Ten Times the Fun

What the ad industry went through last year was, for lack of a better phrase, a mind-boggling experience. For the first time, agencies and clients alike were hit by the combined fears of the public: what to do with their money, and how to effectively reach them so that they're willing to spend it on us.

This year, as the public grows more and more aware of the effect that advertising has on them- and as they become more and more averse to it- advertisers and their clients should both be conscious of possibly the most important underlying theme to this dilemma:

Opportunity.

I just read an article in AdAge called "Planning Your Next Move in Ad Land: The Challenges and Pitfalls Ahead for the Industry in 2010." In it, AdAge discusses the (more often than not) negative trends that have been developing in the industry for quite some time: how automakers are dealing with the decline in television advertising; how soft drinks are facing a "sugar panic" from the general public; how agencies and clients are battling over compensation methods, especially in a time where cheaper digital media is growing in popularity while traditional forms of advertising are declining, and with it, the revenue of the agencies responsible. Those, among many other issues, are the challenges we face for the upcoming decade.

But maybe they're not as horrific as we think.

Maybe it's time for a change in the system.

This may not be realistic, but how about this: instead of keeping the divide between the big digital agencies, the small ones, and the ones that are just branches of full-service agencies, so that no one of them has all that is required in order to create a really compelling digital campaign (that is, great creative, great strategy, and effectiveness), why don't we collaborate all three so that we can get all three? How about, instead of worrying about the public's increasing tendency to shop online, we make it even easier for them, and thereby increase our own share in their lives? Have company-sponsored internet access on 3G networks for wireless providers (since people are living more on their mobile devices anyway, this really wouldn't be a bad idea). Make a Macy's department store iPhone app, where people can "walk around" a virtual store. Put signs in doorways of existing department stores with information about sales that's only available online- in the form of coupons, dates, etc. 20% of the American population owns an iPhone. How many more at least have some form of 3G?

I once saw a commercial for a pay-per-view movie where on the screen, there was a button you could click with the remote to watch the movie while it was being advertised. And therein lies one part of the answer for the auto industry- if they're afraid of completely breaking away from television advertising, why don't they integrate it with the online sphere they haven't quite conquered yet? In terms of the technological breakthroughs the article was discussing, why don't we make it possible for TVs to have internet access, so that we can explore products we may be thinking about as they're being marketed to us?

During my time as a participant in Disney's College Program this past semester, I learned about how the Walt Disney Company formed its global strategy. In the past, Disney was very fragmented- they marketed California Adventure to Californians, the Orlando resort to Floridians, and focused on what makes a theme park a theme park- attractions. Once they realized that wasn't working, they integrated their marketing strategy to have one global theme, which they now change every year. The first time they made us of this was with Walt Disney World's 50th Anniversary Celebration, in which Disney advertised throughout the nation, but still specialized its content to reach target audiences. The campaign had little to no television advertising; instead, most of it was over radio and internet, where people could interact with and customize the vacations they wanted to make. By taking what other theme parks had done before and integrating parts of that with their own ideas, Disney was able to establish a reputation that is known worldwide without ever really having to market it. They changed from the inside out. And that is exactly what the ad industry needs to do in this upcoming decade.

Instead of working through the problems we face, we should make the problems work for us. Every setback is an opportunity to do something no one's ever heard of before, and that is exactly what the times we're living call for. Instead of trying to figure out how to make consumers come to us, we need to figure out how to best let us come to them. We need to engage, we need to change, and frankly, we need to stop being so scared.

That way, we can go from being the industry that reflects the times in to being the industry that defines them.