@bmorrissey

In the stream, ads masquerade as content

There’s part of the Google story that doesn’t get enough attention, believe it or not. Here it is: Google’s success is based, in part, on people not knowing its ads are ads. AdWords placement looks a hell of a lot like the other links that weren’t paid for. Google of course discretely labels the ads, although it wouldn’t use that term – sponsored sounds much more benign.

Switch over to display. Here, there’s a different story. Many display ads don’t fit with the environments the live. This is for many reasons, but it’s just a fact. And so they’re not only clicked but we actively avoid those areas. This kinda sucks for advertisers. So we’ve seen some taking a page from the old playbook and just making their ads bigger and “more impactful.” (This means LOUDER.)

Social media presents a different challenge. The adjacency model, built for editorial and entertainment content, isn't a great fit. Fred Wilson thinks marketers need to be part of “the stream,” the persistent ticker of information the flows by us daily in Google Reader, Facebook and Twitter.  When ads are part of the stream, they can’t look too much like ads. This can be obvious with the popularity of those pay per post, er “sponsored conversations,” programs. Brands will use other methods, I’m sure, including the cover of charities to get people to market them to their friends. Sometimes it’s a matter of subtle placement of regular ad units. The Facebook redesign is taking a step in this direction, I think. Facebook is dead set against having ads overwhelm the experience so they’re weaving them into the experience, which is centered around the news feed. They want to make advertisers part of the stream of conversations. Check out the new Facebook and look at the most prominent ad placement, the ad for a movie called I Love You, Man. That’s an ad? I had to look three times before I could tell.

Other changes at Facebook make this direction clear. Brand pages will imitate personal pages, so their actions can get into the news feed easily and (Facebook hopes) more naturally. My guess is any Twitter ad model will go this route, not banners. One company I know is working on a model to beam brand endorsements, on an opt-in basis, to a friend’s Twitter connections. The idea is these sponsor messages appear seamlessly with the stream of updates. Is this a good thing? I have no idea. I firmly believe advertising messages will get more integrated with content experiences. The adjacency model increasingly looks broken, from newspapers to magazines to display to broadcast TV. Ideally, marketers will earn their way into the stream be doing something remarkable, but they’ll still need to buy their way in sometimes. How this is done in a way that makes people comfortable is the big challenge.

The feel-good social marketing bribe

Time and again, studies show that people’s trust in advertising is going down while word of mouth goes up. Digital is accelerating that. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, we can easily get recommendations from friends and networks. That’s great.

Where does that leave our advertiser friends? Well, if their product and service is wonderful, it’s great. People get to tell others about it – and it’s free. OK, so let’s talk about everyone else. Well, ads in Facebook do OK – better than a lot of what you read would make you think – but they’re clearly not enough. Twitter is full of advertising, only its mostly social media gurus, ninjas and black belts pimping their services or regular users marketing themselves. That’s where charities come in.

See, marketers have to get us to do the marketing for them. But that sounds a little too Amway for most people. After all, if I offered you $10 to send some marketing message to a bunch of friends, you probably wouldn’t do it. Ah, but what if I asked you to add a Facebook app and invite 10 friends to do the same? That works. This is what was going on last night at the P&G Digital Hack Night, when P&G got a bunch of agency types, media execs and others to troop to Cincy to perform for it. The idea: use social media to get people to buy Tide t-shirts –- some of the proceeds going to Feed America -- with an emphasis on "use." It was cooked up as a marketing exercise for the CPG giant’s army of brand managers to see the true power of social media.

It was really the corporate version of the #daniela cause David Armano took up last month. What quickly ensued can only be described as a social media telethon. People were encouraged to retweet the message, leading to a mess of Twitter activity around Tide. There were offers from popular bloggers and Twitterers to give links to those who bought t-shirts. Jerry Lewis, meet Twitter. It was all captured with a hashtag for bright-eyed brand managers to contemplate how to get their CPG marketing done through Twitter.  I’m sure the gerbils in their head were working overtime on the treadmill calculating the “earned media” value. I'm not sure if the use of Twitter qualifies as a success. The AdAge summarizes the lessons this way:

Fewer than 150 media and marketing people leaning heavily on their social-media friends and followers, resorting to big-name incentives and spending a total of about $4,000 on digital media can sell more than 2,000 T-shirts at $20 a pop for charity and hit the top 10 trending topics on Twitter in the process.

