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This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking for my portfolio of work, visit johnfmorton.com. Thanks for stopping by!

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Ad Agencies Have a Relationship Problem

I’ve never seen the play I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, but its title has come to mind during more than a couple recent conversations when the topic of traditional advertising agencies and their clients comes up. If I were to write a play about the ad business today, I’d call it I Like You Sometimes, You Cost Too Much For What You Deliver, And If You Change, I’m Leaving You. Clearly my title is not as catchy as the original, but I think it sums up the situation; fundamentally, most advertising agencies have a relationship problem with their clients. (I say most, not all. If you’ve got examples of good agency/client relationships, please send me an email. Better yet, post a comment about it.)

Clients who have existing relationships with agencies are seldom willing to accept radically different solutions from those agencies because doing so breaks the rules that govern the relationship. When agencies break the rules by behaving in unexpected ways, i.e. delivering radical solutions rather than the expected ones, at a minimum they are not taken seriously and in some case they are punished for it.

Unfortunately, that’s just human behavior.

Think about any person in your life with whom you’ve had a long relationship and now imagine that over the course of a few days they’ve radically changed somehow and are acting in an unexpected way. What type of change? To make it interesting, let’s say they’ve suddenly converted to some new religion which requires serious evangelizing or maybe they’ve discovered they’ve got to have a sex change to fully express who they are. Maybe it’s both. When that person suddenly starts breaking the rules you have both abided by in your relationship, you become wary of that person. You might even think they’d lost their marbles.

Ad agencies haven’t lost their marbles though. Agencies get a lot of flack for not understanding the state of the digital world, but I’ve been inside a lot of them and there are some really smart people there. Putting their new media understanding to practical application has been difficult because delivering solutions based on that knowledge isn’t what’s expected of them. Their current clients see the agency as delivering a particular thing which is probably what attracted them to the agency in the first place, be it TV ads, media buys, banner ads, Flash web sites, or whatever. Clients expect to keep receiving that same exact thing from that relationship. Agencies might believe the thing they deliver is “great ideas to solve marketing problems” but clients are just people and people tend to remember the concrete deliverable, a TV spot or an online banner campaign with a landing page, rather than the intangible, an idea or concept that led to an execution (i.e. that damn TV ad).

What’s an ad agency with an identity crisis to do? If you think about this as a real-world relationship, the answer is pretty clear. That doesn’t make for an easy solution to follow through with though.

Let’s think about you and your friend again who’ve had that long-standing relationship. This time, it’s not your friend who’s suddenly started acting in unexpected ways; it’s you who has realized something’s changed in your life and to be true to your beliefs you need to start expressing yourself in a completely new way. How to do you handle this old relationship? What do you do?

Option #1:
The give-into-the-fear approach. The easiest short-term choice is to choose not to tell your friend that things have changed. You can go on acting the way around him as you always have but your focus on maintaining that relationship will wain and the truth will start to show through lack of attention. The longer this goes on the more you just want to get as far away from this relationship as possible.

Option #2:
The one-day-at-a-time approach. Don’t get too hasty. You can take gradual path towards revealing the new you to your old friend. Maybe you’re just going through a phase anyway, right? You can drop hits about new outlook on life and hope your friend is receptive but you can still go out to the same old hangouts and still do a lot of the familiar things. In the short term, things are going to be fine. You need to be careful to not backslide into your old ways though. It’s easy to confuse slow progress with no progress.

Option #3:
The we’ve-got-to-talk approach. This is where you drop the bomb and see how strong your relationship really is. You are either going to make or break this relationship. If it goes all wrong, this whole thing could be history. You and your friend part and go forward following your own paths. If it goes well though, the benefits could be tremendous for both of you.

When it comes to the business relationships, what options do agencies chose? Small steps or no steps at all seem like a risky way to move forward in the digital space which is known for moving very fast.

An ad agency that goes for option #1 or #2 should work overtime at forging new client relationships that let them be the new-media-savvy shop they really are deep down. Of course, if they choose option #3 with at least one current client and the meeting goes well, they’re much more likely to have tangible experience with a long-standing client that will benefit them with getting those new clients who share their point of view.

A Murakami Grows in Brooklyn

Today I took an afternoon trek to the Brooklyn Museum for the Takashi Murakami show. It’s an exhibit that was originally put together by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in LA. The New York Times calls Mr. Murakami the Japanese version of Andy Warhol in their review of the show. There is a Louis Vuitton shop right in the middle of the exhibit selling extremely expensive bags. When my friend and I priced out a small bag at $1600, we decided it was more a stunt than a true shopping experience.

There are many incredible pieces to the exhibit. Near the beginning there are 3 sculptures of eroticized anime-style female cyborgs. The 3 life-size sculptures show the transformation of this anime woman from winged techy nymph to rocket ship. I wasn’t able to photograph personally, it but have found a photo of it (click the thumbnail for a larger view) from the Gothamist’s preview of the show. 

