viewership, they would buy Exposure – measured as Impressions Served. What was the desired result of the Impression served, again was something that fell through the cracks – that wasn't, the Online Media Planners job, it had never been! The client was also typically happy – they had spent 2% of their budget on Online, the boss was happy to see a good looking website with a cool Flash Movie (which unfortunately took 5 minutes to load, but once that happened, the effect was f***ing awesome), and the marketing department was slowly but surely getting to be cutting-edge!
The growth in Online is being driven by Media whose metrics are not Exposure based, but Response based. What this means is that Exposure has no value anymore – the marketer is only charged when people respond to their ads by clicking on them with every single click being identifiable by source (which keyword, which ad, which form factor), what time and so on. The sudden shift in paradigm from Exposure to Response has led more marketers to look at Post-Click activity (after the click, what did the user do, did they download a whitepaper, call up a number, buy something).
With this granularity, coupled with the causality that the data lends itself too, any self-respecting Online Media Plan needs to start with the question: What is your marketing objective, and how does the consumer need to respond to your message so that this marketing objective is meaningfully met ? (unfortunately, this still forces most marketers to get into a fetal position and gnash their teeth)
Secondly, and equally powerfully, the growth in online media is being driven by Zero Fixed Cost, Auction Based networks. Very simply, this means that there is no Fixed cost to testing a hypothesis. In Fixed Cost, CPM based banner advertising, the client has to spend a large chunk of change – typically spending USD 10,000 and then finding that no one clicked on the ad, or no one clicking on the ad and doing anything meaningful. In the new Media, which is entirely variable cost, the approach is: develop a hypothesis, throw in small money(quickly, no need to do a PhD on audience behavior), learn what media is converting into intended action, and keep iterating and scaling as you learn. This new mindset I call, the Media Experimenter mindset – a mindset of endlessly experimenting and figuring out consumer behaviour in the crucible of the vast sales machine that is now the Internet.
Being an Experimenter is no longer enough. Experimenters need to know what to test for. So they need to be marketers as well. What action would we like the user to take? Is it sales or marketing actionable, or simply good to know? Is the response data quantifiable in near-real time, so that they can can quickly learn and modify their buying strategy? So I'd like to change the title of Media Experimenter to "Marketing Experimenter". Of course the Marketing Experimenter has to have a bunch specialized skillsets that the Offline Media Planner doesn't have (and never needed). The need to be experts in Web Analytics, the software that measures everything, and they need to be experts in website usability and conversion design. And as a first starting point they need to be Mavens – the term made popular by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point – people with an insatiable curiosity on just about everything - since in the new media, theoretically, every question and hypothesis is testable.
So if your Media Agency tells you that they have Online Media Planners, fire them.
Look for someone who has Marketing Experimenters. You can contact me for starters - my newly minted designation, Chief Actionable and Real-time Marketing Experiment
Officer should be all the credentials you need.
