what consumes me, bud caddell

23 months ago I took on the mantle of Director of Invention at a hallowed ad agency here in LA. I assumed a title no one had ever heard of before, took what was my first gig inside an ad agency proper, and set about (with considerable help) to re-engineer a perfectly good, highly successful factory to produce an entirely new kind of output – marketing as product.

Since, rightly or wrongly, I’ve been asked by clients and outsiders how to manifest change within a big organization. My first reaction is that change is innate to any organization that continues to survive (because our job as managers, like our job as a species, is to co-evolve with our environment) – so no single person manifests change, change is something that happens to you whether you’re prepared or not. My job is nothing as profound as manifesting change. My job is to simply help the organization survive change – and for advertising that means surviving a splintering of attention, a more active consumer, more involved clients, the technological means to actively ignore messaging, negative public perception, and increased demand for talent, among a host of other factors. After 23 months, I still feel ignorant, but I cling to the following as a man thrown overboard is wont to do.

invest in people who can create demand for their own services and can weather the storm.

Change is a numbers game. Some will embrace its nature, some will resist it, but most are waiting for it to be worth their effort. I’ve been fortunate to stumble across a small brilliant team that have been invaluable to me in my efforts and its not only because they are far smarter than I am (which they are) – they have created internal demand for their services and have shown a remarkable persistence in the face of what some days can only be described as organ rejection. They create a welcoming face and calm demeanor for everyone else, which makes them the best proselytizers for our little church of change.

focus on building the new thing not on destroying the old thing.

When I took the gig, I wanted to burn the building down. Well, not really, but if there were a room with our travel booking and time tracking systems in it, I would have at least set fire to that room. Going from David to Goliath, everything about how we worked seemed inefficient. In a startup, you’re trying to maximize the output of every single square inch of resources. In a big company, you’re trying to intermingle a host of specialists and silos (who are separated by geography and culture) in order to reduce manufacturing errors. Almost by design this is inefficient, but the only recourse is some kind of draconian process (which creative firms tend to reject). Ultimately, my opinions meant very little until I had my own culture and process in place and had demonstrated (over and over) its success. No one is going to help you dismantle the business that’s paying for their mortgage or their kids’ college education – but they will help you build something that they believe can offer them even more advantages.

hate to lose but don’t count the losses.

When I started this job, I literally marked a calendar with ‘W’s and ‘L’s (wins and losses) based on whether or not I felt I had made headway that day. This turned out to be incredibly de-motivational. Learn from your losses, just don’t carry them too far. Related, don’t draw too big of a conclusion from any single loss (hindsight is rarely 20/20).

don’t let the bastards get you down.

Change is frightening for most and threatening for some. If you wear the change agent target on your back you’re going to be the object of some hate and fear. It sucks. A lot. And it rarely comes from a personal place, but it sure feels personal. You’ll tell yourself that trying to please everyone is the only sure-fire way to fail, but no one wants to be actively disliked. Within my first week on the job, I was pulled into an EVP’s office and chewed out for an organizational decision of which I had absolutely no role in. I was just the most convenient target at the time. Every member of my team has had a similar experience during their tenure. It’s been inevitable. My best advice is to remember what success is (it isn’t pleasing the un-pleasable) and …

finally, have a life outside of work.

I’m a person driven by purpose and I seek out accomplishment. I want my efforts to mean something and to produce something meaningful. And I tend to hire a like-minded sort. The challenge is remembering to diversify your efforts outside of your work life. With this job and its lofty purpose, I also was able to rent an apartment on the beach and I’ve worked very hard to be emotionally and physically available to an amazing woman, Britt, and her wonder-dog, Indy. In a big company, working for even bigger clients, there’s so little I have control over and my life outside of work has taught me that control isn’t a path to happiness.

“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.” – Sir William Preece, the British Post Office, 1876.

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” – Western Union, 1878.

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.” – Charles H. Duell, an official at the US patent office, 1899.

“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? The music–that’s the big plus about this.” – H. M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” – Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

“The world potential market for copying machines is 5000 at most.” – IBM, to the eventual founders of Xerox, saying the photocopier had no market large enough to justify production, 1959.

“There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.” – T. Craven, FCC Commissioner, in 1961.

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” Ken Olson, president, chairman, and founder of Digital Equipment Corp, 1977.

“For the most part, the portable computer is a dream machine for the few … On the whole, people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper.” – Erik Sandberg-Diment, The New York Times, 1985.

“I will believe in the 500-channel world only when I see it.” – Sumner Redstone, Chairman, Viacom and CBS, 1994.

“The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works” – Clifford Stoll, 1995.

“You’ll never make any money out of children’s books” – Advice to JK Rowling from Barry Cunningham, editor at Bloomsbury Books, 1996.

“Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” – Dick Cheney, Vice President of the United States, March 2003.

“The idea that we’re going to see a collapse in the housing market seems to me improbable.” – John Snow, Treasury Secretary, 2005.

