Russell Davies

building a long tail for ads

This is one of those things I've been thinking about for a while, trying to come up with a good way into it. But I haven't really got one so I thought I'd just launch in and see what happens. I was reminded to write something by this great post from Gareth. But I think he's talking about a private corporate archive and I'm talking about something more public.

My basic thought: There ought to be a long tail for ads - but there isn't really.

Think of all the good, big brands that do good advertising and comms. They churn stuff out. Dozens of reasonably high quality bits of communications a year, most of which hang around for a few weeks and then completely disappear. And these are expensive bits of film or print. They've got good music and big stars and good jokes. Or whatever. You could probably stand to watch them again.

And you could defintely stand to watch them 5 or 10 or 20 years later when all the nostalgia kicks in. And at that distance even the bad ads look good. Or at least seem evocative of something or other.

I've seen the reaction you get when you show old ads to fans of a brand - they can't get enough.

And looking at a brand's history of advertising, would, I think, be a really good indication of the kind of business they are. So, as an ordinary customer, you'd imagine that you could just go to most brands corporate homepages and look at an archive of all their work, and of course, most of the time you can't.

The various buy-outs of music, artists etc mean that most ads are locked in corporate vaults never to be seen again. I remember when we did 'cog' at w+k we didn't have the rights to put the ad on our own homepage - couldn't afford it. And Honda didn't have it on theirs for very long. Fortunately someone took it into their own head to make a file of the ad available and served it up to the world. If they hadn't we wouldn't have been able to.

Obviously people like Adland are doing noble work creating an archive of stuff from now on, but imagine all those ads from the last however many years are just lost.

Now I don't know much about business affairs and buy-outs and that, I'm just a planner, but is this something that people are negotiating with artists these days? -Some kind of 'longtail buy-out'? ie we buy the rights to put this ad in a publicly accessible archive online but won't be actively promoting it, or sticking it in the Superbowl or anything. etc.

That seems like it might be an interesting idea. If we're supposed to be rethinking 'advertising' - thinking of it as 'content' (which I think we should) we also need to address the legal/copyright issues which make it so ephemeral. I also think it would make our work better if we planned on it having a life beyond the next 6 months, if we built advertising for the long-tail we might build better stuff.

Does that make sense?

(Before anyone writes in, I'm using advertising as a shortcut term for the full plethora of brand communications. Obviously.)

APSotW video - Dylan Williams, strategist, Mother

I was hanging out with Dylan, who's an old friend, a top man and a strategist at Mother, and we realised we had a video camera to hand, so I recorded a quick interview. The picture and audio quality is not great but Dylan's answers are. He talks about the future of planning, the convergence between agencies and clients, what a junior planner should be good at and all kinds of things. It's about 12 minutes all together.

Dylan(m4v) This is the videopod version - it's about 60MB. Is that right? Am I encoding this right?

Dylan(mov) This is the ordinary quicktime - about 8MB.

Future Marketing DooDah

Piers has asked me to mention this on here, and since he says it's going to be good it probably will be. It's got an interesting bunch of people speaking at it.

I thought I was going to be speaking at the London one, but I can't be because the guy they've got listed on the site only has one 'l' in his name. And no-one would invite someone to speak at something and then misspell their name would they? It's not like the correct spelling of my name is a closely guarded secret.

And also, it can't be me because it says there'll be no lecturing or platitudes, and if that's the case then I wouldn't have anything to say.

vote early, vote often

Apparently I'm featured in the Battle Of The Ad Blogs. Which is very exciting. You have to scroll down a bit to the planner/theorist section. Vote, vote, vote and I'll go back to my constituency and prepare for government. (Perhaps the most obscure reference I've ever put on here, apologies to all my non-British, non-over 35 readers.)

dumb, crass, stupid, sexist lavazza

I'm posting this in the hope that someone at Lavazza or the agency that's responsible for this "First Class Espresso Experience" campaign will do some sort of buzz monitoring and find it via Google or something and it'll turn up in a report associated with the words dumb, crass, sexist, stupid. Which when you think about it, as more brands do active internet monitoring, is a nice way of doing consumer activism.

The more links there are to it, the more likely they are to find it - so if you hate this kind of stuff, do your bit.

life cubed

The nice folk at AKQA took us to Microsoft Lifesquared today. It was an interesting experience, especially as I've been thinking about Scott's questions about fakes/authenticity in the comments on this post.

