Doing What Matters

This article is reproduced from Crain's Creativity magazine, with permission:

© Copyright 2007 Crain Communications Inc.

Published: 05/01/2007
Section: POV
Page: 4
Story type: opinion

Doing What Matters
Byline: Brian Collins

In 1941, the Bulova Watch Co. broadcast the first TV commercial during a Brooklyn Dodgers game, on WNBT. They paid only $9, but advertising changed overnight. By the 1950s, David Ogilvy's genius was to put some science into that mix: If you understand people well enough, you can project what you've learned into the future. Assuming, of course, that the future was simply an extension of the past. And for 50 years, it almost was. But everything changed. Again. And judging Creativity's first awards has given me great heart that imagination and courage is alive and not only thriving in advertising but in amazing new products and experiences. Here are some random thoughts that came to mind as I reviewed this year's best work.

The One Big Idea model is dead. The last half of the 20th century was the only time when there has ever been a model. Since the dawn of commerce, niche products and shifting micro-segments have always been the! rule. TV created massive markets for mediocre, ``good enough'' stuff. That was the exception. Now we're back to chaos again, and we're not going back. This has undone some marketing organizations that are used to placing the bulk of their efforts in one broad, top-down, agency-controlled idea. Single-minded communication--The Big Idea--makes life easy for communicators. But people aren't single-minded. We're too busy living our lives to pay attention. We know what we love, and it's not brands spread like jam across every piece of media in our face. It's lots and lots of small, weird, new ideas and products--in lots of different places-so amazing that people will seek them out. Axe's ``Gamekillers'' is a smart example of making something so remarkable, people will do just that.

The answer isn't more advertising. Three generations of agency creative leaders grew up with media that interrupted what people really wanted to see. By definition, advertising marginalized it! self; it was stuck between things that people cared about more. So age ncies learned the power of rapid-fire storytelling. And the best ones raised their stories to the flashpoint. Apple's ``1984'' commercial created a myth in 60 seconds. Twenty years later, new-media shops proclaimed the irrelevance of narrative in interactive. ``It's the all about utility!'' Well, sure. But as long as there are humans, it's never ``all about utility.'' As utility becomes commodity, utility with stories will be what people seek. The Nike+iPod product and companion website is a perfect example of this future.

You can't buy passion. Why create things people will like when you can create what people love? Regardless of discipline, we're all now in the business of inciting contagious passion. Mass deadens, and corporate leaders are figuring this out faster than I could have hoped. ``We're all just one step away from commodity hell,'' says GE's Geoffrey Immelt. Doing something breathtaking is the only safe spec. But to make things people love means you will,! inevitably, make things some people will hate. I've judged the Skittles campaign twice this year, and each time it floors me. Monty Python in their heyday were this good. But some people on one of the juries despised this work. It completely wigged them out. Thank God. Seeing Skittles renewed my faith in almost everything I love about working in this business.

``Oops'' happens. With the iceberg dead ahead, the crew tried to steer the Titanic instead of just stopping it. The Titanic would still have hit the iceberg, but the ship would have stayed afloat. A lot of branding work gets going in the wrong direction and the people on the bridge make the same mistake--trying to steer through a disaster instead of just saying ``Stop!'' Unilever stopped a big campaign halfway through, scrapped everything and started all over. Dove's ``Campaign for Real Beauty'' was the result. The ``Evolution'' film is that campaign's most remarkable idea to date. Even Tara, my 11-year-old ni! ece, now knows what the beauty industry kept secret for so long.
It's changing, but television is still the world's campfire. On a brand scale, TV can still create phenomena. Whatever you think of American Idol, it's a weekly event that incites people in astonishing numbers to engage. Sometimes, even ads will still engage on that scale. When I was 10, I saw Coke's ``Hilltop'' commercial. It was the height of the Vietnam war, and here were kids from all over the world who wanted to teach the world to sing. And they did. Millions of kids like me bought the 45 single. We all wanted to be the people on that hill. Coca-Cola appears to be hitting such a solid creative stride again. The violence of a popular game like Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto was magically twisted by Coke into a giddy, over-the-top all-singing, all-dancing musical number that would embarrass Busby Berkeley. It's a daring act of optimism. The spot isn't cool, and that's cool. It showed that the ``Coke Side of Life'' may be a campaign that lasts longer than their rotating mar! keting chiefs.

War is the wrong metaphor for marketing. How can we think we'll inspire hearts and minds when we drive ``penetration'' by launching ``campaigns'' against ``target demographics''? When I go around agencies and see conference rooms rebranded as War Rooms, it makes my teeth hurt. Selling isn't about conquest. It's about what marketers and their customers have and can do in common. Still, you love battle metaphors? Fine. Then ask: What's worth marching for together? Hey, I know. That amazing $100 laptop computer to get into the hands of children around the world. Let's go.

A storm is coming. Are you going to hunker down? Or are you going out to meet it? Walt Disney was his own storm. Cartoon shorts were only the beginning of his career. When you think about it, he started off doing what many agency people still aspire to today--making mini-movies. The difference is that Disney didn't stay with what he knew. He was at the forefront of every new techn! ology. He changed every five years, always asking, What's the next thi ng? And the next thing after that. What's weird to me is how so many agency people still believe that the height of creative achievement is getting a spot on the Super Bowl. I mean, after 50 years, is that all we've really got?

Put down the camera. Please. Pick up some other tools and try to build something that's inherently inspiring, on its own. David Ogilvy came to advertising from a research organization. In the early years, he preached that success could be codified, and should be replicated. Later on, he saw that the future was no longer the lengthened shadow of the past. ``Change,'' he said, ``is our lifeblood.'' And that's exactly what I saw throughout this work. And it's about time.