This was a marketing exercise, nothing more, yet I wonder if it’s going in the wrong direction. The optimistic view of all this is it’s a win-win-win for users, charities and marketers.  After all, users get to feel like they’re doing some good, charities get some needed cash and marketers get some nice buzz. Awesome. The problem is charities are being used to get people over the ickiness of marketing for gigantic corporations. As was pointed out yesterday, if people really want to help Feed America, they can donate to it directly. Why is P&G needed? (Only about $6 of the $20 for the t-shirt went to the charity, according to the Q&A on Logic + Emotion.) What's more, even as a marketing exercise, the lessons it is teaching the world's largest advertiser is social media is a great place to broadcast stuff, even if it's untargeted by going to people who couldn't  buy the t-shirts outside the U.S. Using charities as a guise for people to do marketing for enormous corporations gives me the creeps. Even among the tenuous relationship in Twitter, what happens when we commercialize those bonds? Do any of us want an avalanche of application requests and corporate-sponsored retweets? I take a dim view of these attempts to prey on people’s do-gooder instincts for some marketing exercise. Am I too cynical?

Finding the beauty in banners

Last week, IAB chief Randall Rothenberg promised to use a word with me that I probably never heard used in conjunction with online advertising: beauty. It's part of his effort to refocus the industry on creativity in digital marketing.

While I think creativity comes in many forms in digital media, I'm very interested in the future of display ads. On Monday, I wrote about an interesting effort by AKQA to pipe live video into banners -- and turn banners into actual utility. This kind of creative use of display units is admirable, yet I think we're entering into a time of more interruptive ads. Sure enough, NYTimes.com, ESPN.com and other top Web publishers are introducing bigger, "more impactful" units along the lines of the recent Apple executions. The idea: give advertisers more "share of voice." What this means in practicality is devoting more of the page to bigger, bolder ads. Nothing in life is free.

The solution to making display ads work better for brands is many things. Bigger and flashier is certainly going to be part of it. I wonder if people will be as open to these executions outside of Apple, which has led the charge in using display units in new ways. (Eric Reagan points to the iPod Touch integration with Pitchfork.) In addition to the live video, AKQA is doing some interesting stuff in making the display units actually helpful. The one area that will get a lot of attention soon, I think, is adding social media into the display space. Seth at SocialMedia is doing this and Mashable last week began an interesting experiment that is basically running brand Twitter feeds as as units.

As an aside, I sent a note to Crispin Porter + Bogusky asking if it had done any interesting banner creative recently. It got back to me too late for my story, but sent along a pretty smart creative media execution for the Alliance for Climate Protection that took over 404 pages. Clever.

Advertising’s innovation problem: fear of failure

Don’t be fooled by the talk in the ad industry: it is as deeply conservative as accounting. I’ve always found that odd, considering it’s a place where it’s OK, even expected, for 45-year-old men to dress (and often act) like 20-year-olds. Yet when push comes to shove, advertising refuses to take many chances. This isn’t just on the client side, either.

That’s my last takeaway from Skittlesgate. The commentary I’ve read, even from the self-appointed social media experts, is distressing, some of it just factually wrong. In advertising, everyone talks about trying new, different, even daring approaches. They rarely do them. They’re scared of failure. There's a stigma to it. This is diametrically opposite to the attitude of Silicon Valley, where failure is viewed as an important part of the innovation process.

