A couple posts ago, I made a quick aside on good failure. Basically, I think there are two kinds, often confused when maybe they should be conflated. He struggled with mental tasks normal people find easy. When he read a novel, he would instantly memorize every word by heart, but miss the entire plot. Metaphors and poetry - though they clung to his brain like Velcro - were incomprehensible. He couldn't even use the phone because he found it hard to recognize a person's voice "when it changes its intonation...and it does that 20 or 30 times a day."1. Shotgun - the "do tons of things and cross your fingers" approach2. Scientific - the iterative "i made no mistake but learned one more thing not to do" approach.
And as I said, I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. We're not scientific enough to embrace the iterative approach all the way. And the shotgun approach doesn't really satisfy the need for fiscal discipline that most companies have. Either way, failure is difficult, so some level of hedging is probably needed.
A few reasons why:1. The comfort of reach and frequency - While returns are clearly diminishing on any traditional ad buy, we are pretty good with arriving at a rough rate of return. At least it's more knowable than if you don't have those two metrics. Without reach, we're sort of working without a net.2. The hand wringing, blinding focus on the avoidance of failure - Jonah Lehrer has a post up today about people that remember everything, as in, can forget nothing. Sounds pretty awesome at first, until you read a little further and find that most of them go nuts, often after having difficulty with simple tasks we are able to complete without thought. It's excruciating.Which is the way most companies react to failure. They hash and rehash. It paralyzes them for future experimentation, and often causes them to walk away completely after casting the entire thing as something that "just doesn't work." No question we need to do our best to find answers, but we need to be scientific enough to gain the knowledge, while forgetful enough to, as we say in Texas, get back on the saddle.3. The Luck factor - Frankly, some things were because we just got lucky. We happened to be in the right place at the right time. So for all the picking apart and recap that's possible, it'll never lead us all the way to a replicable solution. In fact, it could keep us chasing after something that's passed. And the inherent luck in some solutions is just unknowable with any level of assuredness.Bottom line: We are shifting into a culture that favors doing over saying. We know this. And we know doing things creates a situation in which success only comes when we cause a reaction, not simply an impression; reach is unforecastable and frequency matters little. So if you're looking for a pre-destined ROI, you're in the wrong game.And while scientific failure may be great to help get passed failure avoidance, it may be an obstacle to assessing the luck factor. The shotgun approach is awesome in the name of experimentation, but it sure doesn't make anyone feel all that comfortable. So in that middle ground rests good failure.
Piggybacking Sean’s comments on Charles’ article about what the future of the advertising agency holds, in which Charles essentially asserts is the combination of transmedia planning and the black swan theory, combined with a shitload of experimentation and the acceptance of failure.
(But first, a quick aside on failure. It seems like there are two ideas of what failure should be. First, there’s the shotgun approach with the hope that one actually hits the target and becomes the next big viral win. The second is a more scientific, iterative process. I think some people are little too quick to only push quantity at the possible sacrifice of quality, rather than using failure as a tool to increase future chances of success. It’s why strategic planning is becoming so much more important. Although in reality, good failure is probably a little of both)
As I wrote about in the AOC – I believe our collective fate lies in our ability to adapt. It’s the key to experimentation. If you only have a bunch of people used to making television, the likelihood of actual experimentation over just hedging is pretty low. It’s important that we fill up our agencies with people who easily adapt to new ideas, technologies, audiences, or at least have a pretty strong hunger for new information.
So – the new agency will do three things.
1) Shift from the single idea told multiple ways to broader cross media narratives.
2) Get better at experimentation.
3) Employ more adaptable people.
But I would also add a few trends that are forcing these changes:
First, we’re finally making the shift away from a consumer culture back to a more participatory one. Or better said, one of doing things rather than just consuming them.
Clay Shirky described this in his discussion of cognitive surplus (what you do when you have nothing to do). He cites a British historian who described the urbanization of society in London in the late 18th century due to the Industrial Revolution. Essentially, people couldn’t handle the shift, so they collectively chose to get shitfaced on gin for a few years instead. But when they adjusted, when they started to wake up from that stupor, that’s when they got all the good parts of the move to the cities. The public libraries, the museums, public education, etc.
Then we began to make our move away from a wholly manufacturing society. With the inception of the 5 day work week, we got something we had never dealt with before, free time. And television was our gin.
But now, the pendulum is swinging back. We’re going back to doing things with our hands, just this time there’s a keyboard and a mouse in between, not necessarily a shovel or a hammer. We’re waking back up. That’s the first shift.
Secondly, telling these broader transmedia narratives requires an audience that gives a shit. The entirety of the point of the tagline, the 360 degree branding, whatever your agency calls it, is the repetition of a single idea forcing its way into the subconscious of an unengaged receptacle. But now that this isn’t really working anymore, we’ve seen the rise of the very buzzy and very misunderstood engagement metric. Most equate this brief attention with caring, but we all know better.
So the second requirement of the new agency is defining purpose. And selling more of X product generally isn’t enough of a purpose. And there simply aren’t many products like iPod’s that have caring already in the bag, so we have to find ways to make this so. And, gasp, this could actually mean using our influence and our money as a force for social good. Dove is a great example of this. It’s brands finding a rallying cry that makes them matter.
And last thing is the shift from brands as a monolithic thing to brands as a more human entity. I think this is mostly an offshoot of number 2, combined with the growth of corporate blogging, the changing nature of customer service, etc. Either way, we expect brands to behave more human, whether that’s by taking on simple human characteristics like empathy and nuance, or by being defined by the sum of the people who represent it.
So that’s it my sort of long winded version of Charles’ future for agencies.
Brands will begin to get better at transmedia narratives and experimentation by becoming more adaptable. And, I believe these changes are happening because the pendulum is swinging back towards participation, the need to make people care and the requirement of brands to have a few manners.
As we adjust the definition of what advertising is from saying things to doing things, do charts like these tell us anything of any use?
After Michelle Obama mentioned her J. Crew outfit on Leno last night, some smart search buyers stepped in to maximize the impact. Simple, but nicely done. Not many organizations move that quickly.
(via Ben)
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