Big and Small and Branding (with free advice for the Republican party)

Partially because of a pitch I just finished working on, where our ideas played with the notion of bigness, I've been thinking a lot about big and small. Specifically, I think these two words have an interruptive value: they can make you stop and reconsider things.

A classic example is the 'Think Small' ad to the left. The assumption the car buying public made at the time was that bigger is better, but this ad challenged the notion head on. It forces you to ask an obvious question: why, exactly, do I want or need a bigger car? Many people, I believe, answered it by saying they were shopping for bigness because of social pressures and not because they really wanted it. And so a smaller car made them feel not just frugal, not even smart, but like an individual. The word small didn't just mean physically smaller, but psychologically smaller, moving from a collective level of decision making to a personal one.

An interesting counter-example can be found in the cell phone business, where Samsung seems to be trying to stake out a place for itself as the 'big' smartphone maker. It starts, of course, with making a phone so big that some people question whether it is even practical, but a look at their ad will also give you a sense that (even though they don't use the word) they are trying to link that physical bigness to a sense of transformation, of expanding possibilities. It subverts the trend towards smallness that tends to rule in the technology space. But I think being more explicit about the value of bigness in a space that so often devalues it would have potentially been a lot more disruptive than their reliance on the oft-abused stand in, free.

Why are the notions of big and small so powerful in branding when used correctly? I think we can trace that back to the interplay between our desires for stability and progress. Our default position is to stick with what we know and our comfortable with. But we also don't like being stuck with something outdated, so we tend to assume certain trends: that cars will keep getting bigger or cell phones will keep getting smaller. In other words, we assume progress is linear and predictable, and buy accordingly. Marketers use those assumptions to keep selling new versions of their products. But sometimes products come along that flip the trend assumptions on their heads. What is a savvy marketer to do? Challenge the trend head-on, and give people reason to think that the trend is arbitrary or played out. Your departure from the norm isn't then lesser, or even just different, but bold, better: in short, a sign of radical, unexpected progress people can get excited about.

At some point in thinking about this topic, the wires in my brain that think about marketing got crossed with those that think about politics. It might have been this article that Jonah Goldberg wrote about federalism, and how absurd it is for the federal government to interfere in local disputes about things like the proper care arrangements for the six-toed cat population of Key West, Florida. He writes:

Federalism reduces partisanship by shrinking the importance of the federal government. It increases happiness by maximizing the number of people who get to live the way they want to live.Unfortunately, proponents of federalism tend to start the conversation with the really big issues: gay marriage, drugs, guns, abortion, etc.I'm for making all of those things local issues wherever possible, too. But, admittedly, those questions are complicated or emotionally freighted. Some questions do cut to the heart of what it means to be an American.  But many don't. So let's start there.

This struck me as an interesting idea for shaking up the political status quo. However, it has a branding problem. Support for federalism is often associated with the big issues he outlines, and supporters of local decision making are demonized: if, for example, you support federalism in the case of gay marriage, you are really a homophobe who wants to deny civil rights. If you support federalism in gun laws, you are really trying to take firearms from law abiding citizens one state at a time.

So, even though I am a supporter of federalism even in the case of big issues, I agree with Mr. Goldberg that we should start with the less controversial issues. I would go further to say that the taint that has been put on the word 'federalism' might require politicians to think of a new way to promote this cause.

A model for this would be the 'Big Society' movement launched by the Conservative party in the UK. They call this, "a massive transfer of power from Whitehall [the seat of their national government] to local communities." It plays off of the notion of 'Big Government', the idea that in an increasingly tumultuous and challenging world, we need a central power to set the rules that will make things fair and happy for more people. However, I think the challenge we face isn't that people don't like 'government', but that they increasingly don't like 'big'. So implying that society is going to get big implies shifting that stress to a different place.

Almost any institution that gets the word 'big' affixed to it is loathed. Not just Big Government but Big Business (and its tributaries like Big Finance and Big Pharma) and Big Labor. The word, in the context of institutions, has come to imply imbalance and heavy-handedness: the individual is simply too small to push back if one of these forces is arrayed against them. It also suggests facelessness. Who do you appeal to if Big Business screws you over? People are just tools of the system. Any individual bureaucrat might be nice enough, but if he can't help, there's nothing you can do. (Check out this article on rebuilding after Sandy for an example.) People are fed up with Big, and a lot of them feel like it's holding them back.

