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Time Again

It's not good to write a blog post about why you're not really writing a blog post.  Don't know why, exactly, it's not good, but I've heard or read or thought that.  It at least seems like it shouldn't be a good thing to write.  Still, that's what I'm writing today.  A post about why I'm not really writing.  Because I'm still in a total time crunch.  New business project that presents on Tuesday is the big elephant in the room, and has consumed an entire week, plus an entire weekend, and it's still going.  But, on top of that, there has been all the stuff leading up to it, plus other stuff, like the recent adotas article, some stuff I've been working on for the bbdigital blog (wip), another presentation I'm preparing for Georgetown University's School of Continuing Studies, where I'm a guest lecturer this Tuesday, after the new biz presentation.  And there's the panel I'm on this coming Thursday in DC, for Media Future Now. 

So, even though I'm not really writing a post today, I just didn't want y'all to think it's 'cause I'm slacking.

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Time

Today is Sunday, the day I write my blog.  I also go to church, pay bills, and try to get a couple more hours with the kids before the week begins. Today was going to be critically busy, because yesterday was insanely busy, which cut into today.  And because there was a makeup Lacrosse game scheduled for today, on top of the regular one from yesterday.  But the rain makeup got rained out, so Jackson is blasting spiders on Neopets next to me while I'm writing my blog.

The reason I write on Sunday is simple.  I simply don't have time to write during the week.  And that's a bit of a shame, because the act of writing my blog (or any blog, I suppose) is an act of thought.  And since my blog is about how agencies and clients can better make the transition they have to make, from traditional to digital, the fact that the only time I have to write about it is a sliver of time on a Sunday afternoon means that the only time I have to think about it is also a relative sliver of time, and that is more than a bit of a shame.

Because there's more to think about than just that.  Thinking time, I think, has been squeezed, in general.

The web has accelerated communication, which means the web has also accelerated production.  Follow the logic, and it's accelerated everything on down the line to the point that the time alloted to think stuff up, and think about how to make it better, has been tremendously compressed.  People (meaning clients, agencies, and, well...people) just expect things faster.  I think that's good.  What's dangerous is the compression to the point of restriction of the function that, more than any other, makes things good.

To be completely honest, I'm not sure how to solve the dilemma.  One way, of course, is to throw manpower at it.  And that works, to a point, assuming the manpower (or, rather, personpower) is good at thinking good stuff up.  More brains thinking about the same thing will more than likely produce a solution quicker.  But as everyone knows, and as we've discussed before, the pricing structure for new communications isn't the same as the pricing structure for old communications, and that's going to affect the personpower budget.  You can also simply say, "can't be done," but, guaranteed, as soon as you do, your competitor will chime in with, "I can do it."

Have we reached critical mass yet, where time alloted simply isn't time enough to produce quality?  Not yet.  But we will, sooner rather than later, industry-wide, I think. 

Maybe the key is to temper our promises of speed with a hefty dose of education about the virtues of quality, combined with, of course, instructional discussion about the nature of quality, and how it just takes a little more time than the un-good stuff.  Maybe.

I'm going to think about that.  Just as soon as I find the time.

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Better Bread

This past week, this post at Mashable gave me my current favorite metaphor for the way the web has affected many businesses.  Here's the quote:

if you’re selling bread and suddenly bread starts raining from the sky, are you going to be able to keep selling bread? Hell no, because it will be free for all and your business model needs to change. You think you can tell people that it’s illegal to pick the free bread from the street? You better start making better bread, buddy.

The piece that it comes from is a post by Stan Schroeder about Guy Bono, a French member of the European Parliament, and his bill that urges EU countries to avoid adopting measures that would deny internet access to convicted illegal downloaders (people who are sharing copyrighted files on P2P networks, etc.)  I think it's an interesting bill, but won't make a comment on the EU thing, mainly because I think Schroeder's bread example is so good, and I want to focus on that.  He's writing it, of course, in reference to old media companies, who want to solve DRM and protect copyrights through legislation.  But I think it has an amazing amount of application in the world of advertising, too.

