Time to change

Randall Rothenberg’s recent blog post, “‘A Bigger Idea’: A Manifesto on Interactive Advertising Creativity“, about the state of interactive advertising is really inspiring. It’s been open in one of my 27 browser tabs for about 2 weeks now and I’ve been dipping in and out and slowly digesting. That’s because it’s an exceptionally rich and filling meal. It’s 5,000 words, not 140 characters.

He calls it a manifesto, but it’s an urgent war cry for a new model of creativity in digital and advertising agencies. He starts by setting out the historical context of ‘how we got here’ brilliantly, describing the current dearth of creativity in online advertising as a “creative crisis” rooted in a “direct response culture”. This culture, he explains, is a legacy of the way the online advertising market evolved. The apparatus and thinking required to monetise online advertising in the years that followed the dot com bust – innovations such as standardised formats and standards of measurement and accountability – has ultimately led to an ossification of creativity and is now retarding development and actively preventing advertising agencies and online publishers from spotting and exploiting the awesome creative opportunities of the new, richer, personal, social, federated, ubiquitous Web.

The passing of ‘the old world’, the simple world of banners and buttons and direct response, has been accelerated by the recession and many are dangerously unprepared for this new phase of the Web. His argument is common sense: in this richer and more connected world, we need to involve techies at the top table of creative idea-making. As difficult as it is, we must put the image of techies as ‘hairy-arsed-guys-with-screwdrivers’ out of our minds. A new breed of creative technologists is required to help us re-make the Web, but we first need to re-set our thinking about ‘creativity’ online at a general level.

There is so much in his post that it’s difficult to do it justice. The stuff about the need to involve technologists and the different mindsets within traditional creative agencies resonates most for us here at Made by Many, not least because set up inside an ad agency in Sept 2007 (as a completely independent entity) and many of our clients are publishers. Before Made by Many, we’d all worked at the application development and user experience end of the spectrum – creating new services and brands rather than banners and buttons. As such, we’ve always been involved in the strategic vision part of online creative work, and when we compared notes recently the bizarre thing we discovered is that none of us have *ever* worked on digital advertising campaigns – not by accident, but because we knew it just wasn’t what made us valuable.

Weirdly enough, we set out 18 months ago to prove the new model digital agency didn’t need a big team of developers. We reasoned that having one or two really excellent technologists with superb communication skills and broad knowledge across many technologies was where the word was heading. This was a reaction to coming from design and build agencies with big dev teams using very limited palettes of technologies and proprietary agency software. Instead, we wanted to partner with the best techies using the best technologies wherever they were, and we would act as a strategic design and management interface for the client. That kind of works, but we’re now in the process of recruiting more of these uber-techies and are starting our first big development project. We’ve also found that partnering is great – and we have brilliant partners in this respect – but you can never do enough to share the creative vision, and not all techies get it. It takes a very special kind of technically skilled all-rounder.

On the other hand, we’ve also discovered that many above-the-line creative types from traditional backgrounds really struggle to think beyond the campaign. They don’t seem to understand ‘platform’ and ‘application’. Their idea of a technologist is limited to someone who can program Flash. They have traditionally seen web technologists as a kind of production phase specialists, useful only in translating their creative vision. Having said all that – and this should give Mr Rothenberg heart – we’ve also observed how rapidly this situation is now changing. The best ad agencies are filled with smart people and they know what time it is.

Randall’s piece is a must-read for anyone who wants to use online media to move people, to quicken the heartbeat, to make people react emotionally, to make magic. Finally, it’s about more than clicks again.