Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [6]
The enthusiasm of the digital team was boundless. And why shouldn’t it have been? They were creative. And they were hard-core techies. And they knew what the rest of us did not. For them, whether this pitch succeeded was irrelevant. They got it. They were part of the first wave of the next big thing. They had skills that were already in demand and would soon make many of them rich. They knew advertising. They knew the Internet and the magical potential of Flash video technology.
They knew that the culture of big-agency advertising as we knew it—a media constant, relatively predictable world of catchy jingles, celebrity endorsements, and expensive TV campaigns lionized by the fictional likes of Mr. Blandings (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, 1948), Darrin Stephens (Bewitched, 1964–72), and Don Draper (Mad Men, 2007–2008, set in 1959–62)—was about to be blown into a billion pixilated, Nielsen-rating bits.
Make that bytes.
They knew that this was the death of Darrin Stephens and the birth of all sorts of crazy shit.
Who knew that in the coming years the major networks would lose so much of their audience that they’d resort to running ads to get people to watch their ads? Or that viewer attention spans would grow so fickle and the use of digital video recorders (DVRs) would double almost every year? Or that we’d see the advent of the five-second spot? Or that the future of broadcast television might be saved (or killed) by something called an iPod? Who knew that while network ad revenues continued to shrink, more than $25 billion would be spent online in 2007 (Bharat Book research) and that the line between what’s digital and what isn’t would literally disappear? Who knew that within a few years advertising on something called social-networking sites would surpass $2 billion annually?
Who knew in the fall of 2000 that something called Google would become one of the most dominant players in the history of advertising, or that advertising holding companies would gamble hundreds of millions of dollars on digital agencies in hopes that they wouldn’t get left behind? Who could have imagined that a caveman from an insurance company commercial would get his own sitcom (although we all knew, once he did, that it would suck)? Or that millions of people would drop everything and visit Burger King’s Subservient Chicken Web site every day? Or that consumers who zapped commercials on network TV would also use the Internet to seek and watch and rewatch and post and forward to friends other commercials tens of millions of times? Or that agencies that paid lip service to clients with a jury-rigged digital division were about to go out of business, replaced by exclusively digital agencies, or better yet, agencies at which every medium was treated equally, where digital was part of every creative person’s repertoire and the transformative advertising idea was everything?
I’m pretty sure those guys did. Because that day, when most of us were dreading what lay ahead, they never stopped smiling.
Once treated like second-class citizens in the agency hierarchy, the unsung digital folks at agencies all around the country were about to change everything. They would not need to try to find a way to fit in at mainstream agencies; mainstream agencies would have to find a way to fit into the digital world. Call it the Revenge of the Interactives. I mean the Experientials.
But then a funny thing happened that day. My “traditional” team started smiling, too. They got into it. They fed off the experiential team’s thoughts. They began to come up with breakthrough concepts that riffed off or perfectly complemented our other new-media ideas. Sometimes my team came up with the experiential component, and the experiential guys came up with the TV idea, or the headline, or the punch line. Sometimes they finished one another’s sentences or turned