In the last election, a lot of people seemed to view Obama versus Romney as a choice between Big Government and Big Business, or as a choice between the poor and the rich. Neither of those formulations seemed to favor Romney. So, my promised free advice to Republicans: be the party of Small. Right now, they try to embrace Small Business, which is a start, but what about Small Decision-Making (the label might need work, but I mean keeping decisions and laws local as outlined in the libertarian argument above). What about Small Finance (breaking up Too-Big-To-Fail Banks and treating hedge fund earners like the rest of us)? I'll let someone else find the name, but what about acknowledging that there are only a few issues where government needs to dictate a uniform standard of morality to all 50 states and 300 million Americans? And of course Small Debt, which is self-explanatory.

The beauty of this platform, which I'll call the Freedom to Live Small, is that it allows people to campaign on big and popular principles while acknowledging that local beliefs might not support each manifestation of those principles. So a Republican in New Jersey can be personally in favor of tight gun control, but respect the right of Texans to live differently, and not be a hypocrite. I actually think it would be pretty refreshing to hear a politician on either side of an issue, instead of grandstanding, say, "We believe in X in my state, have passed laws that support it, but I see no reason to impose that belief on the entire country."

But the psychological benefits of Smallness go beyond any particular law that might be enacted (or avoided). It is a promise that we'll have fewer anger-fueled national arguments, that a flawed educational or economic theory won't hamstring the entire country for a generation if it is implemented, that we won't live our lives buckling under the pressure of one powerful institution after another. It is a promise that we can increase the level of mastery over our own lives, that smaller is simpler.

Maybe I'm crazy, and there's not much to this idea. If so, just chalk it up to me being a Big bullshitter.

The Virtues of Being Two-Faced

Politicians are often accused of being two-faced, and President Obama is no different. In particular, his critics say, he calls for unity and bipartisanship out of one side of his mouth, while bashing his opponents as extremists from the other. But what if, rather than being a fault of a shifty politician, two-faced behavior is actually the hallmark of the successful and flexible leader? 

Reihan Salam writes persuasively that Obama demonstrates a trait common to well-regarded rulers from both recent and ancient history: an ability to convince allies he is still on their side even when he makes decisions that they disagree with. He concludes a long post by saying:

Perhaps sphinxlike leaders make the strongest leaders — allies see in them exactly what they want to see, thus giving the leader in question considerable freedom of action. Ronald Reagan’s political success arguably derived from the fact that his conservative supporters saw him as a loyalist and his moderate supporters saw him as pragmatic and flexible when necessary. In a related vein, Barack Obama commands the allegiance of a large number of base liberals, moderates, and culturally conservative minority voters because members of each of these potentially clashing constituencies see him as one of them.

He earlier notes that Obama was able to run ads in local markets that contradict some of his stated positions and would seem likely to offend his allies...and he did not suffer any criticism or loss of support from his core. For example, he ran some ads in Ohio that implied he was more supportive of coal than Romney, but environmentalists didn't blink. If Romney had similarly run an ad in Ohio expressing support for the auto bailout or for raising taxes on the wealthy, there's no way his political allies would have accepted it in silence.

How does Obama get away with seemingly pandering to win support like this? Salam's answer, in part, is that his allies either believe he doesn't mean it, or that he is simply making necessary compromises with political reality, moving the country as far in their direction as is possible. Another way of thinking about this is to say that, for many of his supporters, who Obama is matters more than what he says, or even what he does. And another way of thinking about it is that Obama has a brand that is deep and resonant enough to say seemingly contradictory things.

There are a few lessons marketers can learn about brand-building from Obama's achievement:

• Be really clear about what you stand for, and have an argument for how your actions reflect your beliefs. Although many conservatives felt like Obama was disdainful and combative, he steadfastly stuck to his brand, which was the reasonable compromiser, the "adult in the room". It might have made his opponents want to throw a rock through their TVs, but by fighting to preserve that brand he was able to hold on to moderate voters despite widespread disappointment with the economy. Similarly, a brand that changes what they stand for every time a new competitor enters the market or the environment changes loses its credibility and coherence.
• Understand how far your brand can stretch. Obama would never have been able to appeal to Tea Party types, and wisely didn't try. He found places where he could tweak his messages to appeal to low-attention voters or the undecided without violating his brand.
• Identify the marginal opportunities using "Big Data". Writers have commented at length on how savvy the Obama campaign was in micro-targeting different slivers of the population. Often, they say that Obama was marketed like a consumer product. But a lot of consumer brands could learn from Obama's ability to address regional issues and go beyond broad ethnic and gender categories. Hispanics aren't just Hispanics, they are also women, and parents, and employees. Obama's campaign seemed to appreciate that people have composite identities, and they had the data (and budget) to act on it.