And why not. Look at the commentary out there about the Skittles site. Mind you, this is a package goods Web site that a few thousand people would normally visit per month. I'm reminded of Allen Iverson's "practice" tirade. "We're talking about a candy Web site?" The story has been predictable. Agency.com got vilified for “stealing” from Modernista. Then some people thought it could have some value. Finally, the naysayers looked for holes. Look, some people wrote about putting Skittles up their asses! This is the worst thing to happen to social media! Skittles has “pulled the campaign” because it rotated the landing page from Twitter search to Facebook! Never mind that it rotated the page from Wikipedia to Twitter search originally. Oddly that didn’t warrant claiming the brand “pulled” the campaign. People are even debating whether this was “planned.” (It was.) But in digital, the magic is you try things, you see what works, you adapt. That’s how it works.

Skittlesgate reveals the underbelly of the advertising industry. It revels in failures, real and imagined. (I don’t think you can plausibly say Skittles.com has failed.) It loves nothing more than tearing others apart. This is not just a traditional advertising phenomenon. That would be amusing if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s corrosive to innovation. The way forward in reaching consumers in innovative, effective ways through digital media is trial and error. Is Skittles.com perfect? Far from it. Is it an attempt to do something very different? Yes, it is. Most would play it safe, as Agency.com and Skittles could easily have done. They could have created a Taste the Rainbow casual game, and add in a “viral” option for uploading your photo to a Skittle and emailing it to friends. Instead, it not only talked the conference talk (“consumers are in control”) but it walked it, albeit imperfectly.

There are some, like AKQA's Lars Bastholm, who have offered reasoned critiques of the site. Most, however, have just settled into the typical vitriol and deathwatch scenario. I’ve seen it before with Honeyshed and many other efforts to try something undeniably new. There’s a price to pay for this reflex to tear into anyone who dares cross the status quo. It's dangerous for what should be the most innovative part of the industry to ape the backbiting and navel-gazing of the traditional ad world. I’ve always thought the industry needs one more awards show, The Fails, which would award those who tried something new, came up short and learned from it.

Is Skittles onto something?

The remake of Skittles.com has provoked some predictable debate. When I first saw the site Friday afternoon, I knew immediately how it would go. It would enter the typical ad industry echo chamber: Did Agency.com rip off Modernista? Sure enough, immediately after I posted about the site on Twitter and Adfreak, that’s where it went.

Let’s put that to rest: Yes, it clearly got the idea of an “un-site” from Modernista’s innovative Web site makeover a year ago that points to the social Web to define the shop. Here’s the thing: It doesn’t matter. The ad world needs to get over the propriety of ideas. On the Web, as Ana points out, it’s about trying things, building on the existing, testing and adjusting.

What’s more interesting to me is what Skittles might mean for the future of the brand microsite. I confess that I have a long-held skepticism for nearly all microsites. They seem outdated and mostly pointless. Their shortcomings are made all the more obvious at a time of social media. For the past several weeks, I’ve been neck-deep in submissions for digital agency report cards. The product microsites are nearly uniformly terrible. I keep asking myself why I’d want to go there to play that Flash advergame, upload my photo on a snowflake, get immersive with rum. I simply don’t get it.

The old playbook for Skittles would be to make a Flash microsite that matches up to its “Taste the Rainbow” tagline created by TBWA. Agency.com could have and truth be told, usually does that. Instead, it borrowed the Modernista idea to let others define what you're about. The crucial difference is this isn’t an agency but a candy product owned by Mars. Skittles did a small thing in aggregating the conversation out there on YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, et al. The statement, however, is quite interesting. As someone from Agency.com mentioned to me about the they-stole-the-idea hubbub: “More companies should learn: It's not about them, but about what their customers are saying about them.”

People are, in fact, talking about Skittles out there. Check it out for yourself. It’s true what Gary Vaynerchuk says: Twitter.com isn’t nearly as interesting as search.twitter.com. I spent the weekend monitoring the conversation about the site at search.twitter.com. What amazed me was not just how many people were talking about the site, but how much other Skittles conversation is out there. Quite a few people put Skittles in vodka, for instance. That’s a pretty interesting trend for Mars to know. Also, it seems chocolate Skittles are disgusting.

