SadAge
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Oh fuck it all any way
Advertising, as a culture, is boring.
It’s one that fancies itself both serious and studious, but still fun and irreverent, while it’s actually none of these things. Instead it’s just as vapid and intolerant of change as any other, but wrapped in petty shows of meaningless flourish which it rewards in self-aggrandizing awards shows.
But it’s easy to make fun of, so at least that.
Which is why we need sites like Agency Wank.
The thing is, if you’ve worked in advertising for any length of time, you’ve written something like the garbage on AW, or said something like it, you’ve probably even believed it for a while, and that’s fine. Every profession has its own embarrassment. But if you can’t eventually realize the situation for what it is and at least laugh about it, then you’re an asshole.
So I was bummed then when I went to the AW website to see why they hadn’t been updating and found this:
I’ve been blown away by the number of views and shares over the past week.
However not everyone has taken it so well and unfortunately I’ve had to go into hiding.
It appears I’ve been targeted by a very angry irishman.
http://theescapepod.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/agencywank-moi-surely-not/
Do not worry though, for one day I will return to clean the wank from our industry for good.
Until that day arrives, remember this…
As a man, I’m flesh & blood; I can be ignored, destroyed. But as a symbol I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting.
I guess we get the blogs we deserve.
But any way, this bums me out for two reasons: first is that this was a blog that was genuinely funny, and it was genuinely funny because it was true.
The second reason is that the link he mentions which points to an insecure, threatening post on the agency blog for The Escape Pod (which only reenforces all the reasons we needed Agency Wank in the first place).
The whole post is terrible, but I feel like the end stands out as particularly bad:
But we understand that the person who created this tumblr might be a bit junior. And might not have the best judgement.
So we’d like to invite the creators of this bloggity tumblr thing to come to The Escape Pod for a drink and a laugh.
Afterwards, I personally will kick the living s**t out of you. It’ll be a hoot!
So yeah, it’s both bad and poorly written, but you want to know the absolute worst part of this whole thing?
It’s not that The Escape Pod seems to think putting commercials on YouTube is revolutionary.
It’s not even that using the phrase “bloggity tumblr thing” completely undermines their argument that they’re “the agency of the present”.
It’s not the line “I personally kick the living s**t out of you.” which makes me wonder why you’d go through the effort of childishly asterisking out the word “shit” when you’ve just threatened someone with physical violence on your company’s blog?
It’s not even their cheap and unfunny shot that the author of Agency Wank is “a bit junior” - which, even if he is, only means that he’s understood more about this industry in his short few years that most of do in our careers.
It’s none of these things.
The very worst part of this whole thing is that when The Escape Pod centered their dumb slogan, they included the “TM”.
That, my friends, is fucking amateur hour.
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Coke Wants in on Storytelling Last week, Coca-Cola took an intriguing approach to the growing trend of “brands as publishers.”
Calling it Coca-Cola Journey, Coke married the staid, static philosophy of a corporate website with the dynamic, fluidity of a blog. While the Atlanta-based soft drink company has its footprints all over the digital world — it has a robust presence on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn — it also wanted to build its own online home, a welcoming place for its fans.
While it may be a great PR move, there’s also value for its 1.2 million monthly unique visitors. There’s a wide range of content topics — entertainment, brands, business, community, environment, health, history, innovation, sports — that Coke employees write about and curate from around the Web. The stories themselves either discuss the company or issues that the company cares about.
Coke is now firmly entrenched in the storytelling business, minus the whole ad selling aspect. And keep in mind that these are Coke-focused stories, and not journalism, which, some say, is exactly the point. One agency executive, who requested anonymity because his agency represents a competitor, told me that “this is content that is meant to be discoverable and shareable, optimized around topics that Coke feels shows their brand in the best light.”
Click through to read the rest.
How you do social media when your main product isn’t content: Build lots of content anyway.
I sorta already said I what I needed to say about this a couple days ago, but I’m going to say more because apparently I have no impulse control.
Last time I was focused on the customer aspect of things: why people genuinely will not give a shit about this: people buy Coke because they want delicious, delicious sugar water. If they want stories they’ll go to Tumblr, or Twitter, or CNN, or Reddit, or any of the other like million places for whom making stories is their reason for being.
This reminds me of the story of the Subaru SVX - which, if you’re on Tumblr, you’re too young to remember. The SVX was Subaru’s first entry into the sports car market, and was most notable for it’s weird windows. It was also notable for no one buying it. The problem wasn’t the car itself, which was fine for it’s era, it’s that people who wanted sports cars didn’t think of Subaru, and people who wanted a Subaru didn’t want a sports car. Same thing here.
But beyond that, there are some very practical, unsexy reasons this isn’t going to be the next thing.
The first is that Coke’s agency(ies) have no cultural support for running long-term projects like this. I say this with 13 years of agency experience. All agencies are designed to do one thing: get a brief from a client, make the project outlined in that brief, and then move on to the next project. This is why agencies make great commercials and great nothing else. It’s a weird thing to say, and to dive into the why’s of it could be a book, but it’s true, there is simply no cultural knowledge or support for agencies to create and manage long-term, iterative projects.
The second other reason this isn’t going to work is that Coke has basically the same problem that agencies do. Where as agencies only real culture is making commercials or things that look like commercials, Coke’s only culture is making and selling soda, and at the end of the day, anything can’t be tied to selling more soda is going to be cut. Unless someone in Coke or someone in the agency that made this, can show a line from this to sales, someone is going to start asking things like “why this instead of something cheaper?”
And, really, that’s a pretty good question.
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Confessions of a Big-Agency Top Digital Exec | Digiday On Chief Digital Officers at big agencies: There isn’t a “single example of an innovation person or dept doing well”
File this under “Least Surprising Article of the Day” for any one who’s ever worked in an agency.
While there are tons of great quotes throughout, I thought this one:
If you are not 100 percent confident that you can deliver a piece of innovation…
set up the really deep, unspoken, core-level problem perfectly. For everyone involved - from clients, to agencies, to small digital shops, “innovation” in this industry seems to be a specific thing delivered rather than a fundamental approach.
Regardless though, the question I really wanted this article to ask is: the implication here is that agencies should be behaving like software companies, that they should be doing something other than T.V. spots, and I’m not sure there is any evidence for this at all.
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“I feel like I’m watching it turn into Digitas” — A friend’s description of his agency. I love that “Digitas” has become an insult.