If you want to build a mass market for something, whether it is a politician or a product, it is unlikely that everyone you're trying to convert wants the same thing. So your brand has to have room for a lot of different facets or points of emphasis. Ultimately, a strong identity actually creates more room for flexibility in messaging, because your audience is willing to forgive individual messages that don't connect with them if they are invested in the brand. And if your competitors hear your diverse messages and call you two-faced? You should probably take it as a compliment.

Is Political Marketing Making Us Crazy?

NOTE: This is a series of four planned posts about how we make decisions as a society, and where our political leadership might be taking us. It is meant to be non-partisan, but my conservative-ness might slip through. In the first post, I discussed the difference between team thinking and crisis thinking, and how we seem to be demonstrating a team mentality while saying we are in a crisis. This post considers the possibility that we are being manipulated by sophisticated political marketing. The following posts will examine the possibility that we are entering a slow moving crisis, and that we are in the process of separating into two distinct societies.

It seems like most people, despite their political leanings, agree that things are very bad right now. The economy is lousy, the world is an increasingly unsafe place, and there is a miasma of despair and anger that seems to have enveloped the country. But what if things aren't so bad? Or, to be a bit more specific, what if we're being made to think things are worse than they are by people who want to manipulate those feelings? And, if that's still too cryptic: what if the political marketing gurus being paid vast sums of money to get their candidates elected are trying to make us feel as terrible as possible to get us to vote the way they want?

Modern political consultants have the full range of data and analytics that other marketers have. This data is so powerful it can, for example, help Target determine when a woman is pregnant, and when she is due. So we should expect that political marketers know what issues drive candidate preference in what cohorts, what personal interests we have that campaigns might tap into (I was served a large number of Pet Lovers for Obama ads a few months ago) and even the factors that will make us more or less likely to go to the polls on a given day.

This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but combined with one other factor it becomes toxic. Namely, we don't much like our politicians right now. Recent polling found that almost twice as many people approve of the BP oil spill than approve of Congress.And while approval ratings for our presidential candidates are significantly higher, a lot of that is probably each team approving of their standard bearer. Fixing the reputation of politicians is going to require a long period of better performance and better behavior, and no individual candidate can do much about that in the short run. So the solution is to make sure that voters find your opponent more odious than you.

This is where we confront the big difference between politics and most other forms of marketing: politics is a zero sum game. Since what matters is not getting as many people as possible to vote for you, but to get one more person to vote for you than votes for any other candidate, politicians and their handlers get just as big of an impact from denying an opponent a vote as they do when they win one for themselves. You can't sell a Chevy just by making people hate Toyota, because they can always buy a Honda or a Ford. But Obama wins if he can make enough people hate Romney even if he is almost as unpopular, and vice versa.

So if we can accept that politicians have to navigate an environment where they, as a class, are disdained, and we accept that in a zero sum game the rewards for negative marketing are at least as high as those for positive marketing, and we accept that political marketers know an awful lot about our hot buttons and our voting behavior, then we can assume these marketers are following a strategy that will increase our misery and our belief that our country is falling apart. Why? Because they know that their base is primed to think the worse of the other team, so negative marketing about an opponent isn't going to turn them off. And they know voters who could go either way aren't inclined to think very highly of politicians, so it is easier to confirm that bias by sliming your opponent than it is to build yourself up while your opponent is sliming you. And lastly, they know that the opponent's base is never going to vote for them, so the best they can hope for is to make that base so disgusted that they choose not to vote at all.

We can see this dynamic at play in this year's debate over Medicare. Both sides are working as hard as they can to convince us that their opponent is going to wreck Medicare for seniors. Neither side acknowledges very directly that Medicare is endangered by rapidly rising costs and that painful decisions will have to be made, but rather imply that their plan is the only way to save the program. The negativity-to-solution ratio is dangerously high. Maybe that's why this Wall Street Journal column resonated with me: the author argues that we are being suckered into thinking the parties are further apart than they are, and that most of what we register as serious disagreement is really just noise.

