Tag / advertising

by Ajinkya Pawar

“Insights” as revealations of hidden optionalities

Terrace. say the word 50 times.
Slowly.
As if you are pondering over the word. Letting your tongue linger over the r’s and letting it bid adieu to the dimming sss sound at the end with a gentle flourish. Do this over and over again.

What happens?

You begin to doubt the meaning of word. Or imagine different meanings for it. The evolving sounds of the word nudging you towards different notions and worlds.

Something similar happens in pursuit of ‘insights’. either alone or in group, after a few hours of meditating and mining for the insight, we begin to lose the shape of the very concept of insight. we might have a list of contenders by then. But when you look back, the contenders stare back at you with a question. is this really an ‘insight’?

***

Insights sit at the edge of epistemic boundaries.


Epistemy is the kind of word whose meaning deserts our mind as soon as our focus shifts away from it. If intellectual pursuits are scaffolds, the concept of epistemy sits perhaps high enough where clouds obscure the vision of ground reality below. Which is to say, it is one of those concepts you brush away in an encounter out of confusion or being intimidated. But try and hold onto it for a minute here. I think it would be worth your while.

Epistemology is knowledge about knowledge. how we know what we know? what are the limits of what we know? how we know what we know is true? how we believe in something and what constitutes reality?

Epistemy deals with perception, memory, cognition, reasoning… things that advertising professional deal in. In that sense, we are itinerant traders of epistemic goods; chiseling out notions, transporting it from minds to minds, fertilizing beliefs, harvesting behaviours and preferences.

When we talk about insights, we are really talking with purpose of effective inception – an ‘a ha’ moment. So within the epistemic set, insight is purposive subset. An insight that cannot trigger a response is not useful.

Secondly, insight is relative. what is insightful to me might not be insightful for you. what is insightful for me now might not be insightful for me the day after. what is insightful for me when commuting might not be when I am drowsy with sleep.
In other words, insight needs to be TG, occassion and behaviour specific. I saw an ad recently by a footwear brand talking about woman empowerment. Nothing wrong with the politics. The insight is right for the politics, but not relevant to the brand at all.

thirdly, insight is epistemic. this is to say that it is relative to the knowledge, expectations, beliefs of the person we are trying to communicate with. The reader of this blog might enjoy this epistemic discourse. But this insight about insight is not of interest, concern or vocabulary of, say a parle G biscuit consumer. It is precisely of interest to a very narrow group of people interested in advertising, media AND who are intellectually curious. The latter group might have the vocabulary, the context and the interest in what I am saying, most others won’t.

Now is a good time to ask the question – so what?
Tthe thing is, to create an ‘a ha’ moment, we need to drive the person right beyond the edge of his knowledge, his beliefs, his perspectives.

So it is not enough to know what your consumer knows, feels, believes in. We need to know what are the limits of those ideas in their mind and heart. We need a humanist perspective to expand their boundaries of tolerance, beliefs, knowledge (Which is relevant to the brand in question).

***

Insights and optionality

Life is essentially a journey through optionality. We move ahead in life, only by making choices (knowingly or unknowingly). We are under the illusion that time is what pushes us ahead. But that’s a fallacy. Time just moves our mortality. We stagnate and solidify into inert calcified husks if we postpone choices and doggedly ignore them. We move in life if we take chances, if we make choices.

and the journey is outwards, expanding the boudaries of what and how we know, feel, belong etc.

so every insight can essentially be framed as a choice, as an option, as an invitation to expand the boundaries of our lives. These insights sit at the boundary of our cognition. Often unsaid or invisible to the consumer, until it is made apparent by an outside agency (hopefully us).

I think this conception of insight is beautiful and MECE enough to settle all ‘what do you mean by an insight’ debate. what do you think?

summary: insight = identify epistemic boundary + an option to explore the beyond

by Ajinkya Pawar

An ostrich, an Albatross, a beaver and a phoenix walk into a pandemic…

Ostrich buries its head in the sand.
(actually doesn’t. but metaphically does)
Brands that never got out of the PSA mode. Brands that actually could do something useful, but instead chose to eject platitudes out of their insincere mouths (with those ‘unprecedented times’ and ‘we are here for you’ ads). The Marie-Antoinette of Brands who managed to be tone-deaf inspite of having actual humans running the show.
And then there are brands that actually do amazing commercials – commercials that move you, spur you into action. You wish you had done such ads. But then you realise who the ad is for. A platform of misinformation, an enabler of autocracies (Sheryl Sandberg actually wrote ‘I am fine with this.‘ when shutting down voice of Kurdish minority seeking support while getting bombed by the Turkish strongman. Well, listing all of facebook’s misdeeds would turn into a tome. Read Antisocial Media by Siva Vaidhyanathan instead or An Ugly truth by Sheera Frenkel & Cecilia Kang.)

The majestic flying beast falters.
The mighty flying beast, The Albatross, unaccustomed to walking on ground, much less the uncertain and treacherous ground of pandemic, falters, gets taken advantage of, is jeered at. His giant wings coming in the way of walking, it falters where it could soar.
Airline brands, lifestyle brands, hospitality brands even Healthcare brands… The uncertainty and ugliness of the times cost some businesses heavily, without their own fault. Fate was unkind to them. Many of them chose to be mute when it comes to branding and communications. And it was a wise decision. The time demands us to be useful, to be silent comrades. So when brands could, they did try to be useful. Like hotels turning into health infrastructure, factories manufacturing ventilators, and that’s something to be proud of. No matter the weak sentiment now, the weak performance in stock market for such businesses now, they stand to be repaid in gratitude when situation eases. They need the ramp of digitization, tax breaks to take off again. Hopefully, they will get the help they need in time.

