Only Dead Fish

Creativity and Self-Doubt

This is wonderful. Ira Glass, award winning American journalist and broadcaster talking about creativity. I love the bit where he’s ripping apart one of his early broadcasts...

Via

Cityscapes

There are perks to working near to the Tate Modern. It's currently featuring a wonderful exhibition called Global Cities, exploring the changing faces of ten dynamic cities (Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, São Paulo, Shanghai and Tokyo) through five ‘thematic lenses’ - speed, size, density, diversity and form – and through the subjective and personal interpretation of 20 leading international artists and architects. An installation built out of scaffolding and showing video artwork and photography takes up most of the enormous turbine hall.

A great short film featured on the website reflects the place cities have in a changing world: more diverse and connected than ever ; over half the world’s population now live in cities, one billion of them (1 in 3) in slums; cities are growing faster than ever – upwards as well as outwards, with 95% of future urban growth due to come from Africa and Asia.

"Latchmere's Got A Wave Machine"

Image and title lyric courtesy the legendary Maccabees

Will agencies of the future exist on the strength of their creativity or their technical abilities? Which will clients prioritise as being more important: the deep dive pool of consumer insight or the fancy wave machine of data analytics and optimisation?

Back in January the IPA partnered with The Future Foundation to produce a report into the Future of Agencies. One of the conclusions was that the agencies of the future will need to assume multiple roles:

"agency as media brand owner; agency as joint venture partner; agency as content collaborator; agency as programme producer; agency as network creator; agency as data provider; and agency as data aggregator."

At least two of these scenarios are rooted in creativity. At least another two are rooted firmly in ad science. Two different ways. One is governed by algorithm, process, proceedure. The other talent, insight, humanity. One is boxed in, methodical, precise. The other reaches out, has no boundaries, transcends the traditional. One is all about testing and optimisation. The other is about new ideas, originality, progressiveness, new forms, methods and interpretations. One employs analysis, mathematics, statistics. The other imagination, inspiration, invention.

Is it really possible for both of these to co-exist in the same agency? I've been thinking about the tricky balance between the art and the science in advertising for some time. There's no doubt that ad science is here to stay. The potential for what it can do is amazing. And it is asking some questions of ad art that I don’t know that we have answers for yet: if we target advertising by behaviour, how is it possible to produce the myriad number of creative treatments necessary to target the myriad differences in human behaviour? Should creative be that reactive anyway? If we are able to optimise our messages real-time, how is it possible to produce creative fast enough to adapt to rapidly changing behaviours?

There's an interesting parallel here between the ad industry and the "quiet revolution"€ taking place in the financial world. Investors are investing heavily in "algorithmic trading" systems that automate the process of deciding which trades are most profitable and can do it faster, and at a higher volume than the smartest city trader. One third of all US trading decisions are now reportedly made by machines. At Deutsche Bank in London, over 70 per cent of one category of foreign trades ("€œspot trades"€) are carried out without human intervention.

Such are the benefits that can be brought by such automation that there is a virtual arms race between investors for super-fast software systems supported by the best hardware with huge processing and data-handling capacity. Computers have a distinct edge over humans - concurrent capacity, speed, reaction times. Over time, the importance and level of investment in algorithmic trading software and the hardware that supports it has grown exponentially, moving the trading function away from the more instinctual area of human judgement to one where some investment banks have some of their prime office real estate filled with humming machines.

Is this the future for advertising? Econometric modelling, behavourial targeting techniques, ad optimisation services are getting more sophisticated by the day. Google has made no secret of its desire to apply its algorithmic contextualisation and optimisation based models to other media. But it is interesting that right now, it is the combination of human instinct and experience with sophisticated algorithmic trading which is right at the cutting edge of financial trading.

The future is one in which technology and its application will of-course be a bigger part of everything we do. But personally I hope that we never lose sight of the human side of advertising, the essence of what great advertising has always been good at - as eloquently summed up by Paul McEnany:

"It all makes too much sense, but I fear all the process removes the focus from the one place it should be. The people. And what CRM, customer tracking and all the rest can't tell me is why I just smiled, why I told my friend, why I chose pink over blue."

Let's not forget what great advertising can still be - what Bob Scarpelli calls: "a simple idea based on a simple insight communicated in simple ways".

Bubble Stories

This weeks Campaign piece featuring stories and reminiscences of the Dotcom bubble (which, scarily, began almost a decade ago) from the likes of Mark Cridge, Helen Calcraft, and Jerry Fielder got me all nostalgic about my own experience riding the first wave all those years ago. At the time I was working across a whole range of websites, some of which are still around (and doing very nicely), and others which were thought better of.

Across the industry I remember there being a lot of rubbish talked, not least about the illusion of “first mover advantage”, and a lot of people who had forgotten about the end user and what they might actually want or need.

But I also remember there being a fantastically entrepreneurial feel to it all, an unprecedented speed of decision, a willingness to challenge convention, and a feeling that anything was possible. That feeling has stayed with me ever since and, I think, profoundly influenced the way I work. So I have a lot to be grateful for.

Spookily, I also recently happened across a Campaign piece of the time (sorry for the appalling scan – must have had appalling scanners back in those days) in which I was asked about my opinion on the future of the banner ad. Thankfully I think I said that it was not quite dead (just yet).

P.S. Yes, I even had the dodgy goatee way back then

Image courtesy

Spamalot

Unfortunately I've had to turn my CAPTCHA back on due to a comment spam problem that seems to be getting steadily worse. Seems like I'm not the only one. I'm hoping this won't deter anyone from commenting though - (proper) comments are always great and I've had a few particularly good ones recently.

Image courtesy