Jeff Goodby on Award-Chasers and the Future of Ad-Tech

June 24th, 2009

Jeff Goodby, from Goodby, Silverstein, & Partners (one of my favorite agencies to work with BTW), wrote an article in AdAge that actually got me thinking.

The article is Jeff Goodby: We are Becoming Irrelevant Award-Chasers.

There are some real gems in this article and I agree with his core position. It echos something a friend of mine told me. He’s the Worldwide Creative Director at one of the world’s largest agencies. His group focuses on the shopper space and measures success in terms of direct sales. The motto he and his team operate under is, “We don’t take gold. We make gold.”

They focus on activation more than awareness, and obsess about ROI. Cases moved, not trophies from their peers. Definitely more MBA than MFA, though they’re no slouches on creativity.

This is a different position and purpose than awareness-building groups and campaigns, but I think the two are artificially separated.

My favorite paragraph from Mr. Goodby’s article sums up a problem a lot of folks joke about: using client dollars to build an agency brand first, client brand second.

It’s a warning that we are, in effect, making things that serve our own agency brands instead of serving our clients and making a difference in the minds of the world.

I see this all over the place. It’s an industry-rag myopia that often leaves consumers/shoppers/users out of the equation. It’s more prominent in the awareness-building side of advertising, because it’s easier to get away with there.

What I don’t agree with is the call for famousness as a driving force – at least not for the agencies themselves.

I want us all to be famous again, outside the walls of our agencies. How can we accomplish this?

I’d rather see the brands made more famous, the agencies fade into the shadows, and awards focus exclusively on metrics. The problem, of course, is finding new ways of measuring success.

In Which Toby’s Optimism Takes Over

If each major agency donated the time and brainpower of one pointless microsite or social network spam tool and focused on using technology to prove efficacy as it relates to activating sales all the way from display media to the credit card machine, they could transform the industry.

We’re all digital-obsessed anyway. Why are all the lines of code squandered on ephemeral campaign collateral? Why not come together and create standards that unify as many digital outlets as possible? Unify digital cable to mobile to web to shopper loyalty programs to e-commerce to out-of-the-home to in-store displays?

It could be awesome… A lot of work, for sure. A lot of ego set aside. Great care to liberate consumers/shoppers/users from privacy concerns, bad UX, and fatigue. A massive battle against inertia. But the payoff could be the ability to tune messages so effectively that we reduce the noise, stop fighting for eyeballs, and help people make decisions.

In Which Toby’s Cynicism Takes Over

But then, who wants to create tools that can measure success accurately? Who wants awards to go to campaigns that help move units if those campaigns end up straightforward and unobtrusive and inexpensive? What if your pet client is pushing a shitty product and user-centered advertising exposes it as worthless? Ouch.

And who can be famous for helping their clients get richer?

What if cabbies are unimpressed?!?!

In Which He Makes a Call to Action

So who wants to discuss the overall role, and future, of technology and user experience in advertising? Who can think outside of their current assignment? Who among us would like to be the Tim O’Reilly of ad-tech? Where are the visionaries?

  • chandler
    there is another question, which i think is really at the heart of it, and hinted at when you say more "MBA than MFA", most of the people in advertising don't want to sell things. They want to make "experiences" and create the glamour (both meanings) of a brand. They want to do what Koolhaas does in Project on the City. But they aren't Koolhaas, nowhere close. So we get pointless media disconnected from sales and focused creating half-formed false images of corporations.
  • TJB:

    Count us in. Colgrove and I were just talking in a similar vein yesterday w/r/t a very famous quick service brand failing to make ground on another very famous quick service brand despite the award-winning work turned in by its very good agency (ahem, http://adage.com/article?article_id=137472 ). To be fair, CPB's business objectives in its campaigns may have had nothing to do with increasing BK's same-store sales or overtaking McDonald's or selling more non-hamburger items or whatever. I'm not privy to that information so I’m reluctant to judge too harshly (although if it’s not “beat McDonald’s,” I’m not sure what BK’s objective is … but that’s why I’m not in the QSR business).

    What I do know, though, is that unless agencies are working in a complementary manner toward broader business strategies and that our efforts as designers, developers, copywriters, etc. contribute measurably to delivering against those strategies, we are de facto doing it for ourselves and not our clients. We cannot and should not be in a position where we can blame the CMO or blame the direct mail agency or blame the inadequate media buy or blame the weather for our campaigns failing to move the needle in the right direction. If we didn’t develop a holistic view of the entire problem and the role our work plays in solving it from the outset, we disserved our clients. If the budget for all players wasn’t there for our work to contribute positively toward meeting strategic goals, then we probably shouldn’t have taken the job.

    Much easier said than done. We all gotta eat, and worry about building the brand of our agencies to attract clients and talent. Awards are a potent drug. And how can you measure “client satisfaction that they asked for and received ‘good creative’,” even if that creative didn’t deliver more sales/visitors/subscriptions/donations? And when CEOs signoff on awarding a contract to an agency based on their awards and not their results, the cycle feeds itself.

    We all live in glass houses, so I’m reluctant to throw stones. But I am willing to volunteer my and my team’s time to see if we can help figure something out.
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