What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [79]
The best way to burnish a brand is no longer to rub up against media properties like Vogue or the Super Bowl. The best way today is to rub up against people: Sally the blogger or Joe the Facebook friend. The medium is the message and the customer is the medium. Sally is the new Vogue.
Separate the functions of an ad agency today—media buying, research and data, and creative. What happens to each?
Media buying, under Locke’s theory, now becomes more important than messaging. When your customer is your ad, media doesn’t mean content, it means people. Networks of people will become a force in advertising. Already, media companies, including Forbes and Reuters, are running blog ad networks for marketers. A group of fans on Facebook discussing a product is worth a thousand ads.
Each company must take responsibility for its own research and data. It must know everything it can about its customers and how its products are bought, seen, and used. This knowledge is more than raw numbers derived from snooping on behaviors, commissioning surveys, or quizzing random customers behind focus-group mirrors. We’re not data. We’re people. So understanding will come from relationships. Ask your customers. Listen. Remember it’s a gift economy, and they will be generous if you deserve their generosity.
Creative? Messaging? The more you hand that over to your customers, the better. Apple produces great and entertaining commercials. But in 2004 a teacher named George Masters made a now-legendary commercial for the iPod Mini, filled with psychedelic hearts, that was in some ways more powerful than professional ads because it was made with personal passion.
What becomes of advertising? For the first time, the ad economy may contract. In the past as new media emerged, dollars shifted from old to new—newspapers to TV, TV to internet—but didn’t leave the market, according to Bob Garfield, cohost of public radio’s On the Media and critic for Advertising Age. Garfield observed that while old media shrink, new media are not ready for big advertisers, and big advertisers are not ready for new media. As a result, dollars will disappear into the chasm between. Garfield called this advertising’s “chaos scenario.”
In addition, as relationships replace advertising, spending will decrease. The new abundance of media online will drive prices down as supply increases and demand decreases. Google’s systems will target advertising more efficiently, reducing cost. Opening the market with Google auctions also lowers cost. These savings will not be plowed back into marketing but will need to go toward lowering prices because the internet gives customers unprecedented ability to comparison shop and price will matter more. Some of those savings must be devoted to both improving the product, which now acts as the ad, and improving relationships with customers, who are the new ad agency.
The agency and advertising need to get out of the way in the relationship between companies and customers. Agencies may help solve problems—teaching companies how to build networks with customers, assisting them with product launches—but once the consultation is done, the good consultant leaves town.
Tobaccowala suggested agencies remake themselves as networks. He quoted University of Chicago economist Ronald Coase in his seminal 1937 essay, “The Nature of the Firm”—which is also quoted in Wikinomics, Here Comes Everybody, and, it would seem, half the business books published lately. Coase reasoned that firms exist and grow when internal friction is less than external friction, when it is easier and cheaper to deal with insiders than with outsiders. “In a networked world, it’s easier for us to work with outside people than inside people,” Tobaccowala said. “Google, even in its grandiosity, still is a company that believes in forms of partnering.” Agencies and other companies, he said, will look more like Hollywood studios, where 80 percent of what goes into a movie comes from outsiders. Google even provides technology to make such collaboration possible. So