The exhibit is one of the most enjoyable times I’ve spent at a museum in recent memory. I dare you to go and not come out in a better mood than you went in. And by the way, at first glance this might seem like an ideal show for kids, but be warned, there’s some pretty explicit sexual themes in the work.

When the show was at the MOCA, the museum produced a series of videos about the exhibit. There are 8 videos in all. The first is before the jump. To view the rest, just click through to the rest of the article.

There's more to read. Click here for the rest. >>

Talking with Colmeia TV About Agencies, Advertising Failure & Geekery

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Eduardo Camargo from Colmeia. He, Vini Reis (a friend and former colleague of mine) and I had a great time hanging out and talking about the things that excite a geeks like us: technology, innovation, marketing and more. Eduardo taped it and put part of our conversation on Colmeia’s vlog which you can see below. You can also follow Eduardo and Vini on Twitter.

colmeia na gringa | @NYC | episodio 2 from eduardo camargo on Vimeo.

Digital Evangelists Roundtable, Round 1

This past Thursday night I was lucky to be part of group of people got together to talk about the state of digital advertising, technology and what the future holds for marketing in the digital age. John Haake, from Eyeblaster, was the host at ValBella.

The evening wasn’t presented as an Eyeblaster event though. No one talked about their technology or what they were selling. It was just a discussion amongst people who care about making progress in the way marketing is done in the ever-changing digital space. We’re in the middle of a full-on collision of forces shaping how products are created, designed, built, marketed and sold and each person at our little gathering brought a unique perspective on a piece of the action.

This first night’s gathering we spent a fair amount of time talking about what’s going right and wrong in the spending of media dollars. Although it may sound obvious, one comment really stood out to me on how the digital world of media differs from the “traditional” way media was bought. Before the digital revolution when a TV spot or magazine ad ran that marked the end of the media buyer’s job. The planning had happened; the buying had happened. What little work that was left was to make sure your spot ran or that the magazine reproduced the color of your ad properly.

In the digital age though, the moment your interactive pieces go live only marks the end of one stage of a multi-stage process. The beginning of the job was the initial planning and buying, similar to what was done traditionally, but because of the ability of digital to adapt to what you’re finding out in real time, there is a huge amount of work left to do to get the most out of your media spend. Ideally, that doesn’t mean just the media plan is adapted over time, but the creative executions as well. This concept is pretty easy to understand in terms of an online banner campaign where banners are rotated over time based on what’s being clicked on and how a banner’s click through rate changes the longer it is in market, but there is a much bigger scope of information that can be evaluated on a large digital buy and the complexity can lead to many opportunities being missed along the way. I’d love to explore this optimization topic more next time from the point of view of media, account, creative, and brand planning.

The word “widget” was mentioned approximately 112 times, but I lost count somewhere in the mid-60s. Why was “widget” talked about so much? It’s a buzz word of the moment that’s started to stick with people across the marketing industry. The term has stuck, but not a definition of what it means is pretty vague. One person’s widget is another person’s gadget is another person’s embedded video. Whatever you think it is, to get the most out of the widget concept means agreeing on a what you or your client is talking about. Again, here’s another topic that I think we can explore further. 

We’ve got the initial introductory meeting done. I think we’ve done well by getting to know each other a bit. We’re collectively trying to come to a decision on what to do next.  I think “optimization” and “widgets” will definitely be part of the next meeting. It should be fun.

See Ben Weisman, who invited me to the evening (thanks, Ben!), has also written about the night on his blog here. Check it out. Also thanks to Ben and Gefen Lamdan for the photos used above.

Who was there? Amy Auerbach from PHD, David Berkowitz from Marketer’s Studio, Matt Enos from Tribal DDB, Amaya Garbayo from Mindshare, John Haake from Eyeblaster, Liza Hausman from Gigya, Alex Jorissen from Eyeblaster, Lindsey Kollross from MEC, Gefen Lamdan from Eyeblaster, John Morton (me) from johnfmorton.com LLC, Linda Payson from Avenue A | Razorfish, David Pogue from The New York Timess, Adam Romero from Agency.com, Adam Shlachter from MEC, Troels Smit from Eyeblaster, Doug Stivers from Beyond Interactive, Persia Tatar from Media Post, and Ben Weisman from Eyeblaster, Digitas, Bucky Ben Consulting and Dogmatic. (Yes, Ben is a busy guy!).

How To Make a Mix Tape In the Digital Age

I love music and used to spend hours making the perfect mix tape to share with my friends. I didn’t realize how much I missed it. If you’ve got some MP3’s, some time, and some friends you want to make a mix for, check out muxtape.com. If you make a mix tape, send me a link.

BTW, Music companies, if you are listening, don’t kill this site. If someone can make the act of listening and sharing music this fun, I’m sure there are ways you can live with it. Just add a ”buy this track” button next to each song and it’s doing your job for you.