Earlier in the week, I spoke with one of the top digital strategists at a major holding company. He told me social media is incredibly important for brands, especially packaged goods. There’s no reason for people to go to their sites, he said, but the conversations are happening out there. “There’s a business model for CPGs there,” he said. The idea is that all that conversation provides an opportunity for brands to listen, troubleshoot, reach out to fans, maybe even come up with product and marketing ideas. The execution of Skittles.com can be quibbled with. It would be nice to see the brand do more than just aggregate conversation. It might not even be the ideal product for this approach. Yet I think Agency.com and Skittles are onto something with it, “ripoff” or not.

Beer and conversation

 

On Sunday, March 8, I'm linking up with David Armano, purveyor of Logic + Emotion and the famed Twitterer @armano, to get some interesting and fun people together for beer and conversation. We're meeting at Royale, a bar in the East Village, at 7pm. Tweetups are an interesting phenomena. The idea struck me as peculiar at first, but then I realized one of the most powerful things is when digital and real life cross. So if you're in town and free that night, swing by for a beer. RSVP and info here.

The case for interruption

The first story I wrote about Internet advertising was in 2002. I just began covering the online ad industry for Internet Advertising Report (now ClickZ). My first assignment: cover a speech by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at a conference. Google’s success – this was before its IPO – was just becoming apparent. Schmidt told a roomful of ad types what I thought was a nice, simple message: Stop scaring users. I even used it as a headline.

Ever since, the trend in online advertising has been to emulate Google. After all, it is the shining success story with its simple, unobtrusive targeted links that “act like content.” That’s all good when you’re harvesting demand, but brand advertising is about creating demand. This is where the model falls apart. Creating demand probably requires a degree of interruption. Instead, it seems like all the energy in the industry has gone into using data to target users better and “drive efficiencies” via ad networks. That’s landed display advertising in the pickle it finds itself: a commoditized product that’s nearly universally ignored. Only now, it seems, has the issue of creative gained steam.

Display ads, the presumed vehicle for brand ad messages, have actually gotten less interruptive over the years. In the early days, pop-ups and pop-unders were all the rage. Then we all got pop blockers. Advertisers went momentarily nuts with Eyeblaster rich media ads flying across the page. But those seemed to fade. Instead, display ads have mostly behaved, staying in their little areas off to the side where they can be safely ignored. Facebook, the new darling of the digital world, treats advertising as a necessary evil. The concept of interrupting users appears abhorrent to its executives. As a user, I applaud that.

I also think it’s stupid. The economy sucks. Display ad rates are in the toilet. It’s probably time publishers treat their users like grownups. That means interruption. Troy from Videoegg lays out a compelling case for interrupting users, along with more rich media and an attention model. I'll leave the last two for another time to concentrate on interruption. This is a sensitive issue when we debate “digital creativity.” The notion that Internet publishers can attract brand advertisers with the current little IAB formats is far-fetched. Troy believes ads need to get bigger and flashier. They need to get users’ attention. Maybe they need to start scaring users.

We’re already seeing publishers go in this direction. Witness ESPN’s prestital takeover and the New York Times running gargantuan Apple ads. Hulu is doing just fine with a smart interruptive ad model. The economic pressures on publishers will accelerate this. There is too much supply out there. Ads are not staying on the periphery of content. It’s simply inevitable. The social media gurus will say companies should leave behind this legacy approach and make things worth talking about and sharing. Agreed, but I don't see brands giving up on interruptive advertising. TV is still pretty strong after all. I'm not sure if it's an either-or proposition. It may feel good to say interruptive advertising is dead, but it's probably wrong.

Where are the branded entertainment success stories?

The surprise is it took this long. It didn’t take a genius to see that Bud.TV was doomed to fail. The entire premise of the venture was flawed, from its ambitions to its execution. Bud.TV was crippled by some structural flaws. Its age-verification system was Byzantine. The site launched as a standalone destination just when the power of YouTube’s take-content-anywhere model was becoming very clear.