The beaver soldiers on.
The beaver keeps building what he was building before the pandemic. He is stoic and agile. If his dam gets damaged, he promptly gets back to repairing it. There’s no place for sentimentality or pause for him. He has domesticated his feelings and is on work-mode, all the time.
We need the stoics. The FMCG, retail, logistics companies and brands that ensured that the people staying home have access to all necessities and the ones who are desperate find some support, some subsidy.

These are institutions like Tata that stood by their employees unreservedly. These are also brands that pivoted with emerging challenges like Marico prioritising easy to make food categories or FMCG players expanding their hygiene offerings.

These brands find a way to keep going on. They reframe the conversation, and respond to emerging situations as necessary.
These brands also aid in escapes. escape is vital in recovery. As we recover from the pandemic, we need humorous and inspiring escapes. (BurgerKing, Cheetos, etc.)

Here are some examples.

Check out the cannes Lions winner playlist to see more good work.

The phoenix soars out of ashes.
The phoenix that rose in the ashes of pandemic. Well, the metaphor is slightly skewed here. Here, the ashes are external not Phoenix’s own. the phoenix is an opportunist siezing the day, dragging the world ahead in its wake.
Digital platforms. Green energy. Surveillance economy. Meme stocks. The pandemic was a gulf stream of accelerated trends.
When it comes to brand and comms – check out Tesla’s stunts or food aggregator apps’ social presence.

Which acts/ campaigns were phoenix in your perspective?

by Ajinkya Pawar

Greenwashing extinction

Mastercard’s greenwashing campaign

Donation from this campaign per new card: $1
The average value of a typical gift card: Guessing, more than $100 at least.
CLV of a typical credit card: US$ 3,600 – US$ 48,000
(Fairly rough estimate courtesy of a Quora user. This campaign and gifted cards will likely lead to new user acquisitions beyond the actual card bought. So the likely payoff is much higher.)

PR value: Priceless

Credit card companies are at the very center of the capitalist structure that endangers ecologies by promoting unsustainable growth in consumption.

So this campaign ends up precipitating exactly the opposite of what it intends. It is encouraging needless consumption (worth hundreds of dollars more than the donated amount) while it talks about conservation efforts (which get $1). Do the math.
It gives mindless consumers an easy way out of their guilt.

If this is not Greenwashing, please tell me what is.

Can the ad agencies please stop greenwashing for award considerations?
Also, please tell me if this campaign doesn’t exist, just because someone thought the wordplay on ‘expires’ is amusing.

This is another good reason to do away with Advertising awards. They incentivise disingenuous shit like this.

“Raising awareness”

Do campaigns like these that aim to ‘raise awareness’ really make a dent?

The key questions to know if the campaign has its heart in the right place are –

  1. Who is it aimed at?
  2. What is the Behaviour change/ Call to action?
  3. Who benefits the most out of the exercise?
  4. Consider the total budget of the campaign. Is this the best use of the money for the stated goal?

This campaign is aimed at credit card users among the elite of the world. The call to action is to buy a gift card. 99% of benefit goes to the credit card company. (1$ is nothing compared to CLV of a typical credit card user). The best use of the money, IMHO, would have been to straight away donate the entire amount (the creative agency fees, the cost of PR, the future cost of award entry etc) to the NGO in question.

A better brand would have ensured that –

  1. the campaign be aimed at people whose behaviour change/ act would actually make a meaningful impact for the cause.
  2. The behaviour change is permanent or atleast long enough to see the change through. A better brand would have clear objective of change. Even if the objective is not measurable, it should atleast be definite.
    How many people’s / animals suffering are we a alleviating? What useful information are we spreading among the affected?
  3. The campaign should actually benefit the people it is supposed to be helping more than the brand, in some concrete way. Otherwise it’s just a narcissistic play.
  4. the client should think through about their intentions and costs. Is it the best way to spend this money on this cause?

I know that this campaign was probably born in an agency which thought ‘expiry’ wordplay was interesting. The client was on-board because it didn’t seem like a costly affair to do and might actually help the brand appear more humane. they would have said, ‘what’s the harm?‘

The brand might not get harmed. but the world does get harmed.
With communications like these, we are spreading a dangerous belief system that sharing, liking or feeling sorry for something for a few seconds makes a difference. The viewer has not been engaged in any meaningful way. So the person remains ignorant, but feels that he is doing something good for the world.

It is perpetuating a fiction – their useless gestures matter. the world is actually running out of time when it comes to climate change. we badly need actual allies, helping actually move the needle on the ground.

it infuriates me to see such mindless drivel being appreciated. Because it sucks away the oxygen for actual meaningful dialog about real issues.

***

The checklist mentioned above, is also available here – https://rewiringchaos.com/2021/06/14/22-greenwashing/

by Ajinkya Pawar

Our role in the fight against climate change.

Weren’t we supposed to be the good guys?