But, you say, even if the Republicans and Democrats aren't offering serious solutions to our urgent problems, we at least know that we have urgent problems, right? Well, perhaps not. One under-discussed possibility is that the problems we have might not be so insurmountable. Maybe there are structural advantages the US has that will reassert themselves over time, or maybe the public is already waking up to the unsustainability of the course we're on and will back needed changes. As a country, we have faced seemingly impossible problems before, and have always managed to pull through and continue our march forward.

After all, the broad trend of human history is positive, and there are a number of reasons to think tomorrow will be better still. At this point, though, I should put my cards on the table: though I am confident we will continue to advance in the long term, I think the problems this country (and really the entire industrialized world) faces are too big to avoid serious pain in the shorter term. Marketing is a powerful tool, but it rarely conjures emotion from nowhere. Rather, it taps into and amplifies the feelings we already have. So our natural feelings of impending doom may be enhanced by the political back-and forth, but they are based in something real: namely, a concern that we've lost control of the country our forebearers built.

I'll explore the implications of that idea in my next two posts.

Believe in Digital, not Facebook

In my own modest way, I'm something of a digital evangelist: I think marketing, even in conservative areas like healthcare, will be fundamentally a digital activity by the end of the decade. And what does it mean for marketing to be digital? Simply that it is targeted to the point of personalization, highly measurable, and allows a big role for customer interaction and feedback. I think a lot of people who would basically agree with that description look at Facebook, and its over 1 billion users, and believe that they're looking at the future of marketing. And yet I think Facebook is ultimately way over-valued and will be a small part of most brands' marketing budgets. So how can I believe in digital and not in Facebook?


Now, lots of people don't like Facebook. Some of it is jealousy: you can't make $100 billion in your IPO without bringing out the haters. (Of course, some people are upset because it now seems their initial valuation might have been based on withholding some more negative forecasts.) But I am on record as hating Facebook before it was cool, writing about how Facebook may not be able to live up to the hype back in 2010, and last year speculating that Facebook's brand will not allow it to become a place where people buy things. My dislike is grounded not (just) in jealousy, but it real questions about their business model.


If I were to break down the logic that has made so many people think Facebook is worth so much, it is this: they have gotten a billion people to reveal tons of information about their lives, which will let companies conduct personal marketing at scale, reaching millions of relevant customers with exactly the right message. But one of my favorite authors, David Goldman (aka Spengler) makes an interesting point challenging that assumption:

No one is likely to learn much about anyone else by reading their Facebook page, or, indeed, by becoming their Facebook "friend". A Facebook page is constructed to maximize our appeal and white out our warts. We learn as little from the pages of Facebook "friends" as prospective employers learn about job candidates from a resume.

Later, he crystalizes the central paradox of Facebook:

[Facebook] attracts hundreds of millions of users by providing them with a platform for narcissism and the means to lie about themselves more persuasively, but it hopes to make money by learning what it is that they really like, the better to show them advertisements. Sadly, the system is worth a great deal of money, but not 100 times earnings.

I said earlier that digital marketing has three pillars: personalization, measurability, and interactivity. Facebook superficially seems to offer those things, but does it really? As people worry more and more about what their Facebook profiles are telling marketers (and family, and potential employers) they are likely to curate their digital selves more and more, stripping out a lot of the quirky or embarrassing details that would help marketers understand them as individuals. So much for personalization.


But Facebook is certainly measurable, right? Well, you get a lot of data from marketing on Facebook, which is good. But unlike search marketing on Google, for example, there isn't a clear answer for the question, "How much is a Like worth on Facebook?" People who really get it know you can probably define the value of that relationship for your brand if you're willing to crunch the numbers, but what people want is someone to say, "It's $8!" so you can build some assumptions into a marketing plan. But I would contend that since any marketing activity on Facebook (for most brands) is going to be geared towards generating goodwill and brand equity, rather than a direct response sale, measuring the value of Facebook marketing is going to be as squishy as measuring other forms of brand-building tends to be.


Finally, interactivity. Surely Facebook wins here, right? Well, for some brands. Brands that can take a point of view and be controversial, or have a large enough "cool factor" that those folks using Facebook as a personal advertisement want to associate with it. But there's a catch: the more brands that are in the conversation, the less attention there is for each brand. And unless you can define a unique audience segment you want to talk to and be consistently relevant and interesting, you're likely to be talking to yourself. So while some brands may develop a cohort of engaged followers, Facebook can't guarantee followers the way TV can guarantee eyeballs or Google can guarantee clicks.


