Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga, recently announced to The Daily Telegraph that he wants Zynga to become a verb.
"I want people to ‘Zynga’ each other and for the word to become completely aligned with gaming."
This is quite a big shift from where he's been and where gaming has been traditionally. Like record labels, gaming brands have had a tough time trying to create strong parent brands, only Rockstar and EA have managed to do it.
It's likely that many of the million of Farmville players don't even know Zynga is behind the game and even if they do, they aren't likely to substitute Zynga for Farmville anytime soon.
It's also somewhat arrogant to believe that Zynga will eclipse all other gaming brands in other categories and seems unlikely that the brand will dominate the social gaming sphere for ever.
However, stranger things have happened and maybe Pincus is planning an advertising onslaught with a global television campaign supported by online takeovers, spectacular billboards and events. Who knows? But Zynga's going to have to do something radical, if it wants that verb status.
Posted by Ed Cotton
If you take the big theme in corporate boardrooms- ROI, add onto it the possibility of brilliant data viz and then think about the iPad as the device of choice for high flying CMOs, with this you have to think that the Excel spreadsheet is going the way of the dodo as a measurement tool and interface,
Instead you are going to have a real-time live feed that looks glorious and tells you everything you need to to know at a touch of a button. There will be no need to wait for this week's numbers, the hourly numbers will be right in front of you and not only that, they will be correlated and comparable with your media investments, your daily brand performance and your social media stats.
Data is the new gold and those who find ways to make it more user-friendly and relevant are going to be onto something big.
Everyone knows the social media measurement industry has expanded to the point where there are now a variety of options and choice, further evidence of the maturity of this business is that we are now seeing services develop for specific verticals.
One nice example, comes from Next Big Sound, you can see their key dashboard visuals at the top of this post.
They describe what they do as follows:
We believe in the power of data to transform the music industry.
The listening, discovery, and purchase decisions of millions of consumers has moved online and the pace of this transition is only accelerating.
Next Big Sound provides a centralized place to monitor all the behavior and activity happening for artists both online and off.
This is just an example that shows one piece of the puzzle heading down a very vertical avenue. We are likely to see more of this because industries will want to benchmark their performance against category rivals.
We are still a long ways from the single real-time dashboard, but when this arrives, it's going to be very interesting to see what happens. Marketing teams are going to have the data to make informed decisions like never before and this new future offers both promise and peril for those in the communication business, depending on how clients to choose to use it.
There's going to be a real broad need for disciplined data teaching, learning and transfer of best practices with clients and inside communication agencies.
Data Analytics will have to move from the back office to the front of the house.
Posted by Ed Cotton
Peter Meholz of Adaptive Path wrote a blog post a couple of days back which slammed agencies for operating a business devoid of user understanding. It contained so many quotable gems that it was impossible to ignore and and of course, generated a flurry of coverage on blogs and Twitter.
The gems included:
"When criticizing ad agencies, you have to begin at the core — advertising, as it is widely practiced, is an inherently unethical and, frankly, poisonous endeavor that sees people as sheep to be manipulated, that vaunts style over substance, and deems success to be winning awards."
"Such poor treatment of staff is a big part of the reason that ad agencies end up dissatisfying their clients. Clients are sold a shiny flashy bill of goods by slick senior folks who are then never to be seen again. In their place are squads of junior and mid-level designers, working across multiple projects, with little chance to reflect and improve their skills."
"One thing I haven’t yet touched on is the legacy ad agency practice where the art director and copywriter are the voices that matter, and the rest of the team exists to serve their bidding. This might be fine in communications work, but in user experience, where utility is king, this means that the people who best understand user engagement are often the least empowered to do anything about it, while those who have little true understanding of the medium are put in charge. In user experience, design teams need to recognize that great ideas can come from anywhere, and are not just the purview of a creative director."
I found Peter's comments a little strong and somewhat wide of the mark especially in our case, we've had frequent conversations with Adaptive Path about working together and ended up doing a considerable amount of work on user understanding with one of the founders of the company.
Anyway, here's was the response I wrote as a comment on Peter's blog.
These are confusing times.
It's harder than ever to define terms like, "user", "consumer", "creative" and "agency".
In the chaos of this confusion, it's very easy to be convinced that the world is bi-polar with the user advocates and deep experience creators at one end and the traditional "Mad Av" ad creative teams at the other..
This polarized world is fast becoming a dated concept, the smartest agencies get that this isn't a zero sum game with one winner, but instead the goal is often for a hybrid "best in breed" approach.
User understanding is vital and important, but it's just the start of a conversation on top of which creative flair has to be added. The marriage of deep user understanding with leading edge creative talent is for now and the future, but the switch isn't going to flip over just like that.
There will be a gradual shift- television and television advertising hasn’t and isn’t going away- in-fact- various research studies confirm that both TV viewing (on all formats) and appreciation of television advertising are on the increase.