Almost everything an organization does is inherently a prediction about the future. The talent we hire is a bet on which skills will be more valuable down the road. The products we manufacture are a bet on what our consumers will want tomorrow. The marketing messages we craft are a bet on what will attract someone’s attention under a future context.

The average lifespan of a Fortune 500 firm was 75 years in 1937. Today, that lifespan is hovering dangerously close to just 5 years.

That single statistic says a lot about how the world has changed in the last 75 years. It also demonstrates just how ineffective most organizations have become at predicting what’s around the corner in this more connected and more global world.

As our ability to predict the future wanes, our ability to invent the future must supplant it. Today’s organizations spend untold resources and time trying to predict the future. Managers once existed to ensure quality and/or efficiency in their subordinates (e.g. looming over the assembly line), but as technology and management practices have alleviated that demand, the field of management has become more and more obsessed with predicting the future. Compounding this, most structures within large organizations seek to limit agility rather than promote it.

We have worked to create a process by which organizations such as these can unlearn their bad habits. As interesting as we find it, we know that managers today don’t have the time to ruminate on the finer points of management theory and their ability to predict the future. We know that companies are profit-driven. They need success stories to rally behind in order to change. And if we can help create just a small handful of these cases, we think there’s the potential that the masses will take notice.

Here’s to hoping.

Just a couple weeks back, I got to meet Kevin Doohan, former Head of Digital Marketing at Red Bull. He actually reminded me about Stratos and told me to keep my eye on it. Hence, I woke up early (on the west coast) this morning and watched, tensely, the livestream of Felix’s triple-record-breaking-leap to Earth.

I asked him about what Red Bull does for their athletes. I referenced Shaun White’s now famous, but once secret, super pipe. Kevin said,“Quite honestly, those ideas just start because we’re trying to help our athletes win. Shaun was tired of kids filming his new tricks in practice and sharing it with his competitors, so we built him a pipe other people couldn’t get to.”

Of course, it was also brilliant marketing.

We’re all after that, too. Mass attention, jaw-dropping, real-time events like today.

But as usual, we’re chasing the effect, not the cause.

First, smart brands and smart marketers need to find small groups of special people, and then quite literally go to extremes to help them win. To propel them to their goals and to their mutual fame.

By the way, Kevin’s now EVP, Marketing at Machinima, another brand championing a special group of people.

Earlier this year I had to stop using one of my favorite file sharing services, Drop.io, when they were purchased by Facebook and all of their data was shut down. I’m still waiting for Facebook to make this technology available again.

I used to rely on Backtweets to track who was linking to my blog and to my client projects from Twitter. This service was purchased by Twitter and then shut down. I’m still waiting for Twitter to make this available again.

Yesterday, Google decided to neuter its Reader product by shutting down sharing and re-routing its social services to Google Plus. This blog runs on my Google Reader shared items which have now been deleted and the feature itself has been disabled. For now, shared items are shut down until I scramble to find a replacement service.

From a business perspective, I understand why Google made this decision. Google Plus is the basket in which they’ve put all of their social eggs. And trimming social from their existing products inherently means that they’ll have less resources spread out. I also am very conscious of the notion that, “if you’re using the product for free, then you’re the product being sold.” I think the resource argument is a short-term thinking trap, that any company needs more bets than one in market, but I can’t argue that Google doesn’t have the right to modify their own platform.

But I can argue that they shouldn’t. And that as users of their platform, as the products being sold, we may have some right to fight for the features and products we love. We have a reactive choice. It’s called protest. Try Googling “Occupy Google Reader” – I shit you not. The social features inside Reader supported their most advanced and ardent user base and it even protected pro-democracy forces in Iran. It was important and now people want to fight for it, even if they can’t. But nature abhors a vacuum. Even as we speak, some of Reader’s users are attempting to build their own version of the utility, with social features, to fill the gap. With all of this passion and labor, I’m struck thinking that Google surely could have found something to do with these people beyond disappoint them. But again, it’s Google’s choice to make an engineering decision over a cultural one. But that sort of reminds me of another tech giant. The one in Seattle.

I can argue that we, the normally silent user base helping to propel these tech start-ups to fame and fortune, should be rewarding the companies willing to extend some protections beyond harm to body or mind to their users. We are another sort of 99% – the tangible value behind these products – and we should demand that social products respect the communities that we form, the connections we make, and the content we create in the process.

Community is where I think the typical arguments about value exchange in systems like these fall flat. It’s no longer about the value I personally give and give up for the sake of utility. How do you value new friends and new family? What’s that worth in display inventory and lines of code? And how do you measure the loss of it? That’s why I find Reader’s recent changes much more detrimental and troubling than losing utilities like Drop.io or Backtweets. I’ve lost a community of people I regularly communicate with and I’ve lost the value that community brought to my life.

My friends Rob and Alex over at Fearless worked on a new Consumer Bill of Rights earlier this year. I think we need to amend and extend this to digital products and services to protect our communities. And I think we need to demand that the firms we labor for agree to these new standards.