And then, like any good tragedy, there’s hubris. Just like David Droga and Maurice Levy oversold Honeyshed as “the future,” Anheuser-Busch was grandiose in its expectations for Bud.TV, which it poured some $30 million into. How grandiose? Check out the Feb. 2007 The New York Times Magazine cover story on the effort. It’s embarrassing. You have beer company executives, not to mention their agency counterparts, play-acting as Hollywood moguls. Unintentional hilarity ensues.

Here’s the thing: A-B isn’t in the entertainment business. It’s harder than it looks. There are good arguments that the lines between publisher and marketer are blurring. After all, TV began with marketers calling the shots. Easier said than done. Bud.TV’s content wasn’t very good, certainly not good enough to jump through the hoops needed to see it. Most people didn’t visit Bud.TV. I did. It was pretty bad. Sure, the “Swear Jar” commercial was OK, but the rest of the stuff I saw sucked. Joe Buck riding around in a New York cab and bantering about life? No thanks.

There are many examples that come to mind of brands thinking the world revolves around them. That’s why they do things like Bud.TV or “The Coke Show,” where Coke tried to (re)create its own YouTube. Didn’t work so hot. It’s the thinking that leads brands to do things like create their own cookie social network.

I’m hard pressed to see many successes in branded entertainment. People still point to “Gamekillers” as a prime example. It’s nearly three years old. AOL and MSN have made a big push into creating programming on behalf of marketers. Perhaps I’m not the target audience but it’s not exactly scintillating programming. (Remember “Gold Rush,” the Mark Burnett production?) More often than not, I see marketers trying too hard to be hip. In the words of MRM Worldwide’s Alistair Duncan, “It’s like watching your dad dance at a disco.” It’s an enticing idea: brands can take over content creation instead of just buying ads. More often than not, however, it’s going to fail badly. The advertising message will be lost entirely or it will be basically a long-form commercial. Either way, it fails. People aren’t as dumb or bored as many marketers seem to think. Maybe the “new model” isn’t that different from the current model. Maybe the role of advertisers is to underwrite professional content creators. Right now, it seems like there are a lot of cases of overreach, where marketers get in over their heads.

Advertising’s infrastructure problem is cultural

This is a strange time. Many of the challenges facing the economy seem more than cyclical but structural. In so many areas – energy, health care, transportation, financial services – we’re confronting infrastructure problems. Our systems clearly aren’t modernized, which this deepening recession is proving. Fixing that is going to be some seriously hard work and new thinking.

On a smaller level, this is the same challenge facing advertising. Big Spaceship CEO Michael Lebowitz made this point recently. It makes sense. If you think of the big challenges in the industry, they’re infrastructure related: how agencies and clients are set up, analytics and reporting systems, integrating technology, and finding new ways of adding value to people’s lives rather than interrupting them. The marketing industry feels very much like it’s organized for the 20th century rather than the 21st. Tim Leberecht thinks it’s in “permanent crisis.” Social media is simply revealing a lot of the inadequacies of the current structures.

What I’m struck by is how reversing this comes down to culture. The hardest part of changing infrastructure is not necessarily integrating technology but changing deep-set mindsets, processes and business models. Case in point: TV ad buying and selling. I wrote this week about how companies like Spot Runner are trying to bring some semblance of modernity to a process dominated by phone calls and faxes. Nick Grouf, CEO of Spot Runner, described the practice as “antiquated.”

This is a similar refrain to what I heard this summer at Google, where a very bright computer scientist made a compelling case that TV advertising is in the horse-and-buggy era. Google has seen some traction, but it’s running into a stubbornness to upend current practices. Yet both Spot Runner and Google are facing something greater than a technology problem. Yet efforts by eBay and Enron to change the system failed.

