Category: Business of advertising
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Agencies as platforms – setting up for failure
Publicis is trying to become a platform with ‘Marcel’. PHD has ‘Source’ – another platform idea. Ogilvy also has its OS – more or less a similar idea. Every global agency wants to become an Operating system/ platform where it could efficiently put to use the thousands of creative minds, departments for its thousand clients […]
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The triad of Consultancies, FB and Google will neuter creative agencies globally, unless…
First: The digital disruption. Globally, Facebook and Google now dominate advertising dollars, not WPP or Publicis or other agency companies. (For comparison about the market muscle – Combined market cap of FB and G was $812Bn as of June 2016. How did WPP, Omnicom, IPG, Publicis stack up? The four combined were at $70 Bn. […]
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FAQs – Open Source Ad Agency business model demystified
In an earlier article, I proposed a new business model for advertising agencies. As I see it, it is a logical next step for the industry to remain relevant and to thrive. Unless it evolves like this, expect marginalisation of creative industry. I have been speaking with a few industry leaders. There were some interesting […]
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End of the bluff
In this video, P&G’s ‘chief brand officer’ talks about P&G’s efforts in ‘draining the swamp’ (as trump would have said) of digital fraud, unverified stats, dubious practices by publishers and agencies. This is great, because this comes from one of the biggest advertisers in the world. And it is a positive step – one that […]
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“Relatability”
The context So recently we shared two creative options for a campaign. I wish we hadn’t. But we did. Imagine the product is a soap targeted to housewives. The product is better because it smells of pleasant cuttle fish, instead of the generic smell of sardines that all the competitor soaps have. (For the sake […]
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The importance of knowing the unsaid objective
The situation – Death by committee So imagine an impulse purchase candy brand. Client wanted to do an ad because ‘it has not been advertised for a while now.’ We push. We ask, how exactly will advertising help the brand now? Some confusing slides that perhaps were rehashed from another presentation find their way into […]
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The Advertising Agencies of future will be Open Sourced
The alternative ‘new normal’ Sir Martin Sorrell, perhaps the most powerful person in the advertising industry, recently said that the “new normal” for the global advertising industry is that of “low growth.” I think that is not necessarily true—if we examine the underlying assumptions about the source of growth for the industry. The advertising industry […]
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How not to be a lazy hack
“I can’t think of a decent idea, so how about just using a celeb to sell the brand instead of an idea that can actually do the job better?” That’s just one way of being a fucking lazy hack. Don’t be that person. A lazy hack writes an unoriginal idea that doesn’t exactly solve the […]
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A capitalist industry can only be saved by a communist ideal – unions
Everyone whines about the bane of free pitches. Everyone knows that it is bad for business. It strips away dignity that should be afforded to agency’s labour. Why should any labour be free? Besides, it increases uncertainty about businesses with increasing frequency of pitches. Clients behavior is changing – it is getting conditioned to treat […]
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Honest marketing meetings
Humanity is quite immature as species. A stunning example of our intellectual frailty is the specimen inhabiting glass towers in uncomfortable suits and ties: the marketers. They are ace bullshit artists (well, of-course not you, but others 🙂 ). They can shift responsibilities of decision making as fluidly as a tai chi master might shift […]
Truth About Branding 