When I was 18 years old, right around the year 2000, I was the lead (and mostly sole) developer for a venture capital funded internet start-up. I was also making what seemed to be an ungodly amount of money for a high school senior – all thanks to the web, and to my incredible good fortune of being thrown into it early in my life. I had my own little shop by the time I was 14(Solace Media), designing sites and developing content management systems for a landscaping company, aikido dojo, and similarly important local businesses. At 16, I co-authored a book on Flash 4 that you could actually buy at Barnes & Noble. I was a huge internet nerd, and I thought I would probably always stay on the development side of things. I was even offerred a job at a hot tech company in lieu of going to college. But then the bubble popped and the start-up I was working for went belly up not much later. The hot tech company that offered me the job not to go to college folded six months after that. Reality had a way of proving it could change faster than I could comprehend.

For years, the fact that our start-up went bust bothered me. We had the classic web business model: build, build, build, monetize later. We had a global network of editors churning out content*, we had an online marketplace, community pages, display ad sales … We had everything and more that your average dot-com had in the year 2000, we were just lacking an actual market for our product and a business model that wasn’t predicated on millions of users. Ultimately, this failure haunted me enough that I quit coding and decided to learn more about running a successful business. I studied marketing and finance in college, and more importantly, I actually tried running a small business while still in school. The latter was far more worthwhile than the former.

It’s interesting now to think back and realize that I’m where I am today because that start-up fizzled. Without that failure, I would never had grown such an interest in how organizations work or how to turn a profit. I also wouldn’t have grown an obsession with small companies, which has put me in environments where I’ve been welcomed to tinker, test, and experiment with how things can be done.

And now I find myself taking another detour because of a failure, but this time it isn’t just my own, it’s much larger in fact.

It all started with a conversation I had with my father sometime in September 2008, just after the fourth largest investment bank in the world, Lehman Brothers, announced bankruptcy. My dad’s a general contractor in Houston – equal parts construction worker and entrepreneur. He was the one who first taught me how to use a computer but he’s also the parent I rarely saw most days because he was off pouring concrete or putting up some commercial building in the middle of the Texas summer heat. My dad has run his own business for decades, through all kinds of economic ups and downs. So, when Lehman collapsed, I asked my father whether he was concerned by what was happening on Wall Street, to which he replied (summarized),

“Our banks here aren’t being run like those banks on Wall Street, and because of that we’ll be fine, even if those banks do go bankrupt.”

This was the opinion he formed upon decades of experience in an economy that was relatively less connected. However, as he and I would come to find, the collapse of banks like Lehman Brothers would reverberate across the entire U.S. economy and then to economies across the world, bringing a cascade of wealth destruction and capital crisis unseen in his or my lifetime. For my dad, the last few years have been the worst he’s seen for his business in decades. Construction, across the country, refuses to show signs of resuscitation.

He’s not alone. My girlfriend’s father spent decades in the mortgage business before opening his own company around 2002. He not only lost his business with the housing market collapse, but much of his life savings, because the industry, the whole thing, changed faster than he could comprehend. And his story, and my father’s story, are far from unique or isolated – in this country and across the rest of the world.

That conversation with my dad in 2008 has troubled me ever since. Regardless of our age, nationality, or industry, we all seem to be struggling with the implications ofconnectedness. From toppling oppressive regimes, to destroying the world’s access to capital, to consumers suddenly having the power to muck about with our brands, to trying to invent the next big internet hit, connectedness defines the biggest events shaping our era and our culture. And out of connectedness arises complexity, a word we immediately don’t like to hear unless it’s being used to describe our own taste in alcohol, literature, fine art, or music. But it’s there, nonetheless. When consumers were given the ability to connect with one another in compelling ways, and to aggregate the data behind those connections, they were ensuring that brands and businesses faced a more complex market and cultural environment. The same story is true for networked economies. Now, control has been divvied up among everyone, which means no one has much of a monopoly over anyone else. It also means that we suddenly have an even shallower understanding of the potential outcomes of our own actions.

Most of us here work on behalf of other people, with the idea in mind that we can help them navigate modernity. But most of us still go about our business today just as it has been done for decades past, without respect for the growing complexity of our clients’ businesses or the world they inhabit. We still propose single solutions to complex problems (aka the big idea), we still portray ourselves as sooth-saying trend spotters in environments that fundamentally belie our expectations, and we still drub our clients for being slow, maladaptive slugs when we offer no real organizational solutions beyond speeches laden in platitudes.

I can’t help but feel that reality is once again proving it can change faster than we can comprehend.

That’s why I set out to write a book. And with the help of hundreds of supporters, I’ve spent the last year with my head in research, trying to suss out what connectedness means for organizational management and business strategy. Fundamentally, we have to re-define what strategy means when we’re navigating environments that confound our understanding of control, predictability, and reasoning.