A big reason these efforts have failed is a TV ad buying and selling culture that’s set in its ways and worried they’ll get cut out of the equation if the process is modernized. Spot Runner exec Mark Rosenthal should know. He spent nearly a decade as president of MTV Networks and ran IPG Media. He was speaking about TV, but it could apply across most of the ad world, including agency and client organizations.

It is almost a handcrafted industry. Some of it is plain fear of technology and some of it is the idea their work is so personal that there's no way technology can replace it.

This is at the root of why change has come so slowly to most of the industry. Every digital startup puts up a Keynote slide showing the gap between time spent online and client budgets. It’s still huge. The reason it remains that way is both structural and cultural – clients and agencies haven’t modernized and many in those groups aren't keen to do so because it might not be to their benefit.

What I wonder is whether the recession is used as the catalyst to transformation – or as an excuse to retreat to the tried and true and not deal with the hard task of changing culture. It will be interesting to see how many of the established players make the changes needed to adapt. Many won't and will likely die. I’ve seen this resistance to change in my own industry, which has a culture that’s been highly resistant to change. That’s not a great strategy. Look at what’s happening to newspapers.

Should there be a digital agency of the year?

For the last two years, we've had discussions at Adweek about whether to continue the digital agency of the year. This year, there was real discussion to end it. (We even ran an opinion column on why having a separate digital agency of the year is "nonsense.") One of the considerations was to make Crispin Porter + Bogusky digital agency of the year -- it was regular old agency of the year -- in recognition that all agencies are becoming "digital." This is what I was getting at in my post about the blurring of what can be considered a digital agency.

Of all the traditional agencies, CP+B impresses me the most as one that really understands the power of digital, particularly when it comes to word of mouth. The shop is sometimes slagged as just a bunch of stunts for teenage boys, yet it succeeds where most ad agencies fail in getting people to pass along messages. Just look at what it did with Whopper Virgins and Whopper Sacrifice. The latter, in particular, showed a real understanding of social networking that comes from living it. What's more, years after getting a very bad reputation among digital shops the built the stuff CP+B dreamed up, it's made a big move to build real capability, including buying 60-person interactive shop texturemedia. In all, CP+B has 140+ in digital -- and perhaps as important, a culture that embraces it.

I liked the statement of the CP+B pick, but then I thought it came up short in addressing a larger issue. That's how digital can be used beyond its current dominant role as another media channel for ad messages. In most of the campaigns I see, digital is still matching luggage to offline efforts. CP+B is better at making the Web more than a red-headed stepchild, but it still treats digital, for the most part, as an extenstion of an ad campaign. Things like the Domino's Pizza Builder notwithstanding.

Instead, Adweek named R/GA digital agency of the year. The case is laid out in the story. What I focused on is R/GA's belief in brands building engagement platforms that go beyond advertising and its structure that gives a serious role to technology in the agency. Here's the nut graf:

Rather than pursue the kind of singular creative representations that dominate traditional advertising, the 60-year-old R/GA founder and CEO [Bob Greenberg] has thrown the agency headlong into a collaborative process that results in integrated digital platforms for clients. His vision of skipping the typical attention -- getting advertising in favor of utility has helped the shop establish longstanding relationships with top companies like Nike, Nokia and Verizon -- and makes a credible case that he is building a better agency model with technology at the core.

In some ways, the story is a part of the answer to Randall Rothenberg's question where the creativity is in digital. The problem might be in looking in the wrong places. Something like Nike+ does not fit the classic definition of agency creative -- or "great interactive advertising campaign" -- yet its power is undeniable. Nike's market share in running shoes has gone from 48 percent to 61 percent since its introduction. Thanks to the system, Nike was able to get 780,000 people to participate in a single race with practically no media spending. That's impressive.

To be sure, there are fair arguments against the selection. I'm well aware of them. One Adweek commenter bemoans that we always go for "the top dogs." Part of this is structural. Our criteria is weighted toward agencies that are working for big brands to help them build their businesses. This cuts against smaller shops.

I'm interested in hearing feedback on the selection -- and whether Adweek should even have a digital agency of the year at this point.