Advertising alleviated the pain of the Sisyphean tragedy of modern capitalism. Advertising taught the world how to want. Advertising gave the notion of free will and choices when it comes to consumption. It made the powerless feel powerful, that their choices, their consumption mattered. The consumptive soma that advertising created, filled the world with euphoria, making people forget about the differences that divided them, for a while. The promise of abundance, growth, prosperity united the world in a beautiful hope.

But in the process, it also helped wreck the planet, helped remorse-less industries harming people/ planet put up a human face, and generally aided the self-image and bad-diet crisis.

`And if that wasn’t enough, advertising world has to contend with its role in bringing humanity to the brink – there is growing consensus that unless we change our ways drastically in next 18 months, societies will collapse inevitable due to environmental catastrophe. And as of now, we are on the dark side. We are helping fuel the climate change denial by enabling smokescreens, we are encouraging consumptive behaviour, we are enabling companies ‘manage their image’ in bad faith and we are giving consumers the false hope of sustainable consumptive choices.

It’s time we reckon our role in climate change. Advertising industry has been instrumental in globalised capitalism. It was the soft power, that ensured that hard power was never needed to win new markets to grow like never before. But that project is over now. Same levels of growth for businesses will come at the expense of humanity’s probable extinction.

Capitalism is the creator and destroyer of worlds. And advertising is one of its most prized deputies. It is time for the deputy to check both sides of its master – unchecked creation IS destruction.
It’s time for its deputy to convince its capitalist masters that their survival is at stake, not just others’.

18 months.
We now have 18 months for the great capitalist machinery of this planet to self-reflect critically and change its ways. The way the world is going, it is likely that not much will change in the next two years, apart from the climate of course.

“it is time we consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe in the lifetimes of people alive today.”

Jem Bendell, Deep Adaptation

The de-stabilizing forces that we have unleashed on the planet are multiplying exponentially. The ensuing feedback loops of the chaotic system we call climate is going to leave most of humanity in tatters, soon enough.

We could plead ignorance in the last century. But what is the excuse now?

So here’s what we need to do.

Accept

1. Accept complicity in creating consumptive culture. Understand that it is not sustainable.

2. Accept that we have been opportunistic with interpretation of business goals – we help companies build opportunist narratives by leveraging humanist insights. we allow companies to remain inhumane by helping create humanist facade for them.

3. Accept that we have the opportunity to influence brand leaders and consumers in being more mindful and more active in our quest to increase probability of survival for most humans.

4. Accept that peddling tokenism, promoting purpose or social marketing – are counterproductive.

Check my denial

  1. Climate change is real. The change is not linear. As the situation worsens, it will worsen faster. And it is unpredictable.
    So STOP taking projects that contribute to climate change denial.
  2. We will be seeing its adverse impact within our lifetimes. Our life is being impacted by it even now. There is more than enough evidence for it. Search at reputed sources of scientific information for it.
  3. Avoid conservative/ right-wing media. They might say what you want to hear. But it doesn’t make it true. They are becoming wealthy at the expense of our ignorance and our lack of courage to entertain truth.
  4. There isn’t a category of products that is untouched by issue of climate change. Any thing that is consumed – product/ service will have a footprint in environment. It is time to be mindful of your role in propagating consumption in any of those categories.
    From clothes, soaps, liquor, social networks to hospitals and psychiatric clinics… growth in every category leads to consumption of resources which leads to environmental footprint – possibly detrimental.
  5. We advertising folks are masters of re-framing, reorienting the perspective for convenience. we can justify most decisions on moral grounds by bringing up other issues, by employing what-aboutery. Perhaps you can turn the question regarding consumption into an issue of free will – choice to consume freely, or into an issue of inequality – time for the underprivileged to consume now, or about gender issue – this face cream is about inner beauty… and so on. But know that these arguments are in ‘bad faith‘. (We really need to understand this concept.)
    Understand bad faith and try not to do anything in bad faith.
  6. We cry insignificance and point to the might daddy corporate which really runs the show. we say, if not me, someone else will… and that’s how the world ends.
    Clients are smart people. They aren’t always reasonable and they know the value in being so. After all, it is we who have cultivated the culture that entertains their unreasonable, no-questions asked poodling. They are used to people doing their bidding through the numerous agencies they hire. agency for manufacturing, for marketing, for R&D, for supply chain, for management…for everything. They are so far removed from the real world that they need research agencies to conduct researches to know their consumers. They are so far removed from the effect they cause in the lives of their consumer that they genuinely come from a place of ignorance. We agencies have a perspective though.
    We shouldn’t selectively project ignorance to protect our culpability.
    There’s no alternative to engaging with clients in ‘good faith’ about their impact on climate.
  7. Lastly, the world is never going to be the same again. The new world will not be about abundance and unlimited choices. Geo-engineering, genetic engineering, flying to another planet are not realistic choices. The new world needs a new perspective.

Resilience, Relinquishment & Restoration

I highly recommend reading this to start with – http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf

...what we face is a complex predicament beyond our control. Rather, I hope the deep adaptation agenda of resilience, relinquishment and restoration can be a useful framework for community dialogue in the face of climate change.
Resilience asks us “how do we keep what we really want to keep?” Relinquishment asks us “what do we need to let go of in order to not make matters worse?”
Restoration asks us “what can we bring back to help us with the coming difficulties and tragedies?”

Deep Adaptation

To survive as species, we need this new mindful approach. Exponential growth is not sustainable. We had it good for a while. But now it time for change. So how can advertising agencies change?

