Re: UKNM: New Media vs Old Hat

[Tim.Hayward]

The reason that .com ads are shite is frighteningly simple.


Ad agencies are designed as a huge, unweildy system of checks and balances.


Ordinarily a marketing director walks in with a million quid to advertise a

company with a time proven product or proposition. The marketing dept of a

dog

food know all there is to know about their brand. They have a fair idea

about

what the ad is meant to say and to whom. When the ad airs, they will expect

to

see research that shows how effective the ad is. Everyone's job depends on

it.


This makes the process of writing the brief and producing the ad highly

controlled. Creatives would rather not have a brief which specifies the

precise

length of the pack shot, the size of the logo and the regional accents of

the

actors but they invariably come back with something which is the best

combination of creative and effectiveness.


.Coms are different.


Most dotcoms seem to have started with a meeting between geeks and suits.

The

geeks spend an hour talking about all the exciting things they can do...

spinning 3D models...direct-to-home, 2-way, 12-bore, fibre-optic e-commerce.

The

suits don't quite understand what the geeks are on about but they have a six

month bail out exit strategy anyway so they don't give a flying fuck. The

one

thing that the suits won't do is shut out anything which might become an

opportunity later.


As a consequence, by the time they approach the average ad agency (and

believe

me I've been in a thousand of these meetings) they sound like this....


"We've got this .com. It's a portal, with e-commerce and a sort of community

slant. It will be the first port of call on the web for a huge and valuable

audience if we can just build a brand 12 times the size of God prior to IPO.

Although the site is primarily an e-commerce play for lawn-mower spares, our

business plan involves rapid expansion into garden care, home maintenance,

domestic servants, mortgages and alternative medicine - globally. Initially

this

is obviously delivered via the net but we are already developing full,

all-platform capability. Our audience is 35yr old AB males with a high

disposable income but that obviously can be taken to include women, children

and

the indigent poor. We've got 20M of other people's money, 85% of which has

to be

spent on marketing. Our marketing director (26) has a solid grounding in the

production of club flyers. We know less than fuck-all about advertising but

we

like really funny/funky/sexy ads".


At this point the creatives have usually soiled themselves in sheer glee.


They're thinking "Fucking A. I can finally make that ad involving Kate

Moss's

gusset, shot by Martin Scorcese, in Antarctica (or possibly someone puking

in a

dustbin) and call it cutting edge brand building.


I'm thinking "Another minging pile of faeces that's everything, to everyone

everywhere as long as we can get everyone to believe that it's not a minging

pile of faeces".


And the guys with their names over the door, the poor old fuckers who own

the

agency are thinking "Two years ago we thought this internet thing was going

to

kill advertising. I'm not sure, but it still looks like it might. And right

now

I've got six chinless fuckers with more money than Donald Trump who couldn't

tell their arse from a hole in the ground and I've got a payroll to meet".


What would you do?


Explain that their idea is shit? They couldn't hear you. They're so fired

with a

combination of enthusiasm, ignorance and greed that you could nailgun their

skulls to the boardroom table and they'd somehow drag themselves back to

Shoreditch to bore their mates shitless with stories of their unimaginable

wealth and business acumen.


Tell them there are cheaper ways to do it? They actually WANT to spend tall

dollars. It's someone elses money and the faster they can piss it away the

more

they can raise.


Show them the door? They'll just wander blindly into the next agency like

sacrificial ewes in Japanese import trainers.


OOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooooooooh That felt GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!


T



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