Our job now is to navigate connectedness; to take a step back and examine how things and people and ideas are connected, and to learn how one tap on the corner of the spiderweb sends ripples across everywhere else. We also have to help our clients make new connections, to experiment with new forms of value, and to accept the simple strategic truth of connectedness: you gain insight by doing, not by planning. From there, we have to help our clients reshape their organizations, because experimentation can’t happen and agile is just a buzzword without a truly adaptive workforce. And finally, in a world that many consider increasingly leaderless, we have to inspire leadership – which in the age of connectedness means the willingness to collaborate, and the courage to respect complexity and not sweep it under the rug.

*Random fact: the Editor-in-Chief at our start-up, who sadly passed away this year, was kidnapped in Colombia by guerilla forces in 1994 and held for 11 months. His story formed the basis of the film Proof of Life, starring Russell Crowe.

Think of the list as a simple set of heuristics to be mated, recombined, mutated, adapted, and evolved for specific needs. Also, feel free to debate the hell out of them. Here we go, in no particular order …

DEFINE INSIDERS & OUTSIDERS
Mike used to say this like a broken strategic record. Strong brands are bold enough to define who’s in and who’s out, who makes the cut, and who is left behind. Most brands, and most marketing managers, aren’t willing to do this. Your product or your marketing message can’t be designed for everyone, and it shouldn’t be. Gareth Kay also says, “have a point of view on the world, not a position in the market,” and without a strong point of view, you can’t decide who’s in and who’s out. Simon Sinek also reminds us that people don’t buy what we do, they buy why we do it.

PROMOTE IDEAS THAT CAN BE ADVERTISED, NOT ADVERTISING IDEAS
Gareth Kay brought this one to life. To me, this means that we can’t fall in love with the technology or the medium itself. I’ve seen this countless times, people pitching clever manipulations of a medium, fidgeting within the borders of the ad space, instead of thinking broadly about culture. This kind of thinking is responsible for thecult of clever that permeates digital advertising shops. And this thinking produces the type of advertising that advertising people love, but not messages that spread through culture and ultimately impact behavior. I’ve also found that clients that simply want advertising ideas (and protest anything beyond that) are clients that I’d rather not work for. To me, it’s a shibboleth for both clients and new hires.

IF IT DOESN’T SPREAD, IT’S DEAD
Originally coined by Henry Jenkins and fellows about spreadable media, to me this says something profound about what I do. Advertising and marketing isn’t art for one important reason – we can’t afford to be Emily Dickinson, toiling away in obscurity only to be recognized for our genius decades later. Our work is successful if it’s actually distributed by networks of real people and can impact their behavior. Of course, how advertising works is mysterious and complicated, but we have to endeavor to understand it and to make it work for our clients. I try not to pay attention to award shows because they tend to do a disservice to our true goal. Chase business objectives not aesthetic trends.

IDEAS THAT AREN’T CONTENT, IDEAS THAT CREATE CONTENT
Faris promoted this one. Brands are increasingly talking to generations that are read AND write, that know how to use their voice, and practice these skills when their passions call for it. This doesn’t mean run another UGC contest, it means find intersections between your needs and your customers’ needs, and mine that overlap for opportunities in co-creation. Marketing must become increasingly symbiotic.

FIND NETWORKS THAT NEED FEEDING
Grant dreamed up these words during a discussion between the two of us regarding The Fiesta Movement by Ford. Instead of reaching out to “the influencers,” Ford (and partners) went out searching for content creators that had accumulated significant following all on their own, but they were people that would benefit greatly by opportunities to create more content. The Fiesta Movement helped them sustain, care for, and grow their networks. In turn, the content creators went above and beyond creating content and promoting the program.

NEVER ANOTHER SANDCASTLE
Aaron says he deserves credit for this one, and I agree. This one’s pretty obvious: quit building micro-sites. Fish where the fish are, and other such sporting metaphors. If your big idea is to build an experience completely orphaned from the social platforms that customers actually use, and use to share things with others, then you’re doing it wrong. Basically, if your idea ends with “and then we drive traffic to it,” you’ve failed.

PARTNER WITH EXISTING PATHWAYS
If you want to reach 18-24 year old dudes online, then there’s really no one better to partner with (to both create and spread content) than CollegeHumor. If you want your new soul-uplifting novel to reach housewives across America, then you can do no better than Oprah. Whatever your objective, seek out partners that have assembled the most powerful pathways across networks of your audience, and make their strengths your own.

REAL-TIME RESPONSIVENESS TO CULTURE
Once upon a time, a time in which not every product was a pretty good product, brands stood for consistent goods that were responsive to consumer needs. You drank the branded milk because there was a better chance it wasn’t rancid. Today, every product is branded and every brand is a part of culture. And now brands owe responsiveness to that culture. We call brands that do not respond to culture “antiquated” or “uncool” and when these brands do finally choose to make a statement, we often dub them “inauthentic” because of the delay in their messaging. Of course, by now, W+K and Mr. Old Spice have completely proven how effective a brand can be once it embraces a more responsive attitude to culture.

So, what’d I miss?

UPDATE:
All of the comments on this post are worth are read, but I wanted to pull out a couple of my favorite thoughts from the fine-minded vocalizers below.