These questions can guide us in our brand building, comms approach by keeping the context of broader society in our minds. We can’t afford to see our work in isolation from the rest of the world.

The question of resilience helps us reflect – Is this project really something that we want to see existing in 20 years?

The question of relinquishment helps us appreciate that in the coming decades many among us will have to give up something important – perhaps someone’s home, livelihood, way of being… Are our actions helping other people or are they aggravating their situation?

The question of restoration helps us look back and see for inspiration in our past. What and How can we help restore?

Appeal

What you read are my raw thoughts. I still need to read, learn and build on these ideas. I would appreciate any leads to help me do so.

I am looking for opportunities to partner with organisations in the space of raising climate change awareness. Again, would appreciate any leads.

Thanks.

by Ajinkya Pawar

The brown dwarf

Brown dwarfs are the universal in-between – neither a star, nor a planet. They were potentially stars, but failed short. They failed to shine. Unlike the sun, the nuclear reactions on a brown dwarf sputter unstably, sometimes being extinguished of that majestic fire altogether.
Its death is slow, degenerate. It contracts, cools, degenerates very slowly, forever.

Advertising industry is the brown dwarf of the capitalist 21st century.
It’s capabilities are falling short in the arms race for talent. It doesn’t pay to attract good talent at entry and mid-level. It won’t spend money to train the potentially great entry, mid-level talent either (almost every one is potentially great). So it’s stuck in a degenerative loop. It’s leaders spin furiously in their little cocoons at the top without affecting any change in the lives of people who actually get shit done. A lot of hot talk remains trapped inside air conditioned boardrooms.

Agency business is a good business with decent margins serving a need that is never going to go away. People will always need help with influencing others. But the ways in which people can be influenced changes with times. Other industries are stepping in and re-configuring the way people want, the way people seek and the way people connect. The tragedy is, the agency leadership still doesn’t get this. The margins are fat enough now for the leadership to remain complacent and live off the dividend. But the brunt of accumulating inefficiencies, incompetencies has to be faced by the entry, medium-level folks. As such, the best among them keep on leaving.

So this spinning circle jerk is contracting day by day, jettisoning the best and brightest among the young who feel – ‘i can do better than this’. This leaves behind the not-so-bright-but-cocky-enough-to-compensate folks at the center of accretion disk.

Unless agencies start paying, listening to and adopting ideas of its bright young folks, agencies are destined to deteriorate like a brown dwarf.

by Ajinkya Pawar

Advertising industry’s new ‘Pivot’

No planet for old businesses

Exhibit 1:

On 16 June 2017, Amazon.com Inc. announced that it is acquiring Whole Foods Market Inc., for $13.7 billion in an all-cash transaction.
By the end of that day, Walmart, Kroger, Target & Costco had lost their market caps by 5.8%, 7.1%, 9.1% and 15.7% respectively.
On the eighth day of the announcement, Amazon’s market cap had increased by $18.9 billion.

In a sense, not only did investors reward Amazon by funding the acquisition, they also punished the competitors of Whole Foods for not being acquired by Amazon.
The situation is such that as soon as Amazon enters any category, leaders in that category lose market valuations almost instantaneously. That is the promise/ threat of platforms like Amazon.

Exhibit 2:

“In 2017, almost 80% of every incremental ad dollar spent globally will accrue to digital. In their domestic market of the US, Google and Facebook are capturing more than 100% of this growth, up from 85% in 2015.” So read the 2017 Redburn Report titled, ‘Ad Agencies Marginalised.’
“More than 100%…”

If someone captures a share of more than a 100%, it means that that share came at someone else’s expense. Certainly, many digital advertising companies and ad exchanges saw decline in share of digital ad spends. Advertising agency holding companies too bore the brunt of Google and Facebook’s growth. 2017 perhaps has been the worst performing year for WPP since the recession of 2008-09. For the latest quarter Q3, the firm reported a 2% drop in organic growth.

Essentially, growth is almost a zero sum game now in which platforms are winning. This is in stark contrast to the nature of growth in the last century, where globalization created avenues for many to grow: It was not a zero sum game then. The monopolistic ‘Platforms’ are stealing lunch of legacy businesses – ours too.

Platforms are winning in today’s zero-sum game of growth. The monopolistic Platforms are stealing our lunch.

What are platforms?

A platform is essentially an enabling infrastructure/ environment that,

  1. Gives freedom to connect with others
  2. Enables valuable exchanges which were not possible outside of the platform
  3. Enables external applications/services to be built on top of it, (APIs)

Platforms like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Uber are enjoying unprecedented growth and consequently unprecedented investor interest, because they allow that egalitarian access to valuable exchanges that were not possible otherwise. By their very nature, the exchanges become more useful, more valuable with expansion of user base. Amazon is able to fine-tune its suggestion because it has access to purchase history data of billions of its customers across the globe. People use Facebook because all their friends use Facebook. This phenomenon, of increase in usefulness and consequently the value of a service with increase in the number of users, is called ‘network effect’.

The sinister consequence of the network effect is the potential of monopolies. The logic of Platform growth inevitably leads to hollowing out of existing market structures. The logical conclusion of Platform economy is a world of monopolies rising upon the ashes of old businesses.

Shift in client priorities

From ad spends to spends for innovations in product, supply chain or marketing.