Maybe so maybe there's a reason that a lot of companies, most recently GM, are saying that their Facebook ads aren't working. Of course, it might be that they don't know how to use the platform, but if a large and sophisticated company like GM fails on Facebook, we should expect a lot of other marketers will, as well. That hardly makes it a universal platform, and calls into question whether it will ever live up to that huge valuation.


I believe Facebook can be a tool to help you find your audience in the digital world, but it is hardly the only tool, and it frequently may be the wrong tool. It has fundamental limitations that will keep it from being a one-stop shop for marketers. But digital is much, much bigger than Facebook: it includes everything from online video to search and display ads to niche social media to this humble blog, and within those multitudes is a solution to most any marketing challenge. So go ahead, doubt Facebook along with me if you'd like, but don't let that stop moving you towards the digital future.

Is Your Decaying White Matter Making You Afraid of the Unfamiliar?

If you write about the inner workings of the brain, you soon find out that we don't actually know all that much about how it works. Sure, we have a reasonably good theory of how the brain processes sensory information, and we think we're starting to understand which parts of the brain do what, but how the elements of the brain interact and how all those processes lead up to consciousness is still largely the province of informed speculation.

So it is good to be humble when we theorize about the brain. Especially since we're still finding out things about its function that surprise us. For example, a recent study found out that the white matter of the brain, long treated as the unimportant part, seems to be the basis for the brain's overall "processing speed" (I use the quotes because we should also be careful with the mind-as-computer metaphors) and attention span. Thus, say the researchers, the increasing degeneration of the white matter in the aging brain can lead to, among other things, trouble coping with unfamiliar situations.

The prevailing theory of why people become, in common terms, stuck in their ways in old age is that we develop hard-to-change habits of mind. I've read a number of articles that imply that repeated behavior strengthens neurological pathways that lead to habitual processes, sometimes called "chunking". In other words, the brain forms habits to aid cognition, and sometimes we create bad habits through the same process of repeated behavior. And while this study doesn't undermine that theory, it does offer a complement to it: degeneration of white matter might make it harder to form new habits and leave us more reliant on the old.

Think, for a moment, of what that implies: your mind may inhibit you from comfortably doing something different from what you've done before as you get older. That's somewhat different, and more negative, than the idea that habits are hard to break. It also has implications for marketing: when targeting an older audience, the disruptive techniques that work so well to get the attention of the young might actually be upsetting or disorienting. Not a fun notion for those of us advertising to the baby boomer audience.

The good news, at the individual level, is that scientists believe that cognitive training may help resist white matter decay. But this study provides sobering evidence to support the notion that aging societies (and most societies globally are aging) will be more resistant to what's new and more uncomfortable with change. Which doesn't bode well for those of us who believe some pretty profound changes are necessary.

Reflections on My Next Decade in Advertising

Last year, I wrote two posts about the state of the advertising industry, and why I felt like it might be a good time to get out of it. At the time, I was moving to Google, and wondered if and when I would ever haunt the halls of an ad agency again.

It didn't take very long. I'm now back at my old agency, and as I reread those two posts this morning, I started thinking about what was right and wrong about my not-so-old take on the business. So I wanted to take the time to revisit those ideas, and sketch out why I think advertising has a bright future.

First, a note for those of you who think that advertising as a business is going to be dismantled by tech companies like Google: you are missing out on amazing opportunities to build brands and do more meaningful work because you're in love with old, unaccountable media. Right now, media supply is the constraining factor for most marketers, meaning you have to spend a lot to connect with the right people. With the improvements in targeting (which moving into the offline world as well) along with the explosion of engaging content, it will be increasingly possible to spend less in reaching your audience. With less money going into buying your reach, it leaves more to create content your audience might actually enjoy, even seek out. This should be a great thing for advertising agencies. (And if you don't believe this is possible at mass audience scale, don't believe me, believe P&G, which has already moved pretty far down this path.)

Second, a little bit of self-criticism. Last year, I wrote:

What do I mean about 'relationships before reach'? Simply put, that the number of people who saw your ad is no longer the standard for evaluating success. A campaign should be winning over converts, true believers who will help advocate for your brand. If you have a great product, this is very doable. Just create the story of why your product can improve your customers' lives, put the product in their hands, and watch the fireworks. (Easier said than done, I know.)