I love Microsoft. Have done ever since I really got to know them as a planner on the business. I love the fact that they keep trying to do much harder things than anyone else. Building expensive laptops for art directors is easy, building an impressive OS that runs on everything is really hard. So I'm always willing them to be good, and Lifesquared almost was, but wasn't quite.

Their idea was to present various technologies (or perhaps a 'technology lifestyle') via some vignettes of 'real people' demo-ing the stuff. So we met a guy who ran a marine accessories business, and one of his employees and his wife and they were all loaded up to the gills with Microsoft stuff. Nothing really wrong with that as an idea. It wasn't exactly a show, more like being inside a very dull episode of Howard's Way.

And lots of the techology was actually quite impressive, I'm a huge fan of Tablet PCs and OneNote for example. And they just gave us a little taster of that. Could have done much more. Microsoft/IP TV looks really good - smart applications, clever execution, Media Centre was impressive. The tech was great. So it was really frustrating to be kept from it by all this lifestyle fakery. The actors were fine but they couldn't answer any real questions and you really wanted an actual engineer in the room to demo the thing properly.

I remember when I worked on Microsoft at w+k. We'd have these intense three day long briefings on the newest version of Word or something, and it was mind-numbing, but you learned stuff. And you were getting it from people who knew what they were talking about, you were getting expertise. What you were getting from Life+ was marketing. Which is fine, nothing wrong with marketing, and I appreciate they were trying to make it more accessible and wrap some storytelling around it, but when you go into someone's environment like that you want to really meet them, to understand what they can tell you, what only they know. Not feel like you're walking into a big ad.

They'd obviously put a lot of time and thought into it so it's a real shame that you spend your whole time noticing the artificiality, like the fact that the fake small business had no paper in its files and no kettle. Or the fake wife had no wedding ring and the the fake 15-year old boy apparently spent his time listening to Jools Holland.

I was really itching to sit and get hands on with the stuff and have someone who really knew it talk to me and tell me what it could do. But we didn't get that. We didn't get a vision of the future, we got a vision of a slightly more organised present.

Shame. But I hope they try again, because I bet the next version will be ace.

Can't?

Intriguing sign on the orange shop at fulham broadway tube.

the size of brands

Today's video was inspired by this question:

"There is no question that we consume to survive. Phsyically (food, shelter, clothing) and emotionally (community, security, dignity, esteem, acceptance, etc.), companies satisfy our needs. We look to companies to learn ways of living (new or accepted). So it seems as if brands/companies have stepped into a very unique role: the new village elders.

Do you agree that this is happening? Do you think brands should act this way? Do you think such a relationship represents the future in how brands connect with people?"

(That's from Leland Maschmeyer, thanks very much Lee)

To be honest I don't really answer it. Not directly anyway. I slightly sidestep it because it prompted me to talk about a larger question - the size of brands. By which I mean that many of the metaphors and analogies we use for brands (like village elders) are potentially useful and interesting - except they masively overestimate the importance of brands in most people's lives. Brands aren't and shouldn't be, as important as village elders.

So, I ramble about that for about 4 minutes and then peter out. My basic point is that we have to consider the relative scale of brand relationships and our other relationships when we construct our analogies for the ways brands and customers interact.

I'm realising how hard it is to make these videos coherent, I'm afraid you mostly listen to me just thinking aloud. And only thinking in fragments too. I just don't have the time to create something five minutes long that's full of goodness. But I hope there's some value in me just chatting. And I think I'm going to try and revisit some of these videos, see if they still make sense a few weeks later and see if there are any grander thoughts that come out of them.

And all your comments are very helpful in doing that.

I'm quite proud of the new titles though.

Enjoy.

the size of brands m4v. (About 24MB).

Download size of brands mov. (About 5MB)

BT to gherkin

Inspired by Richard Long and funky dave's comments about navigating by tall buildings I did a walk from the BT Tower (symbol of the nice 60s future, when everything was going to be like Space 1999 or UFO) to the Gherkin (Swiss Re, symbol of Mordor and the evil future, for some reason, which I can't quite articulate).

I've always liked the way that there are no long straight lines in London - especially not between places you actually want to go so I drew a straight line between the two towers and then endeavoured to walk as close to that line as possible. The line is shown below.

excellence in spelling