As if the threat/ opportunity of ‘Platforms’ was not enough, companies these days also have to wrap their heads around 3D printing, Blockchain technology, CRISPR/Cas9 and so on. These are amazing technologies promising revolutionary changes. These technologies present new opportunities that we never knew existed before.  However, many legacy businesses are ill equipped to respond to them.

Thankfully, a whole industry has sprung up to cater to these needs – needs of business transformation in the face of existential threats posed by new technologies. Traditional consultancies have adapted to offer new expertise to clients. Specialist big data analysis agencies are helping companies make sense of their consumers. There is even an AI (Artificial Intelligence) agency now, that helps create ‘intelligent agents’ for brands. Market is demanding newer mutations of agencies like these, mutations that help them navigate the brave new world of the new economy.

Market is demanding newer mutations of agencies; mutations that help them navigate the brave new world of the new economy.

The question that we must ask ourselves is – do advertising agencies matter as much in these testing times? On one hand, the budget allocated by clients for marketing is under pressure. On the other, technological investments, specialist hires and consultancies are claiming an increasing share of the budget. Will this twin phenomenon erode the value of our services? Will the share apportioned to advertising shrink further?

Advertising agencies, if they remain what they are, will secede their privileged partnership status to digital transformation agencies, to business consultants and to platforms like Google, Facebook and Amazon.

One obvious yet terribly difficult-to-pull-off implication of this is – to become an advertising platform. I have discussed this in detail earlier. The reality though is, not everyone can win in that race to become a platform. For the majority of marketing services agencies to survive and thrive, we need a ‘specialist’ strategy, not a generalist one. Here is why.

Age of specialists

Creative agencies are made up of a unique set of people: People who can think laterally, think big, think informally. Apart from a few top tech companies, not many companies have the asset of free thinkers who are not stifled by hierarchies and suppositions. As such, creative agencies are uniquely positioned to create new solutions for brand growth, beyond branding ideas.

For marketers trying to make sense of a fast changing world, agencies need to adapt to remain the priority partners they turn to for help. Can the planner’s customer centricity help companies improve their business plans? Can the creative talent’s mastery over conceptualization propel a client brand’s product and service design?

Why not to be a generalist?

Advertising agencies help clients ‘position’ their products as distinctly relevant. But we forget to apply those lessons to ourselves.

Google and Amazon is fundamentally rewiring our brains – even our clients. The ‘search’ and ‘suggested’ result mentality means that for every emerging need, the client searches for services he/she needs with sharper definition. She is more likely to send out a specific query out in the world – either digitally or among peers – ‘Who is the best at product design in our category?’, ‘Who can help me assess Blockchain’s potential to disrupt our category?’

What results she might get? Would people respond with a generalist agency’s name even if they have the capabilities? Will a generalist be on ‘Top-Of-Mind’ for such queries?

Well, many private agencies can choose to continue doing what they do, with likeminded clients catering to traditional consumer segments. But that set of marketers is shrinking, the addressable opportunity is getting smaller. That means making peace with low growth.

However, for publicly traded advertising holding companies, coming years could be the years of transformation – either willingly or engineered by activist investors who demand growth.

Hence, it is increasingly likely for large advertising players to ‘Pivot’ to go for the biggest emerging opportunities.

What is ‘Pivot’?

The purpose of a pivot is typically to go after a bigger & sustainable growth opportunity in the market that can ensure companies’ prospects for near future. You do so by changing the direction of your enterprise if the need be, while staying grounded in your core competency.
Firstly, it requires reassessment of your old business in the context of emerging opportunities/ threats. The reassessment should ideally throw up useful insights about your clients, your product/ service relevance or the way you work. Consequently, you quickly test possible improvements to your service. When you hit on something that works, you scale it up and go to town with it.
You might end up changing something about the way you do your business, while keeping some aspect of the business constant. For example, it might entail shifting to new markets/ consumer segments/ new clients. It might entail prioritizing a different sales channel or to gain new capabilities. It might even mean reinterpreting a consumer need and creating a completely new offering.

At its core, it is about changing with an ear to ground. An ear to the ground tells us of seismic shifts in advertising industry with issues of trust (Pritchard, 2017), profitability, and marginalization (Bianca Dallal, 2017) posing threat to advertising industry’s prospects. Common sense tells us that something needs to give – something must change.

It is about time advertising agency business models change for the better.

The pivots of advertising agencies

At its most fundamental level, advertising agencies exist to help marketers grow (Purpose). They do so NOT by helping make the product/ service better, nor by helping reach more consumers. They do so by helping create consumer demand with distinctly persuasive communications. (Competency) The perspective to understand here is that of two variables: Core competency and Purpose of existence. Hence, to evolve, agencies can either look at radically reassessing their competencies or their purpose.

To evolve, agencies can either look at radically reassessing their competencies or their purpose.

Pivot 1. Core competency:

a.      Marketing services agencies:

Typically, creative agencies’ core competency is in their access to creative & strategy talent. W+K, Droga5 or Ogilvy are well known for their creative rock stars. Yet another agency might be built on the strength of decades old client-agency relationships. A media agency might boast about the scale of media spends that it controls and can influence. A research agency might have proprietary methods of inquiry or access to qualitative data.