This now strikes me as a bit of digital magical thinking (and there's a lot of that out there) that isn't supported by the way we actually live. For example, I'm a big fan of Narragansett Beer. I follow them on Facebook, read their blog, and ask for my wife to go out-of-state to buy me some as a Christmas present. I am as much of an advocate as they can reasonably hope for, and yet as far as I can tell I haven't influenced anyone to go out and buy the stuff. Now, I'm sure they have other advocates who do drive sales for them, but activating your true believers is not often going to be enough to build your brand in a competitive marketplace unless your product is truly extraordinary. Like, "This pill made me grow five inches, cleared my skin, boosted my IQ and healed my broken leg," extraordinary. Otherwise, you're still going to want to get your message out their to a lot of people who have never heard of you before, which means reach still matters. A lot.

So what is the next decade going to hold? Well, last year I wrote: "What is this illness [in the advertising industry]? In short, it is a business model that is predicated on gaining efficiencies through scale, when that scale is likely to prove inefficient for the indefinite future."Advertising folks have made a lot of money because they could navigate the complexities of the 20th century communications world and get a message out there. As I wrote then, there is going to be pain as the models built up over decades collapse. But we can now reach consumers more efficiently, though the path to do so is often even more complex than the old model. So, I anticipate spending the next chunk of my career answering two questions:

1. How do we reach the right people at the moments when they're receptive to what we have to say?
2. How do we delight them once they've given us their attention?

A few people have started to figure this out. But there's lots of room for innovation, and the only sure way to fail at it is not to try, while the path to success probably involves failing fast. (By the way, I predict "fail fast" will become the new "think outside the box" in the next few years.)

My bedrock belief is that audience attention has replaced media spend as the limiting factor on advertising's success. So our starting question has to evolve from, "What do I want to say and where can I tell it to my audience?" to, "What does my audience care about and how can my brand connect with that?" That shifted focus will cause a cascade of other changes in the business, but ultimately make advertising more enjoyable to make and to consume.

But I'm still thinking all this through, people, so feel free to try and change my mind. Where is advertising going, and how do we get there?

On Meaningful Work

Next week, I'm leaving the best company in the country to work for. I didn't quite make it a year. Frankly, though there were plenty of reasons, the simplest reason why is that I wasn't happy at Google. Sure, the food is great, the people are nice and smart, and there are plenty of cool perks. But none of that is sufficient if you don't find the work you're doing engaging, and you think another job can offer that.


In the course of researching this post, I came upon the following anecdote:

Three men are found smashing boulders with iron hammers.  When asked what they are doing, the first man says, "Breaking big rocks into little rocks." The second man says, "Feeding my family." The third man says, "Building a cathedral."

Most of the time, I couldn't shake the feeling I was just smashing rocks at Google, and I tried to feel better by telling myself I was doing it to provide for my loved ones. But I never felt I was building a cathedral here, or even a house. In some ways, Google's cathedral has already been built: their search engine is one of the greatest gifts to the modern world imaginable. And I know the leadership envisions building other ones just as impressive. It is likely that the failing to see past the rocks is mine.


In the same article where I found that story, the author, a psychologist who studies what makes work meaningful, outlines three principles:

First, the work we do must make sense; we must know what's being asked of us and be able to identify the personal or organizational resources we need to do our job.  Second, the work we do must have a point; we must be able to see how the little tasks we engage in build, brick-by-brick if you will, into an important part of the purpose of our company. Finally, the work that we do must benefit some greater good; we must be able to see how our toil helps others, whether that's saving the planet, saving a life, or making our co-workers' jobs easier so that they can go home and really be available for their families and friends.

 A lot of the meaning in work, then, has to come from within. If I can see myself contributing to the welfare of my coworkers, it might matter less that I am bored by the tasks I need to complete during the day. But it would be wise if more companies thought through how they can make a job sensible, purposeful and beneficial. Other researchers have looked at the link between a sense of meaning at work and job performance, and found that productivity rises significantly when employees are engaged in work they find meaningful. And yet most companies look to "sugar high" motivators like perks and bonuses to provide lasting motivation: 

When we asked 669 managers from companies around the world to rank five employee motivators in terms of importance, they ranked “supporting progress” dead last. Fully 95 percent of these managers failed to recognize that progress in meaningful work is the primary motivator, well ahead of traditional incentives like raises and bonuses.

If I worked in HR, I would make it my business to figure out what meaning my best employees found in their work, and try to instill that sense of purpose in as many other people as possible.


So, the last question: why do I think I'll find more meaning in my new role (returning to the advertising agency I left for Google) than I did in this one? Well, I'm going to take my direction from this amazing Clayton Christensen article and use the uncertainty and change in advertising as a chance both to share what I've learned and to learn from others. Here's Christensen's advice:

Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.