Without advertising- who is going to discover the great user experiences? As any app developer will tell you, it's hard to get discovered, even if you have a great experience.
Advertising in some form will be required to capture people's imaginations and attention. What form it takes will change, but the audio-visual message has tremendous power- despite the digital revolution- no communication format in the digital world has ever come close and clients know it.
Ad agencies as the pure entities you’ve defined- might die out, but this is unlikely as their skills will still be required, but perhaps to a lesser degree than we see today.
However, you have to consider giant agency holding companies are already firmly playing in the digital experience field. At the top, they are smart enough to know where the world is heading and they are covering their bases. Quite simply, they have enough people who “get it”.
In summary, the best ad agencies out there embrace or will soon embrace the “hybrid” model where multiple skill sets create a multitude of different, but relevant experiences for users- some of these will feel like advertising and others more like deep user experiences.
Great user communication and connection is now and will be all doing about both, not substituting one for the other.
While planners are tasked with spending a lot of time in the field understanding consumers, they might need to spend a little more time studying the psyches of the creative people they have to work with.
Recently, Cornell University did a study on narcissists and creativity and they found a couple of really interesting findings.
1. Their (that's the narcissists) selling is often better than their ideas- they are so passionate and convincing that they can sell people on ideas, but the researchers found that their ideas weren't really any better than the non-narcissists.
2. They create an energy field that generates better work. When the researchers put the narcissists into groups and forced them to work with others, they helped make everyone better. However, they warned that putting too many in a group can be dangerous!
So-creative departments really do need a few of them, to sell those ideas to clients and to help others raise their game.
Posted by Ed Cotton
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The thought of an advertising agency having an R&D lab doesn't make sense to most traditionalists thinking of advertising as represented in the "Mad Men world. Certainly, in the 50s and 60s, there were departments devoted to understanding the science of advertising, but they weren't about innovating and building.
Fast forward to today and you are starting to see "labs" emerge as a new nomenclature.
You've got BBH's Lab
Labs is BBH’s global innovation unit. We’re tasked with pioneering new outputs and approaches: building new platforms through which brands can engage, and exploring new agency models. The overall ambition is more engaging content, developed more effectively and efficiently. We’re particularly interested in the following areas:
- Innovative new forms of creativity
- Original ways in which technology and collaboration can be powerful forces in the marketing arsenal
- Novel approaches that are rapid, iterative & curatorial
- The mashup of thinking from radically different sources & industries
The Ogilvy NY Digital Innovation Lab creates, showcases, and markets digital innovations that deliver competitive advantages to our clients.
The Digital Lab is both:
* A physical space showcasing unique new technologies surrounding daily life centered around home, work, and on-the-go environments, and
* A place where teams can work on developing award-winning and innovative digital work for the benefits of our clients today or tomorrow.
There are probably others, if there are, please let me know.
Both labs, but very different missions. BBH is looking at the big picture- even exploring new agency models and Ogilvy is much more focused on the specifics of innovation in the digital world.
What they both have in common is dedication and space. There's a sort of implicit understanding that this new stuff is complex and requires effort and brainpower to not only build it, but also imagine what it can be. It's a recognition of the pace of change in the industry and how important it is to inspire and imagine new things and new ideas for internal employee audiences and clients.
While Mad Men is compelling viewing because you see the dramatic societal and cultural change that spills over into the ad world and there are certainly many parallels with today's environment. However, the big difference is that technology back in the 50s and 60s was not advancing and impacting advertising quite as fast as it is today. These were golden years for the business where captive consumers could be programmed to buy.
Those days are now long gone and the industry has to innovate to keep up with technological and consumer change.
Labs demonstrate that the agencies involved get the fundamental change that's at hand, but clearly they are not for everyone. Many probably feel that these units shouldn't be external and that everyone needs to have a "lab" mentality, which to some extent is true. The reason they need to be dedicated is that in an environment where the pace of change is so fast, it's hard for people to adequately deal with the present, while at the same time imagining and developing a near future.
Having a "lab" mentality is a must for agencies today.
Posted by Ed Cotton
One great point I missed from my review of last night's ADC talk with Wieden and Kennedy, was Dan's point about Nike.
Jeff Goodby raised an interesting question about how much hangs on the human reality, failings and frailty of athletes for the Nike brand and how this could end up reflecting back on the agency.
Wieden used this as an opportunity to show how he thought Nike was way ahead of its time as a corporation. Because it has tied itself to athletes it has to take a lot of risk and stand behind them whatever happens. The fact of the brand's closeness to its athletes makes them a very different and a very human company.
He talked briefly about the Tiger Wood's situation and how the "father ad" had made a real difference to the perception of the athlete and the brand.
Posted by Ed Cotton