The logic of pivot tells us that – for advertising agencies, there is an opportunity to pivot with their creative talent. What is the biggest business growth opportunity for the kind of talent they have? Beyond ‘advertising’ what high-value products/ services can this talent create?
Similarly, a research agency might look at its proprietary tool and reevaluate its potential. How can they augment the value of their intelligence the most? Would tabulation of existing qualitative studies help build an intelligent map of consumer behaviors? Who might be interested in such products? If ‘Big Data’ is the new oil, why are research agencies not making their big data usable at scale?

Here is an example of Pivot thinking applied to creative agency business.

The “If You Build it, They Will Come” agency:

This pivot is about keeping company’s people and their abilities at its heart and purpose. It seeks not to build radically new capabilities or hire radically disruptive talent. Instead, it seeks to find the biggest opportunities that the existing teams can deliver on, with greatest amount of satisfaction for the team.
For a creative agency, that means identifying the distinct talents of its teams and then finding the biggest possible commercial opportunities for them, may it be in advertising or beyond.
Creative talent remains the biggest asset of any creative agency. Yet, there is a growing sense of being overworked and underappreciated among the creative teams. There is a sense of ‘missed opportunity’ among people who see others creative people garnering fame and fortune with digital content. YouTube stars, Vice, Refinery29 and so on, have shown that there are bigger avenues for creative expression that could be financially rewarding too. There is a market for every conceivable creative style, expression, idea, app, activity or content. The creative team’s dilemma is – whether they will be better off with a career in advertising or in new age digital companies or by going solo with content creation, curation or aggregation?
Each creative person grapples with these choices. It would be in the agency’s interest to see the potential of its people before the people themselves do. If their team is passionate about a certain kind of creativity, find the biggest market for that creativity. This logic perhaps would not have been very sound 20 years ago. The surest way to make money with creative expressions and ideas was with advertising alone. However, today, a creative person can do much more with his/ her ideas.

If one looks at an idea objectively beyond the context of its birth, it looks much grander. Here is a thought experiment to prove my point.
Think of the last idea you had for a client’s campaign (or if you do not work in advertising, consider ‘what were they thinking?’ for any of your favorite commercial). Now think a logical conclusion to that idea divorced from the brand. Put that idea onto another stage/ context/ medium – see how it expands. If it is a good idea, it will always fill up the volume of your imagination – more than any brand can do justice to the idea.
For example, divorced from Dove, imagine the biggest expressions for the idea of ‘real beauty’. Can it be a movement? Who would like to contribute to it? Which brands would like to associate with it? Would the idea find place in the women’s marches? Would it lobby against skin whitening creams among policy makers? Would it run community centers? What would be the business plan, revenue model for the fullest expression of this idea?

If it is a good idea, it will always fill up the volume of your imagination – more than any brand can do justice to the idea.

Imagine an agency that has a set of issues/ themes/ ideas that it works on instead of set of clients. Will it be more interesting for the creative talent? Could it be more profitable? I believe it can be.

Ideas can translate to bigger things if you let them run free. The digital world has brought down the cost of realizing ideas drastically. It has given us the tools to translate and mutate ideas in infinite ways. Creative shops must make it part of their credo, to not let any good idea go to waste and to bring to life only the biggest expression of it.

The tragedy for many creative people is to see their magnificent ideas not reaching their full potential, being rendered impotent for a smaller cause, smaller venue. Instead, this new agency would recognize the bigness of ideas and put their efforts and capital in realizing those big ideas. The belief being – If You Build it, They Will Come.

b. Holding companies:

Unlike consultancies whose competency is in housing domain experts, holding companies do not have palpably distinct competency any more. A holding company is as good as the companies it has in its portfolio. The value of a holding company used to be in its ability to help portfolio companies to scale. However, it seems to have exhausted its scaling potential, evidenced by lack of organic growth.
Holding companies are trying a few things to improve their value. WPP is hedging its bets on ‘Horizontality’; Publicis is attempting to create an AI enabled personal assistant for its employees called ‘Marcel’. However, unfortunately, both attempts lack vision and conviction.
In an interview for ‘Strategy + Business’ in 2016, PwC Principal Deborah Bothun asks Sir Martin Sorrell, “How far can you take that?”, referring to Horizontality – the effort to get people from different WPP companies to work together for certain clients. Sir Marin Sorrell responds, “Not far enough.”
If the idea cannot be scaled across the company, is it even strategically relevant? At best, it seems to be a tactic to keep key clients happy.
Marcel too seems to be born of a narrow vision; it simply is an internal talent-sourcing tool. Wit AI, and the data that Publicis already has, it can be much more – but there simply is no evident will to create something groundbreaking.
Currently, the business incentives for a holding company are structured in such a way that they cannot radically change their course. However, many of their operating companies can.

Pivot 2. The purpose

In this pivot, we remain true to our purpose of helping client businesses grow. What changes is the ways in which we help them grow. The competencies become variable here. This means for this pivot to work, we must be radically adept at bringing in expertise for most growth needs of the client. If the client requires blockchain expertise, the agency must be capable and willing to provide that expertise. The key focus here is to become the de-facto growth partner of your client.

The “specialized business growth drivers” agency:

This pivot keeps the client base, the market, as constant and re-evaluates its options to seize the biggest opportunities in that market. Therefore, if your client base still feels that their biggest priorities are advertising/ branding to fuel their growth, continue doing the same. However, if your client base feels that their biggest priorities for growth are about leveraging emerging digital platforms or managing reputation in the age of instant outrage, adapt and train your teams to fulfil these needs well. The days for generalist agencies that could do everything for a client moderately well are numbered. Today, marketers need sharper, targeted expertise, which they can get most efficiently by looking at smaller, more specialized ‘vendors’. There is good money to be made servicing these myriad business growth needs. Specialize in driving growth for a certain kind of clientele with a set of competency they prioritize.