The point is, the market has changed -- and changed dramatically.  It's not just that the old ways of creating things aren't working as well as they used to -- it's also the case that the pricing structure for the old ways of doing things is extremely difficult to apply to new media.  This, of course, has been discussed a lot, and frequently leads clients (and sometimes overzealous agencies) to believe that when you create stuff for the web, it necessarily must be cheap.  That's not the case.  Many times, stuff for the web is expensive. But that still doesn't mean you can charge old-school TV prices for YouTube videos, or that you should simply run old-school TV on YouTube.

Here's the thing. The changes in the market are interconnected -- and include both price and content.  Content wins -- but you don't get to decide what's good.  The users do.  Actually, that's always been the case, it's just that now, the results are more immediate and visible.  What that means is, your $350,000 spot is now competing against some kid's video of his brother slamming into the side of a garage on a skateboard.  And many times (though certainly not all,) the skateboard wins.  Which means, just because you're an agency, even if you're an agency with a Lion on the shelf, it doesn't automatically buy you a ticket to popularity, and a justification for your $350K.  What might buy you a justification for higher production prices (and accompanying higher production value) is a better idea.  Because it's the idea, as expressed by the execution, that wins with users.

Now, here's the funny part:  Agencies for EONS have been griping that they're not paid enough for their ideas.  I can't even begin to count how many times I've heard the phrase, "We're in the idea business."   Except now, when ideas from agencies compete head-to-head with ideas from regular people, never mind about quality, originality, or any of that -- agencies are having a very tough time matching the price.  In the old days, before view counts and click-throughs, it was easy to make the case for superiority by virtue of creative source.  That's just not true anymore. Now, trying to justify quality, simply because it comes from an agency, is akin to attempting to pass that legislation that says people can't pick up the free bread that dropped from the sky.

The market decides what bread it wants, and it doesn't always decide on the side of agency-produced stuff. Nor does it always decide on the side of the most expensive stuff.  It does, however always decide on the side of the most popular stuff.  And as far as I know, that's pretty much always been one of the main goals -- make the message popular. It's a strong case, I think, for performance-based compensation, which may very well be the only way to fairly charge for ideas.

"Will it Blend?" is one of the all-time great ad campaigns, IMHO -- because it's better bread.  And very few agencies could even begin to make one :60 or even :30 video or spot or whatever you want to call it, for the same cost that those guys produced the whole series. 

When you're baking up your next campaign (sorry...I couldn't resist) you HAVE to ask -- is it really better?  Not, "will other agencies think it's better," not, "it must be better because we've put so much money into it," but, simply, "will the market think it's better?"  That's all that matters now -- because there's lots of free bread out there.  Not many people are going to buy yours, just because it's yours; or pay more, just because your charge more, any more. Unless you can justify it with something more than a trophy on a shelf.

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Hero Worship

There's something to be said for watching and listening to people who are successful at doing what you're trying to be successful at doing.  It's good to learn from the best. Good to get the big picture lessons.  The problems start when you duplicate what others have already done.  I think agencies do that a lot.

When I was younger, everybody wanted to be like Fallon.  That accounts for the late 80s ubiquity of print ads with puns for headlines, all set in Futura Extra Bold Condensed. Depending on who you are as an agency today, there's a good chance that there's a lot of talk in the halls about Crispin, or Goodby -- or maybe AKQA or R/GA.  Because if you're not one of them, you want to be like them.

Except...

Except Crispin already has the job of being Crispin.  And that's not a job with a lot of open slots.  And the things that made Crispin, Crispin, won't make you Crispin, because Crispin already did them.  If you're trying to come up with the next Subservient Chicken -- um, the world already has one.

The million dollar homepage was a million dollar idea.  The second one was worth about a nickel.  In today's accelerated world, ads, sites, online...er... things -- are like that.  Short half-life.  A lot shorter than Futura Extra Bold Condensed ever was, because things spread faster, get made faster, get copied faster, get seen and known faster, and thus, get old faster.  Not only that, but the conditions that made something breakthrough six months ago are different now, and will be different again tomorrow.  So even if it's not a direct copy of the idea -- if it's simply a copy of the basic technique, it's still not new.  Things change.  Quickly.

The lesson -- you won't be the next Crispin by doing what Crispin did.  But you might be the next agency to reach Crispin's level if you learn from the moves they made, and apply that thinking (in combination with your own, original, unique ideas) to come up with something that's as new in today's environment as what they did was in the environment of a year ago.

I didn't say it was easy.

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