ADVERTISING IN 2020an imperfect talk to the IPA 44 Club, 24 January 2011 Tom Morton

Chief Strategy Officer, Publicis UK@tommorton

If you want to make a fool of someone, ask him to predict the

future

If you want to make a tit of someone, get him to talk about the future.

I’ve been reading an article from 2000 about how TV advertising would work in 2010. We should have been looking forward to:

OnDigital, Telewest, and Carlton Interactive dominating the industry

Online shopping where you point your remote at a product in a programme and buy it.

People wanting their web browsing interrupted by TV ads. I won’t talk too much about the specifics of what the industry will look like. Instead I’ll focus on what’s going to shape the industry. And I’ll suggest three coping strategies for getting to 2020.

Most of what we need for the future is here,

it’s just in the wrong place

Most of what we need is here, but it’s in the wrong places.

We’ve got emerging talent and strong relationships. Most of the emerging talents are in startups; most of the relationships and the cash that comes with them are in the networksWe’re got the public interacting with brands. We’re asking the public to like our Facebook pages and shoot our ads when we should be asking them to collaborate on our products We’ve got behaviour experts. Media planners are great at understanding audience behaviour, but they’ve kept that expertise and their business in the corner of paid-form mediaWe’ve got a wealth of real-time data based on people’s real purchases and behaviour and movements. It’s just stuck in different industries - buying on Dunhumby, searching on Google, sharing on Facebook, moving on Vodafone, viewing on Sky – not at fingertips of the comms industry. We’ve got people who build interest and usability in to products, but they’re in engineering not marketing. As IBM say, “the interface is the product”, and that will be the case for more industries in future. We should have these people baking that interest and usability in to all productsWe have incredible content makers, from the socially important Wikileaks expose to the new Caribou album. They’re just dependent on declining media to pay for it

We need to put the industry’s resources on castors

We need to put the industry’s resources on castors, so they can be moved next to where they are needed.  The challenge of the next ten years consists of reassembling what we’ve got in order to make something useful. 

A Blade Runner future, brought to us by Cillit Bang

The shape of media will determine the shape of advertising

A lot of our industry will depend on how much high quality content remains ad funded. Lots of the most must-see content will go on to subscription – HBO in the States, premiership football, iTunes, News Corp papers on iPad. The issue is what remains. We could have technologically-boosted outdoor and must-see live TV to work with, or we could have cheap ad breaks in crappy rerun channelsSocial media will remain a parallel universe – central to how people live their lives, where people set the rules and where brands will need to learn some mannersWe’ll have a whole bunch of new technologies that could make people’s lives better or could just be a mechanized form of interruption: more screens on which to assault people with offers. They’ll give advertising a bad name until they settle downMost technologies don’t find their best use in their first years of life. True of gaming, dot com, user-generated content, foursquare. We’ve seen how MySpace has more or less died under the weight of too much interruptive advertising. We have to hope that doesn’t happen to the public space

Russell Davies wrote about the worst case scenario: if good content doesn’t need advertising, and advertisers find more low-rent technologies to carry messages, we’ll be living in a Blade Runner world brought to us by Cillit Bang.

The old world will soldier on

until it dies on its feet

The old world will soldier on, blocking the progress of the new, until it dies on its feet: Future campaigns with many components and constant evolution are labour intensive. The cost is fees and production not media; clients still budget on spending more on media than on creative. Many agencies will have a hard time making modern campaigns at a loss. Testing methods like Ipsos that have nothing to do with modern audience behavior will linger they look familiar & certain This stuff has completely outlived its usefulness; it’s only when it falls apart that its replacement will become the standardAnd the economics of advertising will mean that advertising won’t change as fast as we hope Still a cash generative business: can generate 15%-20% margin every year with little capital expenditure. Business owners will be careful of tampering with thatShareholders more impressed by separate digital business units than by digitally-literate ad agenciesBanners have a click through rate of 0.1%; YouTube’s algorithms assume that if I’m watching the Rolling Stones I’m in the market for paving stones but they’ll probably continue for as long as there’s a ton of space to fill and they’re almost free to runCompany owners will wait until a business model is at its terminal stages – no prospect of making any money in the future - before they do something radical with it

We’ll build the new world on top of the old one

We’ll build the new world on top of the old one The analogy comes from urban planning & a book called The Death And Life Of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. Fifty years ago she saw town planners were trying to flatten or bypass 19th century cities to build modern utopias. She said with a complicated connected system like a city, you don’t dismantle the old. You build the new alongside it.

It’s the same with our industry. 

Always follow the economics

To prep for the future, always follow the economics

They’ll tell you what is viable, and what’s unsupportable. What does this cost to make, what influence does it buy?

Holding companies have no bias to analogue or digital or media or creative. They’ll put money in to what is profitable; what is likely to grow.

For example, newspapers are dead in the US where advertising accounts for seven eights revenue; less so in Britain where it’s half. And it’s not economic to create special build campaigns for every site – the audience size doesn’t justify the outlay

Always follow the people

Always follow the people

Because the ultimate test of our industry is our ability to understand and influence the public.

It will help you to make sense of the potential of new technology. See how people fell on the stats about the number of subscribers to the Times online.

It’s why ‘test and learn’ is so important. You have to follow what people actually do with your new type of campaign otherwise it’s not a test; it’s a prank. Experiments have hypotheses and results and conclusions, they’re more than tinkering.

The growing volume of real-time audience data is going to define our industry. Go seek the truth there. Whoever masters that and makes it useful will rise to the top.

Punt, don’t plan

Punt, don’t plan

We can’t be sure exactly when changes will occur, or how big they will be. Our industry is moving from an industrial model to a bespoke model. Each piece of activity will have a different shape.  That’s a future where it’s better to make punts than plans.

The future’s going to come from a series of experiments: little ventures with new technology and new partners and new ways of working

Learn like every other creative and technology business does: prototype stuff, test and learn. Learn by doing.

A friend of mine left advertising to work at Google. He said it’s an impossible errand to aim to change the entire industry. His mantra:

“Don’t change it, hack it.”

Hack ExperimentLearnPunt

Hack. Experiment. Learn. Punt.

Yes, that does spell HELP. And acronyms are cheesy. But these are what creative, entrepreneurial thinkers have always done.

Good luck