New age, new agencies

It is about time that agencies wake up to the reality of working in the digital world. It is not the time to be afraid and to be defensive. It is time to make bold new steps, to ‘fail fast’ and to ‘pivot’. It is time to start new adventures. The technological and societal revolutions are not threats, but opportunities for growth. It is time to grow magnificently with these new opportunities. Grow by either sharply adapting to emerging client needs or by investing in ideas you believe in. It is a brave new world, ready for the best of our ideas.

by Ajinkya Pawar

Stop feeding the parasites

I received a curious mail today from Campaign magazine. It was soliciting content. so far so good. I skimmed through it and was delighted. They wanted content and towards the end they had mentioned a huge sum of money, almost half a year’s salary for me. I assumed it must be honorarium for the ones whose content is selected. I was thinking, man, these guys are amazing – can they really afford to give away that kind of money to contributors? Didn’t make sense. Perhaps it is a way of cultivating the best talent?

so I read the whole thing – turns out, they are not giving honorarium, they are ASKING for the sum. In exchange, the contributor gets their photo published in the magazine.

This is some weird shit. All this while I thought their business is in getting free content and distributing it at profit.  (which I find problematic anyways. Why should any labor be free?) But it turns out, their business is about validating the poor insecure idiots in the narcissist industry of advertising, who seek validation for their expertise.

I understand, for many small agencies perhaps, this is a way of getting noticed by the right people. For a down and out senior person, this is a way of getting back in the game. For a low esteem somebody, it is way of feeling secure about their expertise. and I am sure it is of positive utility to somebody somewhere, the use-case for which I can’t think of now. Nevertheless, what a scam!

The mice needs security and the vulture is selling helmets.

Advertising industry is plagued with this insecure-narcissistic game that drains its people of their money, their time and their esteem. The countless awards, the countless publications, the countless events – what good comes of all that masturbation?

Awards

Cannes, One show, Effies – what a fucking waste of money and efforts. It does curate some amazing work, but it is not available freely for all industry folks to learn from, now is it? It is available at a price and not readily usable. The learning, the cases, they are not turned into usable insights, usable learning tools for the young in the industry to learn from, freely. If it is behind paywalls,  it is useless. It is unethical to first charge for entries and then again charge for accessing the end product. Its the most dick move ever. In the age of AI, why can’t knowledge gathering digital dust behind paywalls, be turned into an Open advisory for a world where businesses grow more efficiently and people don’t have to weather terrible ads?
I can see the parallel here with the pharma industry – companies that have recipes of wonder drugs that can cure TB, malaria – but won’t give it out to needy people. Well, the comparison is wrong – atleast pharma companies own their own IP, all that award shows do is massage a few egos. Its the most expensive ‘curatorial’ service ever.

Awards might help build agency credentials. But why does a company need new credentials every year? I mean, I don’t see volkswagen or Mahindra spending as large a proportion of their revenue towards awards, as agencies do. No other industry spends as much money on validation as percentage of its revenue as we do.

Look at Publicis. With a year’s worth of spends on awards, they are planning to build a AI assistant for their employees! (Shitty idea, but one must commend on trying to be relevant) I mean they could start new businesses every year with that kind of money, put it to far better uses than advertising awards.

With Unilever, P&G cutting down their ad spends, agencies will have to further tighten their belts. They better start with the awards, instead of employee raises.

Publications

Which other industry has so many ‘thought leaders’, so many publications and yet doesn’t move an inch ahead in the game of innovating it’s own value proposition?
What do adage, campaign, afaqs, thedrum etc add to the universe’s knowledge? Not much. These publications regurgitate same points of views over and over again. They keep discussing similar trends over and over again without critical analysis (programmatic is the future, maybe it is not. Native is the future, maybe not. Context is king. maybe not. where is the data to support the hypothesis anyways?) Never have I read an actual original point of view about media/ business/ culture/ consumer in these rags. They are mere propaganda vehicles for ad agencies and its career climbers.
Its quite possible that half the ‘views’ and engagement of ‘famous’ campaigns are generated by people in marketing only – readers of these publications. I suspect, the feedback effect is detrimentally strong in advertising. Shiny, smart ideas get propped up even if it might not be effective.

Lastly, I feel the publications normalise the alienating bubble of advertising. By repeating trends that are not actually trending, by idolising campaigns that are not effective, by giving trophies to agency folks…  they are holding back the industry.

Agencies often have fairly smart people. People with ideas. People who can start their own businesses, create things of great value. Instead they get too comfortable by publication powered validations and publication powered point of views. They hold them back in the industry.

Events

Well, I think, advertising people would gain far more if they went to art galleries, tech expos, civic issue seminars, political rallies, academic seminars even etc. There’s marginal utility in going to advertising industry events where you will bump into people exactly like you. (unless you want to network).

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Essentially, stop becoming fodder for these parasitic industries that are growing bigger and bigger as the host industry diminishes. Get a grip on yourself, advertising industry.

by Ajinkya Pawar

If agencies remain married to ‘ads’, agencies are doomed.