From Edward Boches, “Share everything you know” – Jason Fried and 37Signals have a way of saying this too, something like “Sell Your Process,” but the idea is that you’re probably sitting on goldmine of information and know-how that you can package to sell or spread. OkCupid is an awesome example of this. DonQ Rum built their digital presence around this concept, too. Smart stuff.

From Ana Andjelic, “Make things visible” – there’s a word for this, ‘macroscope,’ a tool which allows us to view the tiny interactions that aggregate into a larger system. Ana points out that it’s a powerful way to show community participation – but before you can do this, I’d say you have to admit that you need community participation (getting people to act is one half proving they have to, and one part inspiring them to do it).

By now, we all know what a giant success the recent Old Spice work has been. Yes, Virginia, it’s even moved product – culminating with a 107% sales increase in June.

Nicely done, W+K.

As ad folk (and as humans), we tend to have short memories. We’re good at remembering spectacular hits and not much else. With that said, it’s easy to forget just how long Old Spice has been experimenting with many of the artistic devices people talked so much about when it came to the new spots.

Charismatic male spokesman, mid-shower. Pay special attention to the rhythm and pacing that the spots have in common.

Watch the background – notice the sailboat? the infinite loop? You can see how they’re experimenting with visual effects, here in the background, while the charismatic male spokesman tantalizes you with his well written and well delivered dialogue.

When in doubt, call in the celebrity. Again, though, same pacing, same interesting-ness playing out in the background.

Look familiar? The amazing quick change effects, pacing, clever dialog, charismatic male … but only 124k views to date.

I’ve just chosen just a few of their past commercials, but there are many more out there to help fill in the evolution. Perhaps even more deserving than the current success of ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,’ W+K deserves credit for keeping their client committed to this creative vision for such a long time, enabling them to continually adapt, refine, and improve how the basic components work together.

It’s hard to not compare cultural success to winning at the slots. Here, a set of basic ingredients interchanged repeatedly until one lucky turn – when the right combination of elements in the right order yielded a fortune. It’s hard to tell how much luck played a part, versus a strong ear for cultural relevance. W+K would have to answer that one. But it does seem that a commitment to repetition and recombinance can ultimately pay off if you stick to it long enough (and if you’re damn good).

You can see how the brand and agency were employing a sort of Chinese Water Torture method of breaking into cultural exchange over the last few years. Yet, if you ask most people, before the recent spots Old Spice was only known as your grandfather’s brand. The Old Spice body of work seems to whisper the notion that you should continually iterate/evolve a concept not to build up cultural momentum (because maybe that’s not how culture works), but instead to work towards finding that right combination that will yield a sort of Black Swan event in culture.

Should this change the way we present creative concepts to clients?

If you’re trying to sell your client on moving forward with new work, it seems as though you’d want to convince them to allow you to iterate and evolve the work as quickly as possible, ostensibly for as long as it takes to stumble onto something culturally remarkable – and once you find that lucky combination, mine it for all its cultural worth in a rapid and responsive way. Perhaps we should stop pitching fully fleshed TV scripts at all – and instead talk about the building blocks of our creative vision and how they might adapt over time.

Anyone up for pitching that to a client?

It might sound something like, “Give us three years to juggle these creative building blocks and then it’ll REALLY work out for the brand.”

Some things to ponder about The Man Your Man Could Smell Likethat set it apart:

• The campaign launched with a Superbowl spot – and this year’s Superbowl was the most watched live TV program of all time
• Isaiah Mustafa – plenty of commercials become popular and you never see the star again, there’s definitely something special about him (and it helps that he was an unknown, it gave us all something to be curious about)
• Social media – the technology has definitely come of age since the first iterations posted here, not even counting the recent real-time responsiveness by the brand these spots were certainly benefited by people choosing to spread them via twitter, facebook, and the like

There are two types of clients that pay for strategy work.

There’s the client that is deeply curious about outside perspectives and looks for a strategy partner with a set of skills that compliments their own. Client No. 1.

Then there’s the client that feels too busy to do the strategy work for themselves, and who reaches out to a strategy partner to think on their behalf. Client No. 2.

And for each client type, there’s really only one course of action to satisfy their needs.

For Client No. 1, you better be ready to commit yourself to spending a good deal of time with the client, learning their business, and then deep diving on your own. Your work should be the product of rigorous exploration and synthesis.

For Client No. 2 you should brush up on your mind-reading skills. Whatever you deliver, it better sound exactly like the client’s inner monologue. Because, in their minds, if they had the time, they’d do this work for themselves.

In the world, there are more Client No. 2′s than No. 1′s. It’s by far the bigger market. A bigger, less rewarding, market. Client No. 1 will demand more of your time and an overall better product, but the return on your time can be huge. Client No. 1 is looking for a partner. Client No. 2 is looking for an intern. Client No. 1 understands the value of good strategy. Client No. 2 , by the very fact that they haven’t made strategy a personal priority, doesn’t understand your value, and won’t pay you what you’re worth.

Working for Client No. 1 makes you better at what you do. Working for Client No. 2 just tests your patience.

