Let Them Power It

Most companies who want to tell people what they’re doing, who want to advertise, a straightforward and necessary enough thing, don’t really trust the Web. It’s a big, scary place. Chaotic. . . . a place where people do and say what they want.

The advertising agencies, whose job it is to help these companies, are freaked (big time) because they don’t know how to do creative work that’s successful, by some measure everyone agrees on, out on that big wide Web.

And, more importantly, they don’t know how to do successful creative work that they can bill for at the level that sustains them. That’s stressful.

So far, this panic is leading to two natural reactions and both are overreactions. The first is go big on the technology, as in, “If this is all about technology, then we’re going to own those bits, and nets, and targeting thingies.”

The second reaction is to go back to what’s known: big ideas, design, production. It’s an impulse to reclaim and re-own what made agencies what they are. Their leadership is rallying them around the idea that they are the ones who have always known and can deliver what customers want.

The first is a push into the future, the second is a retreat into the past. Neither will work.

And not because the tech ain’t great and the creative work ain’t hot, it is. Can be.

It’s because the vision of these two things, how they need to work together, is completely off. The easiest way, I think, to explain why is simply to say we aren’t getting where the energy for the next advertising revolution is coming from. It’s not coming from us, it’s coming from them. Them, those people . . . out there.

We are knocking ourselves out building the technology and designing the creative, when we really need to take a little of the technology and a bit of the creative and give it up, give it over to them.

Isn’t the point of advertising, of marketing, to get people’s attention, then engage, then promote action? If you want to do that on the Web, you don’t need gobs of big-idea creative, what you need is the right kind of media and the creative ways to catalyze connections.

You certainly don’t need robobots tracking coffee drinkers down with cream as they traverse the Web. Not only does no one care - it’s worse - they run.

Instead, what you need is to take a bag of coffee beans and let me find it in the places I like to be, through the people I know, and let me know that each bean I consume reduces the debt by $1, at which point that digital bag of beans is going to follow me around the Web in the most timely and interesting ways.

You get what I mean (I hope). But let me say it another way: On the Web, the creative and the tech only works, adds value, when it puts me to work. It’s the only way I can use the Web and get what I need out of it. Give it to me, serve it up in all of its relevant, remixable authenticity, and I will do exactly what you want, more.