Top 10 Ways To Improve Ad Industry Morale

On Friday, The New York Times had one of those pieces that makes you think maybe your father was right when he said you should be a plumbing supply wholesaler. The title of the piece was An Ad Agency Crowdsources Its Own Employees’ Morale. I think a better title would have been The Clowns Are Doing The Clownsourcing.

The story, in a nutshell, goes like this: a NY agency ran a contest giving its employees some money for coming up with ideas for improving morale, particularly among their precious, super-pussified millennials. 

Apparently all these Gen Y weenies need to be hugged and pampered or they'll take their yoga mats and go back to mommy's basement.

There are so many things wrong with this I don't even know where to start.

First of all, when did a suggestion box become "crowdsourcing?" Was it when any lump of techno-garbage that actually worked became "user friendly?" When everything that didn't come in a plastic bag became "artisanal?"  Or when any piece of crap that didn't necessitate the killing of whales became "sustainable?"

Second, didn't we bury the rotten carcass of crowdsourcing last year along with "the conversation" and QR codes? Or are used-to-be-very-hip agencies still peddling this baloney?

Third, if a paycheck every two weeks, and a health plan, and a 401K, and someplace to drag their sorry asses every morning, and just a little bit of personal pride aren't enough to motivate these weenies, they can jump on their fixies and go back to Brooklyn.

And finally, what won the contest?  

"...turning over to employees about 4,500 square feet of space on the sixth floor of the agency’s New York headquarters, which they can use, individually and in groups, for personal, creative projects."

In other words, a playpen for the kindergarteners to do their finger painting.

Here's a personsourced idea. If you have 4,500 square feet of space sitting around in the middle of New York City gathering Higgs Bosons, how about turning it over to some poor slobs who really need it? Or is that not morale-building enough for these effete narcissists?

Okay, deep breath here.

Well, anyway, you know me. I'm here to help. So, as a service to those who are worried about morale in the advertising business, I have developed The Ad Contrarian's Top 10 Ways To Improve Ad Industry Morale.

Here we go:

1. Every Powerpoint slide must be written in Waloon and contain either a rainbow or a unicorn

2. Speakers at digital media conferences required to dress as their favorite Spice Girl

3. Move the Cannes International Advertising Festival to Orlando

4. Do a switch -- put the timesheets in the bathroom and the toilet paper in the HR department

5. Before being hired at an agency, candidates for the job of Social Media Director required to say the word "ecosystem" continuously until they throw up 

6. Criminalize webinars

7. Change everything that's global to worldwide, and everything that's worldwide to global

8. New FCC regulation: All truck spots must have at least one ballerina

9. At the opening of annual 4As Management Conference, Sir Martin Sorrell required to sing "Knock Three Times"

10. Upgrade E-mail to F-mail

I got your improved morale right here.

Invisible Advertising

As media options for advertisers have become radically more complex, our ideas about the value of various media types have become concomitantly more esoteric.

We analyze media efficiencies based on very advanced ideas of consumer behavior. We try to understand how and why consumers use certain types of media and we optimize our media efficiencies by following those behaviors. We use highly muscular targeting models to find exactly the right audience and exactly the right environment for our messages.

And yet, as our ability to target has gotten dramatically more precise  -- particularly for online  advertising -- our results have gotten progressively more dismal. So what the hell is going on?

The answer is that we have grossly exaggerated the usefulness of media science. We have also overlooked something far simpler and more consequential. There is one characteristic of advertising that we never seem to discuss, that never enters into the evaluation process, and that, in the end, may trump all the arcane media analyses and targeting models.

In addition to having strategic and executional properties, advertising also has physical properties. These physical properties may, in the end, have a greater effect on success than media science. The simple physical nature of an ad may be far more relevant in predicting its power than any of the mysterious media calculations.

The fact that an ad occupies a whole page, or a whole screen, may be a lot more germane to its effectiveness than how well it is targeted. A big old billboard that targets no one in particular may be, dollar-for-dollar, a more efficient media buy than a display ad that precisely targets left-handed Mennonite yogurt eaters, but is so physically insignificant as to be unobservable.

