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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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Filtered by Category: Advertising

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.

Two More Links To Make Your Internet Experience Complete

Opinions are like blogs, everybody’s got one. But some blogs are better than others, so I thought I’d share a couple that you might not know about. The first is focused on the ad business, the second is a thoughtful perspective on our culture. Both are worth checking out.

Ad Aged—Will Madison Avenue Become Detroit? by George Tannenbaum, as you might guess, is the advertising focused blog. I worked for George for a couple years and he’s filled with insightful and entertaining observations on the state of the advertising industry plus the state of the rest of the world. Luckily, he now shares them with the blogosphere. Check out “Daily dumbness update” for a good example of his take on the state of advertising. You can tap directly into his POV on Ad Aged every morning.

Chock-A-Blog, by the one-named author “Tom” is a little bit technology, a little bit entertainment industry, a little bit marketing, and, well, a little bit of everything else that catches Tom’s eye. It’s updated sporadically, but there is a new entry you can be sure it’s always well-written. Chock-A-Blog is where I learned about TXT of the Living Dead, the latest version of Night of the Living Dead as recreated by SMS messages. It also had a nice perspective on the end of the writer’s strike with “What to expect when you’re expecting an end to the writers’ strike”. Add to that a critique of the critiques of the new New Museum. Very varied topics, but informative. Be sure to give Chock-A-Blog a try.

The 3 Buzzword Takeaway of SXSWi 2008

I’m on a plane traveling back from my very first SXSWi. If you’re a geek, and there’s a chance you are if you’re reading SuperGeekery.com, there is a special place and time waiting for you down in Austin next year at SXSWi. Put simply, it’s dorks, nerds and geeks gathering in one place sharing/challenging ideas, rubbing shoulders the Internet famous, and going out drinking and partying like it’s pledge week at a college where the jocks are nowhere in sight.

I’ve had many people tell me this week that the scheduled SXSWi sessions are incidental reasons for attending; the people you meet and become friends with are what make this such a special experience. I feel like I met fewer people than the typical geek but I still managed to meet quite a few people that I hope to keep in touch with. If you’re one of them, thanks for stopping by! I’d love to hear from you, just shoot me an email.

If you didn’t attend though, I want to give you a 3 buzzword take-away of what I’m taking home with me, minus the networking and friend-making.

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

Consistently Good Emails

Apple gets loads of praise for their products. Thoughtful design and user-centric interfaces make them the best in their class. This level of finish goes beyond iPhones, iPods, and computers. It shows in their marketing of the products as well. When a new Apple television ad is released, it usually has the same qualities and the ads make the rounds of the blogosphere.

But what about the simpler things, like the numerous email messages Apple sends out to customers? Does Apple live up to their own high standards when it comes to the “lowly” email? Of course they do. Here’s a small sample of Apple emails from 2004 to 2007. They are consistently better designed than any other big retailer. These are emails not just for big product launches. They include emails sent for the simple act of registering a product. They all look good. The iTunes emails are the weakest link in the bunch, but as a whole they’re very impressive.

What I think this small collection illustrates is the deep crafting of the Apple brand. No detail is too small to be considered. Nice work, Apple.

Click on a thumbnail to view the larger image.

I’ve noticed how consistently well-designed a few other companies are with their email Both Threadless and Nintendo come to mind. Can you think of others? Take a screenshot and send it to me.

Parody Ads Tell You A Lot About Your Brand

Last year Tom Ford released a fragrance for men that has received less than stellar reviews. A friend showed me the parody of the site. If you want to see them both, do so at your own risk. They are not what I’d call “safe for work”. Click here for the original site. Click here for the parody. I can see why someone did a parody of those Tom Ford ads. They are pretentious and stupid. I think the parody serves as fair warning for any brand with such crappy advertising.

But what happens when a brand listens to their customer and gives them what they want? I’ve got a couple example to share that show what happens when consumers really love a brand/product and take the marketing materials and make it their own. Yes, it’s an Apple example, a brand that almost seems unfair to compare any other to, but it’s worth the comparison if only to show how high the bar is set.

Witness “Hit Me With Your iPhone,” a song composed by a fan and with video remixed from a marketing video on Apple’s site:

Next, take that same video, remix it with a feature suggestion for an improvement to the iPhone. That ”I love you” at the end speaks volumes as to how this brand reaches people.

iPhone Copy and Paste

P.S. iPhone, I love you too.