Judge Brian Collins of Ogilvy's Brand Integration Group (who announced his departure from Ogilvy this month) was inspired by the first Creativity Awards winners.

McClatchy's national website

[exerpts from remarks by Howard Weaver at the McClatchy Washington Bureau, 31 May 2007]

... Let’s lay one tired issue to rest right away. We don’t have to debate and worry any more about the future of the news business. While there are a lot of fundamental variables still much in play, we know enough to assert a great deal right now. We will occupy a distinctly hybrid, multiplatform, multimedia future in which we exercise far less control but enjoy far greater reach and opportunity. We will touch more people in more interesting ways. We will collaborate with our readers and audiences, we will operate more transparently, and we’ll find ourselves adjusting and recalibrating constantly as we do.

Here’s the really good news: we get do all of that on the most solid possible foundation, this bureau’s unequalled capacity for producing significant, exclusive, public service journalism that sustains our unchanging mission as a company. We’ll talk a lot more about that in a few moments.

There are three big themes emerging simultaneously in our world right now. The first involves the revenue reset that’s under way – and it truly sucks – but the other two are both positive for us: an unprecedented public appetite for news and information, and a splendid set of new tools that let us serve that appetite better than ever before.

You know how tough operating conditions are right now. Throughout the industry, McClatchy included, [reported] revenues continue to decline ... let it suffice to say that we haven’t seen a bottom yet ... We believe part of that is based on structural changes and part on cyclical patterns, that some but not all of the lost revenue will come back, and that things [may] get worse for a while before they start getting better. As a result we have to significantly reengineer our cost structures, and that’s underway – reducing employees through attrition; looking for ways to use technology and contracting relationships to accomplish things more efficiently; sharing more; negotiating harder; refining our focus.

You know how McClatchy operates: through this process we will try to sustain our “athletic company” profile, working to be as trim and fit as possible while preserving the muscles – meaning feet-on-the-street resources aimed at producing quality journalism and selling advertising.

Because of that appetite for news I mentioned and our growing ability to serve it in new ways, we do have a powerful story to tell about where we plan to end up. The “hybrid” future I forecast means one based on many different delivery systems, built on an enduring print foundation and rapidly expanding into all kinds of digital, multimedia platforms. We’re already doing this well enough that the audience for what we produce continues to grow.

You know the catechism by now: add our newspaper readership – still one of every two adults in the country – to the unduplicated reach of our online audiences and we’re growing. More people want what we produce today than wanted it yesterday. This is the fundamental truth upon which our future success depends.

Print readership is going to continue its decline – more slowly in the future, we believe, once the current purge of unwanted peripheral readership [bonus days, NIE, advertiser-sponsored copies and the like] is shed. Still, in a world of constantly proliferating choices, every individual medium will lose share. It’s important to recognize that modest, managed decline is not failure in that environment – it is the foundation of success.

But the growth imperative means we have to increase audience everywhere else, principally online. Growing online audience is not optional. It’s at the heart of both our revenue results and our public service mission. It’s how we remain a relevant mass medium with a real chance to do good and serve the public.

You have a rare chance to contribute to that success. You’re not a newspaper and you have more options about how and where to allocate your resources. What’s more, our imperative for audience growth coincides perfectly with your need for reach and impact. Everybody here recognizes how the absence of a Knight Ridder presence in Washington and New York stunted the impact of pre-war reporting. We’re going to fix that once and for all by building a front page they can’t miss and fueling it with enough traffic that they can’t ignore it.

This is obviously built on the foundation of your high quality journalism. Far from abandoning that effort, we need you to step it up. We’re at a crucial point in a very big game here, and we need our best players on the field. Your productivity, your energy and your talent need to be hitting on a high cycle right now. This is no time to pull up for a breather.

We also have to adapt to the new landscape. Some of this is as easy as my old story about the circuit-riding preacher who explains his choir and piano player by reminding people “I can’t convert ‘em till I get ‘em in the tent.” We’re going to play a little music to attract people, too.

Much of that will be ancillary to your daily work, but not all of it. We’ll explore video with freelancers and audience participation, we’ll look for alternative story forms from outside contributors with different voices, we’ll test the waters of participative or distributed reporting through alliances.

But we will also need alacrity and enthusiasm from you. Some of you will be extending almost immediately into the blogosphere – in a few cases exposing that tender flesh to the world’s largest news audience on Yahoo. We have to learn how to blend the strengths of professional journalism with the immediacy and voice of the blogger, and to do so both surefootedly and spontaneously.

We’ll sometimes need you to come back from a complicated interview and find a way to produce a few paragraphs of breaking news before you settle in for heavier lifting. We need some of you to see whether video can work for you. We need editors to think about multiple audiences, to flag great stuff we can promote on Yahoo, to be gentle with reporters who are trying things for the first time.

We need you to step up for online Q&A forums, learning to respond to audience questions – even unreasonable ones – with both candor and grace. I hope we’ll soon be helping readers create social networks or communities of interest built around your journalism, and we will need you to understand that process and help nurture it.

And we will need your indulgence, I suspect, as we wander out into the traffic. We’re going to make some mistakes, occasionally ask too much, sometimes reveal to little. Some of the bromides you learned in journalism school or from your first city editor are going to get violated. You may not like all the alternative voices I’m hoping to round up for our revival tent.

But I think you’re going to like the results.

I had a columnist in Anchorage who wrote, “All a reporter really wants is to be at armageddon with a notebook and a pencil.” Well, bullshit. She wants a notebook and a pencil and an audience.

We’re planning to get you a great one.