I think my life will be judged, by myself and those I care about most, by how I grew as a person, what I built, and who I was able to help. I'm going to a place where I think I can accomplish a lot in all three areas. I can't wait to dive back in.


So my question for you: what do you think makes work (and life) meaningful?

Reflections on a Decade in Advertising: Part 2

In the first part of my rant/reflection/ramble, I laid out what I think is a big problem with the ad agency business model, and promised some potential solutions in this post. Then I spent the next week or so panicking about my complete lack of answers to a problem many smarter people than me have failed to solve. I did have a few initial, sketchy ideas that I hoped would take me somewhere:


1) Create autonomous groups of people to take on the new media world outside of the main organization (I covered off on this briefly in the last post)

2) Experiment on yourself

3) Re-imagine what market research should be

4) Think relationship before reach (unless your product stinks)

5) Sell the audience along with the creative

Let me start by saying that I've given a bit more thought to idea 1, and I think there may be something more important that just creating a skunkworks-type group at some remove from regular agency operations, and that is to create competition. If I were running an agency, I'd want 2-3 groups assigned to selling and implementing digital and social campaigns to existing accounts. I would compare performance and provide additional scale to the group that did this best. I think this would work because ad agency folks, especially on the account side, are pretty competitive by nature, and I think would both like to best their colleagues in something like this, and would be incentivized by the financial rewards for getting it right. But whatever approach agencies take to building a stable business model around digital communications, let me just repeat that expecting the whole shop to be cajoled into becoming digital experts might be like expecting to turn a freighter on a dime.

So on to my second idea, which is inspired by my brother and his penchant for tattooing. When I asked him how he decides who to trust to tattoo him, he said, "I'd never let anyone do it until I saw the ink he put on his own body." If you want a client to trust you with their brand's reputation in this hypersocial world, prove your skills are solid by applying them to yourself, and your agency's brand. I give my old shop, CDM, credit here, since they were willing to dive into the social platforms. But I'd suggest agencies should go a lot farther, and view digital and social tools as one of their top tools for lead generation and relationship building.

My third point is that market research should be fundamentally reimagined, and it is a point near and dear to my heart. Market research is often treated as some hermetically sealed clean room where every variable must be controlled. But this makes market research essentially sterile and detached, bearing little resemblance to the messy, complex, fast-changing digital world we now have to work in. So instead of doing focus-group-facility, behind the glass market research, develop pilots to test ideas in the real world, or conduct intimate tracking research with a smaller number of subjects. Do anything to get into the real world and figure out how people actually use, think about, talk about and share your brands. Remember, the program might be the idea, so you need to have a clearer picture of how people are actually going to interact with that idea.

What do I mean about 'relationships before reach'? Simply put, that the number of people who saw your ad is no longer the standard for evaluating success. A campaign should be winning over converts, true believers who will help advocate for your brand. If you have a great product, this is very doable. Just create the story of why your product can improve your customers' lives, put the product in their hands, and watch the fireworks. (Easier said than done, I know.) But if your product stinks, or is only mediocre, your efforts to build a relationship will backfire, because your customer will resent you trying to force them to have a relationship with a product they dislike. If you're selling some me-too piece of garbage, then forget what I said and go for reach.

Lastly, I have a bit of an out-there thought that I nevertheless think might help many agencies thrive in the new advertising ecosystem that is emerging. Simply put, establish independent channels to target customers that can be sold to customers. For example, my old agency was focused on marketing to health care professionals. But we had no relationship with that audience that lived outside of each client's individual campaign. What if the agency (perhaps in collaboration with others to gain a critical mass of brands) created a knowledge exchange that physicians could sign up for to get product updates, request samples, sign up to participate in upcoming trials, and simplify other interactions they want to have with pharmaceutical brands? I'd think that would be valuable for that audience and for the agency's clients, and it makes more sense for it to be done by an agency (or a group of them) than by a client, who of course has a limited roster of brands. (There are, of course, a hundred practical issues that would need to be overcome, but I don't think any are insurmountable.)

So, those are my ideas. Perhaps some or all are terrible...I have written this post in bursts over several late evenings. But my hope is that they inspire some thinking, and challenge the notion that the agency business model essentially is what it is. The new digital framework cannot be twisted and bent to fit the way agencies have grown comfortable operating. Transformation of the sort that is needed is wrenching, but crucial to the long-term survival of what is still a great industry.