Client No. 2 is a dead-end.

Once we accept a client, we owe them our very best work; it’s something we owe ourselves, as well, come to think of it. But we have a choice of whose money to take. If you keep saying yes to Client No. 2, you’ll never find Client No. 1. You won’t get better at your craft. You’ll only improve your ability to deal with a difficult client.

I wrote this post in 2010 and it generated hundreds of comments on my site and dozens of responses across the web. Looking back, I think I was right about the conditions inside most big agencies – but the market hasn’t shifted away from them yet.

Apparently there’s a roaring interest in a model for the advertising agency of the future. My aim for this post is to address some of the ideas put forth by others, weigh the usefulness of today’s agency objectively, and make a bit of a prediction myself. There’s little fun in making bold predictions about the future without a debate – so dig in and offer up a point of view in the comments, if you please.

Some smart ideas already presented:

• Joseph Jaffe says the future will be made up of two kinds of agencies: the idea generators and the executors of those ideas.
• Bob Greenberg, who has a considerable interest in his own agency, R/GA, looking like the agency of the future, thinks that the agency of the future will hold court over digital technologies and interactions for the brand.
• Ben Malbon, the nice chap who heads up BBH Labs, a sweet future-y morsel nestled inside BBH, believes that crowdsourcing, or some kind of permeable relationship with creative talent outside the agency, is a necessity for the agency of the future.
• Tim Malbon at Made By Many, who shares some DNA with Ben from BBH Labs, thinks we should be asking what an agile advertising agency looks like.
• Putting some of these ideas to the test – new agency models are already being implemented by IDEO, Agency Nil, and Victor & Spoils just to name a few…
• What about an advertising agency that launches its own brands? Both Coudal Partners in Chicago and Anomaly out of NY and London tinker and toil with this model to varying degrees of success.
• And all of this discussion and activity even has Forrester primed to release a report on the topic soon. It’s sure to be short, expensive, and oft-quoted.

I can’t really argue with any of the points or models above – they’re all insightful and interesting – but they’re pontifications on what agencies should be doing right now. To say these are models for the future is the equivalent of attaching tail fins to a sedan. All of the above examples seem to be creative ways to sidestep current problems with the industry instead of addressing them directly (and to be fair to the authors/creators cited above, I doubt they meant their posts to be that forward looking).

Who says the future needs an agency, anyway?

Advertising agency of the future sounds a bit like horse drawn carriage of the future.

I’m not saying for certain that there won’t be agencies in the future, only that the future doesn’t necessarily need agencies. Just like the future doesn’t need printed news but it needs journalism; the future needs commercial communications, but who creates them, the agency or the brand or someone else, is unwritten.

And though the future of the agency is unwritten, I have real doubts that agencies will survive or should survive:

1. Agencies don’t value strategy. Agencies should quit blaming the brand for not paying for thinking. Your ability to court good clients who value strategic thinking is a measure of your own strategic ability. So when brands won’t pay for strategy, agencies gladly overcharge for the execution – which more often than not nets an expensive bad idea. Good luck getting the brand to pay for that the fifth time around.
2. The big agencies only pay lip service to digital. They hire and knight smart digital thinkers who ultimately have no authority, no real work, and contempt directed at them from the rest of the organization. It’s no surprise why they don’t stick around. The big boys also farm out to small digital shops that undervalue themselves and lose credit for the work. By the by, almost no superbowl ad last night drove to a URL (GoDaddy has been doing this for years and no one else has caught on) and no brand I saw used their Adwords in an interesting way (even though people were sure to hit search).
3. Agencies can’t keep the quality talent they need. See the last bullet point.
4. The digital agencies are full of tacticians. I feel a bit like Bill Bernbach must have when he wrote his letter to Grey – the explosion of digital channels has created a need for people with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of how to implement specific tactics on digital platforms but they rarely have any creative ability or understanding of culture, for that matter. And what does that generate? Well, as Bill put it, “A sameness, a mental weariness, a mediocrity of ideas.” Yup, that’s it.
5. Agencies don’t care about the brand. And there’s no reason why they should. Agencies are connected to brands by CMOs with tenures measured in months, not years, and no one ever holds them accountable for failure. I’ve watched brands be gutted by layoffs and their agencies of record, who bungle everything they touch, continue to walk the halls with smiles.
6. Agencies shouldn’t be trusted to occupy the interaction between brand and customer. When brands turn over the interaction and engagement of their customers to agencies, they’re more often than not, losing an opportunity to collect data and insights. There’s a goldmine waiting to be had for the agency that begins to record everything, measure everything, act objectively, and glean insights from interactions and become the data-hub and consumer insights engine for the brand. Unfortunately, no one is moving in this direction because it’s easier to continue flogging a dead horse, for the time being.

One major epilogue to these points – these are blanket statements, which by definition, do not do justice to the few among us that don’t operate mediocrely and slowly suffocate the brands that hire them. If you’re reading this, there’s a fair chance you’re one of the good guys. Either way, I’m not trying to offend through sensationalism; these are real observations from my short time spent near this industry.

