Agency Business Committing Suicide

The advertising industry is well on its way to convincing the business community that advertising doesn't work.

Our obsessive desire to curry favor with the feckless trendy obsessions of the marketing industry -- interactivity, precision targeting, social media, big data, technology -- at the expense of the basics of brand building, is hurting marketers and killing advertising.

We have pounded marketers over the head with relentless bullshit about the miraculous power of digital communication. We have spent 10 years telling marketers that "advertising is dead." We have persuaded them that the "interruption model" is no longer viable.

The result is that they are now thoroughly convinced that the fairy tales we sold them are true. And because we are not delivering on the fairy tales, they are firing us right and left.

An article in Forbes last week, entitled "How The Big Shift To Digital And Data Marketing Is Getting Agencies Fired" gets the result right and the problem wrong.

Let's be clear -- it's not our capabilities that are the problem. The problem is the bullshit we promised. We told them we could make them fly and they believed us. Now that it's clear that we are incapable of making them fly, they're looking for someone who can perform the miracle we promised them.

According to the Forbes article:

• 83% of clients say they are looking for skills and capabilities not found in most agencies 

• 95% of CMOs do not have confidence in agency performance

• 70% say they have no confidence in agency ability to manage or analyze data

These numbers are appalling and we have no one to blame but ourselves.

The article concludes that

"To regain their footing agencies should become highly flexible and constantly adapt"

Wrong.

Agencies have only one hope. We need to stop bullshitting and get back to the basic truth about advertising.

We need to quit blathering about the false gods of interactivity, precision targeting, social media, data, and technology... and convince marketers that the most effective way to build brands and businesses is through the unique and unmatched power of mass media and brilliant advertising.

Radical Simplicity

I am getting started on a new book entitled Radical Simplicity.

Radical Simplicity is intended to be a prescription for ridding our business of the immaterial, wasteful and frustrating practices, people, and behaviors that are confusing the shit out of us and undermining the effectiveness of what we do.

It will try to strip away all the bullshit of our industry. What's left will be a radically simple way to think about and practice advertising.

Any sensible person working in marketing and advertising knows there’s something deeply wrong. We can’t quite put our finger on it, but we can feel it.

My belief is that it stems from a downward spiral of oppressive, unnecessary complexity that has infected our culture, our thinking, our systems, and our organizations.

It is manifest in several ways:

• a feeling that a great deal of what we are doing is a waste of time and money
• systems that obstruct the carrying out of assignments rather than facilitate them
• organizations that encourage vagueness to protect egos
• a sense that the waiters are doing the cooking, and the umpires are running the bases.
• non-productive jobs that are 80% meetings and presentations and 20% doing something
• data, measurements, and processes that have names but no value
• a culture drowning in false goals
• a deep distrust by marketers of the people creating their advertising 
• thinly disguised contempt among agencies for their clients 
• media practices that are so alarmingly arcane, no one knows where their advertising is running, how much they are paying, or even if it is running
• a profusion of dreadful, pompous corporate titles that sound ridiculous and mean nothing 
• a constant drumbeat of anxiety 

We are very confused.

Radical Simplicity will aim at finding a simple path through the woods. It will aim at freeing us from the relentless torrent of bullshit and worthless legends and rituals that are ruining the advertising and marketing industries, and sending talented people running screaming from us.

If advertising were religion, Radical Simplicity aims to be a type of Reformation.

In keeping with its promise Radical Simplicity will be under 25 pages.

It's a tall order. Wish me luck.

Humans Out At MCR

NEW YORK, NY (UPA) -- Marketing communications firm MCR announced today that they will be revamping their staffing practices in 2016 to eliminate the need for "non-digital" staff.

"We think we have identified a new way to look at marketing communication that will create deeper value for our clients by eliminating unnecessary cost factors, such as personnel," said Rich Mandrake, ceo of MCR.

MCR's plan is to utilize technology-based resources such as software, virtual robots, and media algorithms to create and implement advertising and marketing programs for its clients.

"We will need to keep a few tech people on staff to insure that our systems are functioning well and are properly integrated. But that's it. Last-century resources like account managers, copywriters, art directors, and media planners -- in other words, people -- will be replaced by digital resources."

Susan Rottingham, Executive Director of Marketing Matrix, another advertising and marketing firm in East Wilting, PA expressed admiration for the concept.

"I believe this is a first step toward advertising's future. We can drive creative content strategy and design experiences into a highly curated, customized experience across the digital ecosystem by eliminating non-essential pathways."

Thomas Train of A&P Partners in Phoenix was less enthusiastic. "It comes down to this," Train said, "algorithms can't buy lunch."

But Mandrake is unshaken in his confidence in the new system.

"We have developed what we call 'virtual robotics' that can actually understand a client brief when it is converted into code via a proprietary algorithm we have developed. The robot program then goes online and hunts down previously created advertising and marketing campaigns in similar categories which it 'borrows' from -- much like a traditional creative team does," he explained.

Using existing software, a "virtual account manager" then relays the creative content to a newly developed media package called "Planner Z" which generates a media plan and transmits the plan via secure lines to a programmatic buying service or trading desk.

According to Mandrake, the development time from the moment a new client brief is received until a new advertising campaign starts appearing in media can take less than 30 minutes.

MCR was formed in 2002 by the merger of Mandrake & Partners and C.R. Lewin Associates. With offices in Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo, it currently employs 260 people and is the largest advertising agency in upstate New York.

You can learn more about the new technology here.