Reflections on a Decade in Advertising: Part 1

In 2002, in the midst of a recession caused by the implosion of the tech bubble and the September 11th attacks, I was about to graduate college. I had for some time imagined I would be seeking a job in journalism, but I had also gotten engaged while in school, and the road to success as a reporter seemed long and uncertain, to say the least. After putting off thoughts of my future for as long as possible, I went to the career services office at my alma mater and asked the counselor there what, exactly, I was qualified to do. Almost without hesitation he said, "Go work at an ad agency."

I found it was a business I loved, and only occasionally loathed. And I did well enough that I was able to move up, specialize as an account planner, and avoid the various layoffs and cutbacks that caused pain to a lot of other people in the field.

But even though advertising was very good to me, I think it is fundamentally an unhealthy industry right now. That is not to say that advertising will go away: if anything, it will continue to become more ubiquitous as time goes by, largely because people like to be given things for free. But the model that the industry has adopted is fundamentally out of whack with what clients want and need, and the result is likely to be a lingering illness that lasts for years to come.

What is this illness? In short, it is a business model that is predicated on gaining efficiencies through scale, when that scale is likely to prove inefficient for the indefinite future.

Most ad agencies go through the following life cycle: they start up with a small group of smart and talented people who have a vision for "the right way to do things". It doesn't necessarily matter what the vision is, so long as they believe in it and are passionate about it. That passion helps them to work their butts off for the few clients they have, and do great creative work. That attracts more clients, and they grow. Now, as they grow, they make the following tradeoff: the people they hire will never be as invested in what they're doing as they are, but they allow the scale to let the founders provide the high level ideas to more clients.

This eventually hits a limit, too, because the founders are spread thinner, and it is hard to bring along new people who contribute ideas. (And if you have them, they want to be treated like a partner or they don't stay.) But at this point, you have a lot of ideas, and you can sell variations on those ideas to new clients. (If you don't believe there's a lot of idea recycling in advertising, then check out this site and ask yourself why the satire works so well.)

More importantly, in the advertising world that's fading away, you could also sell them an implementation plan that more or less came off the shelf: this much TV, this much print and out of home, etc. (Or, in the healthcare world I just left, it went: do a great sales aid for the reps, place some journal ads, blow out a booth for a convention, and maybe some direct mail if you're feeling frisky.) Because the ad agencies launch campaigns all the time, and clients do it rarely, that expertise could be packaged and rolled out without much modification.

So now you have a nice, big ad agency with lots of prominent clients. What next? Well, a holding company comes along and makes a big, juicy offer to buy it up. Because an ad agency has no physical assets and could be worth nothing if it loses its clients, the founders have a hard time saying no, so they usually accept. And the holding company introduces additional efficiencies: it brings expertise and scale in finance, IT, benefits and other operational areas that every agency needs but are not core to the business.

So now you have a very large ad agency owned by a company that controls dozens of other ad agencies. And its business model gets pulled out from under it in two ways:

First, its ability to sell a 'paint by numbers' implementation plan is destroyed by the proliferation of media. Not only is there just a lot more media out there to think about, but now clients are confused and asking a lot more questions, which means each plan needs to be thought through and given a lot of senior-level scrutiny. So that mid-level account person can no longer be trusted to bang out a PowerPoint deck featuring the same basic plan in new wrapping paper. That's a major efficiency hit.

Second, a lot of these new media options call for fundamentally different ideas than what you see on TV or in print. However, as I learned watching "Everything's a Remix", we need to imitate and combine to generate new creative ideas. Since we don't have a large store of successful social media or mobile campaigns to draw from (yet), sometimes the new ideas are hard to come by. And many people who have made good careers off of the old way are still trying to find ways to squeeze their ideas into the new media world rather than accepting they need to start fresh. At any rate, the efficiencies that come from being able to remix, recycle and reformulate existing ideas evaporates when those ideas don't work in the new media.

This post has gotten damned long, and I'm going to write a second part with some ideas on how to solve this business problem. But I think the core of the answer come's from Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma: big companies need to create small, autonomous units that can take these problems head on, even if they disrupt the existing business model. Commanding hundreds of people to 'think digital' or to 'sell a Facebook campaign' isn't going to change anything. People need to have the chance to do it in an environment removed from the normal pressures of the agency's day-to-day business. Because that business isn't sustainable in the medium term, anyway.