Traditional advertising agencies were essentially amoral tongues on rent.  In the pre-digital age, where there was no other way of knowing the truth (or rumours) about products and brands, advertisements was the only major source of opinion/ information (after WOM) about the product’s usefulness/ efficacy/ likeability.
There was a role for advertising in the lives of people. It was global village’s emissary of good times. It was the window to a new lifestyle. It was the helpful aunt who knows solutions to all our problems. And it was all in good cheery humour. Oh, golly-gee. What a wonderful world advertising was building for people. In a media-starved world, people lapped up the shiny world painted by advertising. The modernist utopia was painted by advertising.

Internet broke that world. It made the world transparent. People could verify claims, could complain, could rally fellow consumes into shaming advertisers who were dishonest. Advertising just didn’t ring true any more. At best they were entertaining distractions. At worst they were insidious worry-mongers who amplified the worst aspects of humanity – misogyny, racism, greed…Mostly they were an annoyance best muted or ignored.

From a brand point of view, ads were not efficient anymore in telling consumers anything they didn’t already know or wanted to know. Advertising simply had lost the plot.

Then came Amazon, facebook and google. And boy did they take the life out of advertising. Many agencies are dead, they just don’t know it yet. They see pitches, dwindling margins as symptoms of economy, politics etc. They don’t see the picture. The disease is different. The disease is ‘death of brands’. And with it, traditional agencies.

People do not need ads anymore to inform/ educate/ convince them about anything. thank you very much. They have google, facebook for that. They stream their brand experience (mostly if it is bad) live on facebook. They pummel the brand social media handlers when brands do a faux pas. They’ve got the power and they know it.

People buy ‘products’ on amazon and flipkart now. They don’t care for brands anymore.
With Amazon’s Alexa and Prime, amazon will ‘seamlessly’ relieve the burden of choices and chore shopping for wealthiest of consumers. That means hello private labels and small players, bye bye big CPG brands.

Sure, some people might continue to believe that they must drink redbull and eat tacos and drive audis and exhibit iphones… but the vast majority of non-lifestyle CPG brands, daily use brands – brand on which we spend most frequently. They will see erosion in their ‘brand value’.

Go niche or go big. There is no middle ground anymore for most brands.

What that means for agencies? Forget the age of ‘lines’ and brand ethos. ‘brand with a purpose’ and ‘lifestyle defining brands’ can only be a handful. Most of agency clients are not these brands.

Agencies of the future need to help most brands become more ‘uniquely useful’ to the consumer. Agencies need to be able to create opportunities and harness unexpected opportunities for brands. Here are some interesting brief to work for.

‘How can we ensure that the consumer searches for my brand name and not the category name when buying on amazon?’

“How can we change the amazon prime habit and get the consumer to buy stuff at my store on his way home?”

How can my brand reach consumer better, quicker, more delightfully than amazon/ google can?

and so on.

The point it, days of ‘lines’ and ‘scripts’ are gone. We must be able to solve real business growth problems and be ready to leverage any medium/ expertise/ experience. If agencies remain married to ‘ads’, agencies are doomed.

by Ajinkya Pawar

“That is the creative challenge”

If clients, planners, management folks and even creative directors make a habit of envisioning their idea before talking about it, we would be spared of a lot of bullshit.

So recently we presented an elegant campaign that was not ‘exciting enough’ to the client. They thrashed it mercilessly.

“Its a 20 seconder, we don’t have the time for a story.”
“Print needs to say ‘this’ and ‘that’ and ‘that’ and ‘this’. Make it all big. How will consumer know this. He needs to know that too……”

Essentially, they wanted to talk about five different things in an exciting manner in a twenty seconder ad that should also be clutter breaking since they had low budgets compared to competition.

I told them that the ad might work better if we concentrate on the most important thing – one thing to talk about. We might then have a chance of making memorable successful campaign. But nop. They wanted to say it all and apparently ‘that is the creative challenge‘.

‘That is the creative challenge‘ is a phrase I have heard often enough. Its the lazy way out of having to make decisions. It is the lazy way out having to work as a team to arrive at better ideas.

It is precisely at this moment that one knows – the campaign is going to be  a dud. At a strategic level, the client has already made a mess and does not want to own up to it, to make sense of it. And no amount of creativity now is going to salvage it. And even if by the stroke of dumb luck, creatives come up with something workable, the idea will get ‘dialed up, dialed down‘ as the client tries to retroactively make sense of his / her strategy.

The antidote – Make people think along

If by some means you could inculcate a habit, inculcate this. For every meeting – briefing, brainstorming, client presentation etc., – make it a habit of visualizing the idea being presented. What could the idea mean actually? What are the best/ worst ads you can think of in that direction?

So if the planner gives you shitty brief with big words – ask him to give him an example of a ‘bad ad’. Give it a go. The planner has not thought through his brief if he doesn’t already have a few ideas himself.

So if the servicing guy comes back with client feedback that seems to worsen the creative work – ask him/ her to think along – how do they visualise it? how has the client visualised it?

so if the client asks to ‘dial up/ dial down’ or add this/ that – ask them to think along. ask them,

“What should the ad say?”,
“What would the people remember from this ad?”

If no one has confident answers for these questions – there is no point in starting to work on a script/ idea. Get clarity about ‘what the ad needs to say/do’ first – not in abstract bullshit terms but words that anyone can visualise, actions that anyone can relate to.