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Black Friday. Retailer’s favorite day of the year… except for last year when sales were down 3.4% from 2007. I worked in retail most of my working life (starting at age 15, a wild and crazy 12 years ago and ending 3 years ago when I no longer needed my 2nd job working at a grocery store) so Black Friday was always a fascinating day that I hated with the intensity of a billion white hot super novas. So this year, watching from afar, I started thinking about Black Friday 2009 and the effects it’s success or failure will have on our industry.

This is where things get fuzzy for you people who love facts and citation, because I don’t know a lot of this for sure. So put on your speculation helmets. You should also note that I’m writing this on Monday morning, before any results are published and before Cyber Monday has even jumped into full gear.

Like I said before, Black Friday sales for 2008 were down 3.4% from 2007( Gather.com ) and the projections are down for this year. Aside from cries from armchair economists of “the economy is in full upswing and fine now!” that increased sales numbers would bring, what would it mean for retail advertising going forward? I don’t have any numbers on retail ad spending for 2009 (because no one does yet) and I don’t have any numbers on Black Friday specific ad spending for 2009 (because no one outside of agencies buying media for those ads and the companies themselves probably ever will), but what I do have is reports all year about how spending on advertising in general will be down 5-8% for 2009. So what does it mean for us if retailers managed to grow sales while cutting ad spending?

This year’s Black Friday was different than previous ones, in that a lot of stores (most notably K-Mart and Radio Shack) started the festivities on Thanksgiving day, staying open through the holiday and starting their sales early. Other retailers opened earlier this year than the traditional 6am. Best Buy stores were open at midnight, Old Navy opened at 3am. Then there’s the price cutting. I’ve heard speculation that prices were slashed to all new lows this year, especially on electronics. So the formula for Black Friday 2009 appears to have been: Stay open longer, cut prices deeper. Notice the lack of anything that has to do with advertising in that synopsis.

I didn’t go to any stores on Friday. I try to avoid the masses of crazed soccer moms and teenage girls trying to get shoes, computers, clothes and whatever else they have to have at crazy prices. (I worked it for 9 years, I’ve had my fill of angry, tired shoppers) so I can’t say that it seemed more crowded than last year, or that there was a lot of in-store advertising going on. My instinct tells me that other than signs that say “This is where the 5 $159 laptops we had at this store were” in-store advertising wasn’t any more or less than is normally is. So what happens to us? What would increased sales with decreased advertising mean for the industry? I feel fairly certain it will start discussions between CMOs and CEOs about “how necessary is all this advertising spending really?” Will retail advertising become a more depressed area of our already depressed industry?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. I don’t know if we’ll even have to answer them yet, since we don’t have the sales results for this year yet. But what if we do? Would it be the first sign that advertising as we know it is becoming less important in modern marketing? And if so, how do we adjust to stay relevant?

History lesson:

On October 22, 1965 President Lyndon Johnson signs the Highway Beautification Act into law. The law put limits on outdoor advertising along the US highway system and generally promotes “scenic enhancement and roadside development.”

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Today I’m proposing that we, the makers of the internet, (Go ahead, make your stupid Al Gore jokes from 10 years ago. I’ll wait……hahaha remember when that guy was running for president? It’s a good thing he didn’t win or… bad… things…. might…. have…… oh never mind) set forth to put a similar plan into action of the internet¹ to promote “scenic enhancement.” So what does this mean? Well let’s get all official about it:

§ 1 – Ad placement should be logical and not overwhelm the content your site is providing

If you want a TV-style ad, do one of those “while your page is loading” ads that everyone clicks through, because there’s always a “skip this ad” button at the top. Those are way less annoying than: pop-ups, those link ads that pop up a window when you mouse over them, pop-unders, and a frame of animated gifs or flash banners all rotating out of sync around your content. And let’s be honest, how much money are these annoying ads making you anyway? CPM on most internet display advertising is crap, unless your the New York Times site. So why not ditch it all together and find some other way to cover your $200/yr server costs?

§2 – Gimmicks are so 1996, don’t make them the focus of your site.

You have this great idea for the website for your local pizza restaurant. You’re going to make a site where everyone can upload videos, and feature them on the site, oh and I guess we’ll put up the menu too somewhere. Oh yeah, and maybe we should put the address up there somewhere to, BUT THE VIDEOS! …I get it. You want to be the next youTube star or something, but guess what. I didn’t come to your website to watch wacky videos about some dude who’s gonna take a cell phone video of his junk and post it to your site just to see it make the homepage. I came to your site to find out how I could get a pizza. If you want to do wacky customer videos I’m all for it. Just make sure that I can find out what you sell and how I can buy it without your gimmick getting in my way, because if I can’t what’s the point? You’re wasting both our time. I just wanted a pizza and instead you gave me youTube.

§3 – No flashing text anywhere. Even if you’re a strobe light company.

I don’t have to explain this one do I? No one gets to use the <blink> tag anymore. EVER.

