Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [107]
D’Arcy took me to a screening room to show me some examples. For a project for Johnson & Johnson his group created a series of additional creative venues to complement an existing ad campaign geared toward mothers. This included a short film that complemented a campaign initiated by J&J’s agency Lowe & Partners, as well as customized print executions with Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, and People. For the prime-time comedy period on the Time Warner–owned TBS network, they came up with a novel way of framing how ads would run. To appear during the selected “Very Funny” sitcoms, the commercial had to be deemed (and branded) “Very Funny Advertising.” The TBS Web site even includes a link for the “Department of Humor Analysis.”
TBS’s goal was to keep viewers watching during breaks by attempting to make the commercials as entertaining as the program. The consumer benefits by not having to watch as many ads that suck. In this instance, it worked. According to D’Arcy, commercials that ran during those periods had 81 percent higher recall and likability than those that randomly ran. “It’s getting to the point where viewers have such an expectation of excellence that every moment has got to be quality or they will tune out. We call it ROA: Return on Attention.”
But still, I said, most ads do truly suck. “Maybe, but a day won’t be far off where a media company can have the ability to tell a brand, ‘I have data that says your ad lost us a million viewers during such and such a program, so why should I run it?’”
I asked if mainstream ad agencies should consider their creative enterprise a threat. “Not at all,” said D’Arcy.
“No one is going to replace AORs [agencies of record],” added Partilla. “But to succeed moving forward, media companies are going to have to act more like ad agencies, and ad agencies are going to have to act more like media companies.”
“And,” D’Arcy continued, “they’re going to have to accept that to a certain degree, they’re going to have to be polygamous. Agencies historically have been monogamous, but now that so much is open source, there is no way a single advertising entity can or should do everything for a brand.”
But who controls the DNA profile of what a brand stands for if there are so many players creating messages on its behalf? The chief marketing officer (CMO)?
“Exactly,” D’Arcy said. “The most important brand shepherd used to be the chief creative officer at an agency, but now it’s the CMO who has to maintain consistency and integrity among the many voices working against the brand.”
I told them about a panel I’d watched in Cannes in which the moderator, Sir Martin Sorrell, head of the WPP holding company, asked marketing leaders from Yahoo!, AOL, Microsoft, and Google if they intended to make creative inroads on the traditional agency model. While the online panelists all said no, Partilla was skeptical. “They’d be crazy not to,” he said.
D’Arcy walked me to the elevator. I asked, “So, you like this?”
“Absolutely. At an agency we gave our ideas away. Here we’re compensated for them as long as they’re relevant and successful.”
A tone rang, and the door opened on a full elevator. As I squeezed on, D’Arcy was still talking. “Imagine the money Leo Burnett would have made if, instead of giving his ideas away, he would have told his client, ‘I’m going to lease you the monthly rights to the likeness of the Jolly Green Giant.’”
When the door closed, someone standing behind me said, “A shitload.”
The Boiling Point of Wow
Fahrenheit 212
From the outside, the epicenter of what’s next doesn’t look particularly futuristic or innovative. Especially on a humid Tuesday morning in Lower Manhattan when the skies were far from visionary blue and the Broadway traffic crept past its nondescript, street-level entrance at an unenlightened,