Obviously by now you realize I’m of the opinion that the advertising agency, in its current form, has a rather bleak future ahead. Certainly the automobile industry has taught us that you can’t continue to profit from a mediocre product forever. Wall Street showed us that eventually greed left unchecked is punished. And newspapers have demonstrated that by ignoring the real opportunities provided by technology you absolutely risk extinction in the longterm. And that’s where, I believe, the advertising industry largely finds itself today: mired in mediocrity, greed, and ignorance. And because of that, I can’t help but hope that the future needs the advertising agency less.

I think Joseph Jaffe probably isn’t too far off – it’s easy to see agencies splinter between the idea-havers and the technicians – but I think the overall footprint of the industry will be emaciated by then.

I think, like any other time of true shift, we’re beginning to see the wheat be separated from the chaff. Brands that are unable to court a consumer that is no longer passive, predictable, or isolated are rapidly losing value or committing themselves to a steep learning curve. Because they feel the pain first, many brands are leap-frogging over their agencies in terms of gaining knowledge and know-how of these interactions. In fact, I’ve already seen examples of brands moving many of these new functions of the agency in-house. Due to this, agencies will continue to have a dwindling pool of customers that require their full services.

Meanwhile, new brands are coming to pass that are built as communication vehicles in themselves – Tom’s Shoes, Zappos, and Quirky to name a few. These brands are also brilliant at using and adapting new technologies to satisfy their needs – which used to be a job for the agency.

I’ve always been interested in the Coudal/Anomaly model of launching your own products, but I think they’d both admit that juggling clients and your own brands is like juggling chainsaws… on fire… blind-folded… on a unicycle… over thin ice. It can be done, and will continue to be done into the future, but not by a wide swath of the industry. The failures will vastly outnumber the successes.

Do I think brands will bear the entire burden of a shrinking ad industry? Absolutely not. I think customers, also known as people, will step up and directly connect to the brand, creating real value, in incredibly significant ways. Ultimately, this new kind of consumer is an opportunity for the brand and a risk for the agency.

I do want to be clear about one thing – there is value in what the agency offers. And although I think the current services and know-how of the agency are at risk of erosion in the future – agencies do tend to have rather creative people stowed away in their ranks. These people are the key to the agency’s survival because there will always be a need for creativity and innovation. In fact, these people have the opportunity to carve out a third possible future for the agency: the platform builders.

As we approach this potential future and agencies continue to subsist on a diminishing set of resources (the needs of brands) we’ll see mostly what’s left of these organizations fall into Jaffe’s two paths: the idea makers and the technicians. But we’ll also begin to see a new species of agency evolve, the platform builders, that reverse the power dynamic between brand and agency by creating remarkable, attention earning, systems for human interaction. Because of the existing skill-sets at agencies, I’d venture to guess that these systems will either be technologically driven (the next Foursquare, as an example) or entertainment based (the next Lost, or hell, the next Two and a Half Men). Either, if executed successfully, have the potential to create a need for the brand to sit down again at the table. To that end, I think Big Spaceship in the technology sphere, or Katalyst Media in the entertainment sphere, are both early experiments of the platform builder – but both are still incomplete attempts to evolve a more traditional model.

A bit of advice for existing agencies…

• Clean yourself up. If you’re committing any of the sins listed above, time won’t be kind to you and neither will your employees. Drop the greed (or find clients that will hold you accountable), fight mediocrity, and spend more time learning about the intersection of new technologies, human behaviors, and cultures.
• Prepare for a decline. Established brands are proving to be quick studies in satisfying the needs of their customers, new brands are being created that require less of your services, and the introduction of a new kind of consumer – one that isn’t passive, predictable, or isolated – is edging you slowly out of the picture and out of work.
• Choose a path. The market will inevitably force you into evolving into one of three species of agency: the idea maker, the technician, or the platform builder. None of these models guarantee survival indefinitely and all are, as of now, still nascent. It’s up to you to see them mature and develop.

As I said before, there’s no fun in making predictions about the future without a debate (and honestly, this post took quite some time to write) – if you’ve made it this far, thank you for your attention and now, would you mind sharing your opinion or sharing this post?

Above is a video we released last week at Deutsch LA for Volkswagen.

In a matter of a few days, with only one broadcast airing, we’ve already picked up over 6 million views.

The LA Times wrote a nice complimentary article, with the headline – VW’s Super Bowl teaser video ‘The Bark Side’ goes viral.

The headline is untrue. We did not go viral.

This video is popular because people chose to spread it – not because the video shared itself.

We attempted to pack the video with cultural currency targeted at specific communities on the web that actively share content. We paid attention to the kind of content they share. And then we put the video where they would find it. But none of that guaranteed us success before hand.

You can design for popularity, but you cannot guarantee it. Popularity is a stochastic process. There is no such thing as a viral video, no matter how hard we as an industry want to believe it or try to sell it.

I’ve written on this subject before, and suggest you read this article if you want to follow me further down the rabbit hole – stop saying viral video.