To state it another way, it doesn't really matter how well-targeted a Facebook ad is if its physical properties make it invisible. The fact that it is a tiny little thing sitting in an area of a page we have all learned to ignore is critical to understanding why Facebook ads are so alarmingly ineffective. The fact that it may be targeted with absolute precision is meaningless if it is essentially invisible.

Which leads me to a piece written recently by Seth Godin. The piece is called "Advertising's bumpy transition (and why it matters to you)." It is basically an apologia for online advertising.

Seth is a very bright guy and he makes some interesting points about media choices. He is particularly astute in his criticism of print advertising. But there is also a lot to argue with.

If I understand Seth's main thesis correctly (and frankly, I'm not sure I do) I think he is saying that advertisers undervalue digital advertising because they don't understand the power that is represented by "focus." By "focus" I think he means a digital environment that is specific and uncluttered and conducive to the particular interests of a distinct type of consumer.

He is correct that placing display ads in focused environments is probably a lot more judicious than throwing them willy-nilly all over the web. But they are still famously ineffective.

Seth believes that once advertisers understand "focus" they will have a deeper appreciation for the power of online display advertising. I don't think so. I think advertisers already have seen that while "focus" may be preferable to absence of focus, it has not led to terribly effective advertising.

The problem is not one of targeting or focus. The problem is that the physical properties of display ads render them essentially invisible. Until this problem is somehow addressed, display ads will continue to under-perform and their value will continue to deteriorate regardless of how brilliantly they are placed.

Categorizing ad types as "old media" versus "new media," or "traditional media" versus "digital media," or "online media" versus "offline media" is not an intelligent way to think about advertising. In fact, because of its physical properties an online display ad has much more in common with a small space newspaper ad than it does with a YouTube video or a website.

Media science notwithstanding, there are only two types of advertising in the world: visible advertising and invisible advertising. The farther away from understanding this you get, the more confused you become.

The Management Mystery

Since yesterday was Labor Day, and I'm supposed to be a contrarian, I thought I'd really go contrarian and write a little something today in praise of management.

I live in Oakland, California. It may be the most mismanaged city on the face of the earth. It is a city so teeming with incompetence that the police department has announced it will not respond to most crimes.

The city government has been the subject of an FBI probe. The Oakland School District is being investigated by a federal grand jury. Worst of all, children are being gunned down in the streets.

Meanwhile, the morons on the City Council are all hysterical because the feds are closing down the "medical" marijuana "dispensaries" that line Broadway. 

Some details of Oakland's pathetic "leadership" can be found in a NY Times Magazine piece from a few weeks ago called "The World Capital of Anti-Capitalism."

And yet, the citizenry of Oakland keeps electing the same ridiculous imbeciles over and over again despite their abject ineptitude.

I have a feeling that the reason for this is that people do not seem to understand the relationship between management and outcomes. Ideology trumps competence. If you sing the right song, it doesn't matter to most people how awful you are at your job, because they don't really understand what executives do or how they can make or break an organization.

Just as in city government, incompetent leadership in an ad agency will also create monstrous problems. The difference is, cities can't close down. Agencies can.

When I was a copywriter it was very easy to demonstrate my accomplishments. "See this ad, mom? I wrote it." But when I told mom that I had become president of an ad agency, she congratulated me. Then there was a long pause.... "so, what do you do?"

Management's failures are obvious, but their accomplishments are substantially invisible. People are prone to thinking that the buses just show up, and the streets repair themselves, and the garbage magically disappears. They don't realize how much planning and expertise it takes to get this stuff right. Not just by the people who do the work, but also by the people behind the scenes who have to make sure the right people, systems, and resources are in place.

Many people in agencies think the work just shows up. They think the new clients and the new hires just pop into existence. They think the pay checks write themselves. As a result, they are skeptical that the big shots in the front offices with their mysterious meetings and their ubiquitous carry-ons are really adding anything of value.

This is not to say that there aren't incompetent people running agencies. There are zillions of them. One look at the long list of former agencies is all it takes to prove how large the pool of lousy agency executives has been.

But before you allow childish rebelliousness to totally taint your view of the value of agency leadership, I suggest you do this -- try starting one yourself.