§4 – If you must do a take over ad, mute the sound and make it easy to close.

This one is very simple. 1) If I go to your site and an ad takes over and starts talking to me or making any noise at all without me telling it to, I’m going to close the window (or tab) and never come back. Ever again. 2) Make the stupid things easy to close because that’s what everyone it going to do immediately anyway. Don’t piss them off by making it hard.

I’m sure there are more sections we could add to make our internet a more beautiful place, but why should I have to do all the work? This is the internet people. We should add this to wikipedia and then all take turns adding things to it! Let’s all do our part to promote “scenic enhancement” of our internet. Afterall, it’s the only one we’ve got ².

¹ Remember when it was called the Information Superhighway and not “the web”?

² Until some scientists build a new one.

As an interactive guy, I get asked a lot about mobile. It’s the future, in case you hadn’t heard, and it will replace the internet….by allowing us to access the internet… on a really really small screen… at slow speeds… future! So, interactive folk (as we prefer to be called, “those dudes over there who know about computers” works equally well) get to shape this awesome small screen, low speed future by building apps, and WAPs and maybe even Maps…later we’ll shoot some Craps…sorry I kinda got on a roll there…where was I? Oh yeah.

What this means, in all seriousness because I’ve reached my quota for ellipses already, is that we’re now building interactive experiences as advertising. To make it even simpler and more of a powerful statement, The Future of Advertising is Experiences.¹ Advertising in the TV era has been about creating an entertaining/informative/repetitive 30 seconds of TV to convince you to buy something for some reason. The only engagement we have with the audience is that they couldn’t find anything more interesting to do for 30 seconds but watch our spot. Now we’re actually interacting. This brings a whole new set of pitfalls

Now I know all of that wasn’t really news. We’ve been talking about it for a while now, but the news is the frequency that it’s becoming more of a mainstream channel. What this means is that the advise from the early days of the web, “You’d better have a website” has now turned into “You’d better have an app.” This is just as dangerous now as it was in 1995.

Back in the day, when the internet was ugly and blinky and limited to the stupid web safe pallet of colors, and dinosaurs roamed the earth listening to something called “cassette tapes” which replaces “records”, some business guru thought up this really catchy line: “You’d better have a website.” The problem was, no one knew what to do with their website. Most of them didn’t even know what it was. We ended up with ugly, blinky, web safe colored things that were essentially brochures. But on the web. Also they cost more than a brochure. Back then websites cost a lot more money to make, because you couldn’t buy a domain name for $7, find some high school kid (unless you found me or a few of my friends) to build you a site on the cheap and throw it on a host you paid $12/yr for. Bandwidth, storage space and domain names were not cheap until mid-dot com boom. But you HAD to have website. Because some successful business guy said so.

Flash forward to today. Mobile apps aren’t cheap to make, even if you choose just one mobile platform for you app. A lot of people don’t know what to do with them, but they know they want one. Because now “You’d better have an app.” The problem is that an app is an interactive experience. They’re a lot more memorable than a passive experience, like a TV spot or a web site. Which means that when you make a bad one and slap your logo on it, people are much more likely to remember you, but not for good reasons.

Branded applications need to do something useful (Yes, entertainment is useful if your app really is entertaining). They’re not just advertising, they’re a product themselves. Too many brands are just cramming website content into an app throwing it out there (some are even charging for this content, that you can get on their website for free.) That’s not useful. It’s not creative, and sooner or later it’s going to be broadly received by everyone as lame. As the iTunes app store begins to see more competition from the growing Android marketplace, the blackberry store, Palm and Nokia’s stores, etc we’re going to hit mobile application overload. Just like any other product, your branded apps are going to have to stand out by being useful, generating a lot of word or mouth recommendations, etc or they’re going to get a bad rep. Which means your brand is going to get a bad rep for something that’s not even your core business.

In the land of interactive experience as advertising, the consequences of doing something poorly are much higher. And like any big risk, this does come with a big reward: good experiences are remembered more. Apple’s advertising for the iPhone and it’s app store has done more than just sell their platform, they’ve set an important precedent with their slogan; we just need to make sure our client’s apps aren’t saying “Yes, me too!” but instead answer “Yes, there’s an app for that.”

¹ For now. Until something else comes along and replaces this future with an alternate 1985, where Biff owns a casino and killed your father to marry your mother.

*Warning* This is kinda a freeform, stream of thought kind of post.

While sitting down to write this morning (something I’ve been doing quite a bit of lately) I found myself staring into space…for an hour. Now this isn’t anything new, if you’ve ever seen creative people working you’ll see them at some point looking very much like they’re doing nothing. This got me thinking about advertising (as most things usually do, especially between the hours of 8a-8p) and about trends in art and culture and design. The conclusion I came to is we need a neo-minimalist movement.