Alright, let’s put a nail in this zombie’s head.

How a virus works: A virus is essentially a set of genetic instructions wrapped in a protein. Outside of a living cell, a virus is inert. Once attached to a host cell, a virus injects its instructions into the cell, which takes over the normal machinery of that cell for the express purpose of producing more virus particles and assembling those particles. The virus particles then reach a critical mass and break free from the host cell in order to find a new cell to commandeer. The only purpose of a virus is to produce more of itself.

We began applying the viral term to digital environments with the invention of the computer virus. This made some sense. Computer viruses often primarily function to reproduce themselves; to seize the normal functions of the system and use it to infect every host file the system accesses. Add the internet, and viruses begin to commandeer email applications in order to infect more and more systems. (these days the viral term is erroneously used to describe malware, adware, and spyware, which are not created to copy themselves)

Then came the marketers.

When we began to spend more and more of our time within networked digital systems, more examples of highly shared content appeared – this sharing occurred long before YouTube or a wide-adoption of video, but it’s safe to say that when YouTube came along, the marketers started paying attention to what we were watching.

Maybe it was because of arrogance… Perhaps marketers couldn’t fundamentally understand why we were all sharing and spreading clips of large men lip-syncing to European hit singles rather than their award winning commercials. And maybe this is why the term viral took hold – because to the marketers it must have seemed that if Numa Numa could have millions of views, almost anything could (which is true, in a way). Regardless, the viral term was applied to these videos and it has taken hold. Language tends to do that and we often tend to take artistic license with terms, marketers especially so. Big deal. Right?

Artistic license should be used to illuminate, not to obfuscate.

Jump to today. Brands now have viral video budgets. A whole new type of advertising agency has risen to life with the sole offering of creating viral videos and every other creative agency has that department or staff for that purpose. I see, at least once a month if not once a week, a slide in an agency presentation with the header of ‘Viral Video Concepts.’ We have viral video chart sites tracking top YouTube videos, books on how to create viral videos, seminars, and webinars, and marketers still don’t fundamentally understand what the hell they’re talking about.

Words matter.

They’ve pulled the wool over their own eyes. They’ve labeled the phenomenon by its visible effect, not its cause, and they’ve ignored it ever since. “Videos go viral because they’re viral videos, duh. Don’t you see the title of this slide? It says viral right in the title! And don’t worry, we’ve got some great tags, and we’re uploading it to all of the major video sites. We’re aces.” Aces, alright.

Viral assumes the mechanism for distribution is built right in. It’s not.

Here’s what a viral video would actually be: I receive a link from a friend to watch a hilarious YouTube video of a cat walking on a birthday cake. I click said link. Some malicious code on the page copies itself to my computer. That code continues to replicate across my system files. To make the marketers happy, that video also commandeers my social network profiles and publishes the same link to the hilarious video of a cat walking on a birthday cake. The same code has also corrupted my browser, now any video I want to watch is replaced with the link to the hilarious video of a cat walking on a birthday cake. (someone please write this code)

Viruses are inherently malicious because they disrupt the normal mechanics of a system. Trust me giant global brand, you don’t want to keep calling it a viral video. At some point, people may have different feelings about you huddled in some dark corner engineering viral videos to infect us with some advertising message.

Ultimately, we’re missing the point; and the point is people.

Whether you have a popular hit or near-invisible flop is solely up to people. People have to see your content and then feel motivated to spread that content on your behalf. Therefore, we have to create media that is spreadable.

Spreadable media

Spreadable media is created with an understanding of the communities of people to be courted.

Spreadable media is created so that members of those communities can easily find it. And when members of a community share it, they can use spreadable media to spot other members of their community based on their reactions.

Spreadable media is a term coined by Henry Jenkins and his research colleagues at the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT.

Spreadable media puts people’s motivations at the forefront of its creation.

What motives, you ask?

This particular section of Henry’s work deals with motivations for spreading content, not probabilities.

On top of the core question of why someone shares a piece of content, there’s still the actual mechanic and act of doing so – which requires, principally, the time and attention for consideration.

Mike put it more simply in his post, the currency of online sharing,
What does this mean for the people trying to make spreadable media?

Well, before you create anything, ask yourself, “Self, what communities am I trying to court with this content?” And then, “What about this content will motivate someone within one of those communities to share the content with someone else?” And then you can move on to, “How will anyone within any of these communities stumble upon my content to start with?”
Start thinking about people first.

Speaking of people (I’m a people).

I need your help.

I need you to help me put a stake in the viral vamp.

Next time you hear someone use the term viral erroneously, correct them. Send them to any of the posts linked to from here. Fix slide titles, call bullshit, and rename your department.

Be loud and troublesome.

In writing this post, I’m surely standing on the shoulders of more brilliant gents like Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Josh Green.

By the by, Henry is working on a new series on seven principles for transmedia storytelling, definitely give it a read.

Oh, and what should you say call a video if its been spread to millions of people? Popular. Add an adverb before popular for special emphasis (e.g. very popular)