What does this mean? I don’t know, I just thought about how overly complicated and shinny and “new and improved” and “now with Bacon!” everything seems to be getting lately. That’s not the point of this post though (although if we want to discuss it I’ll gladly do so). The point of this post is this: It’s important to let your mind wander around and figure things out. A lot of creative people get this, but it’s not just a technique for creative endeavors.

We’ve come to a point in our instant gratification society where we expect everything, even our brain to do it’s thing RIGHT NOW so we can move on to the next thing in our busy schedule. The answers that you get RIGHT NOW aren’t always the best ones. Our brains are amazing things, but even they need a little time to work through things.

So on this Wednesday, while you’re no doubt in the middle of your week crunching problems left and right, shifting paradigms out-side the box to maximize reach and ROI while staying top of mind in your key demographics, take a step back and just let the problem sink in. You might be shocked at the solution you come up with if you just wait a minute or two

All of the recent talk of crowdsourcing (mostly thanks to the launch of Victors and Spoils), the things I’ve written about it (just look back a few posts, you’ll see) and the great two part blog by James Hodgins (hereand here) got me thinking about “the agency of the future.” Make sure you say that in your best 1950s sci-fi movie narrator voice, maybe with a little echo on it so you get that “uture…ture…ure” at the end of it.

So, found memories of bad 1950s sci-fi movies aside, what is the elusive new model for the advertising agency of the digital age? We’ve been discussing it for years… my whole career actually. We have clients that think we’re charging them too much for work that doesn’t do what they want, we have the two major camps “It’s all about the brand” vs “It’s all about the metrics” fighting it out for total domination of the online-o-sphere, and we have this new “crowdsourcing” (more on why I’ve put it in quotes in a second) trying to grab some legitimacy by offering “authenticity” along with low low prices. We have lots of problems, but we don’t have any answers that we’ve been able to agree on.

While thinking about all of this I made a nifty little sketch-chart-note-thing in my sketchbook answering the question “What would my advertising agency look like?” I will spare you my scribbles and chicken scratch (anyone who knows me and has seen my handwriting will tell you, you’re not missing out on seeing the original) and present it here, in clear Helvetica (or Arial if you’re using Windows…you poor Windows users are missing out on all the Helvetica)

The Agency of The Future is:

Small – But takes advantage of the agency network, software start up, or studio model, or some combination of the three. (So it’s small, but part of a large network of small shops, builds innovative things even if there isn’t a commission for them, has groups specifically assigned to a client and it’s needs all the time, or some combination of these to over come it’s smallness, or create smallness in a large organization)

Agile – Partly because of the smallness ( or pockets of smallness that the client interacts with) but mostly because it’s not locked into a static org chart mentality, where everyone has a set job and no one leaves there little box on the chart.

Full of idea people who make things – The days of the art director who comes up with ideas all day and passes them off to production are coming to an end. The computer age has made the tools of production cheap and easy, and having people on staff who don’t make anything is a waste of money. Makers are thinkers and thinkers are makers in the new agency world, even if they aren’t making the things they’re thinking up, they’re making something.

Strategy driven – Bet you didn’t think you’d here the AD say that, huh? In the age of “We’re bringing our account in house” having a solid strategy team working in tandem with strong creative is the only way to continue to be better than an in-house studio. The old “art director & copy writer” team now has to be the “art director, copywriter, strategist, developer” team.

Multimedia – TV is not dead. Newspapers are not dead. Magazines are not dead. When they die you’ll know, because we’ll all stop talking about how they’re dead. While digital (the internet + mobile + all new tech to come) is surely the future, to ignore existing media channels is death. Teams need to be thinking across all available media, and by teams I mean every member of every team.

Social – Account people are great, and we need them. However, they can’t be the sole touchpoint for a client in the agency of the future. Clients today want to be involved more and more in the process, and we need to let them. This is the only way we can avoid the idea that we’re wasting their time and money and giving them work we want to do to make us look good. Clients concerns should be filtered through accounts, sure, but more contact with their whole team is a must.

Distributed – This is where real crowdsourcing comes in. The best team might not be in the same city, or in the same state, or country. That doesn’t make them any less the best team. Not only does telecommuting allow for much lower costs, it allows us to create truly phenomenal creative teams. Maybe your star writer can’t move to the place your star strategist is. Wouldn’t it be better to have the star via video conference on days when it doesn’t matter where the writing is getting done than not have her at all?

Ready to start today – The people are here. The ideas are here. The infrastructure is here. This model can be implemented tomorrow and if I had the resources to do it I would. This is the future, welcome to the internet age, where we use the collective knowledge of our race to find solutions, while our all-star team works from wherever they’re most comfortable, flying to meet a client when necessary, minimizing costs to allow us to charge less and make more, innovating in our spare time and providing a level of service that a large, bureaucratic organization could never even hope to provide. This is the agency of the future…uture….ture….ure…

I have to preface this post with a little back story so it makes some sense (and so when I come back to read it down the road I won’t feel like I left a big chunk of info out.)

In August I left my full time job and moved West to try my hand at freelancing full time with hopes of business being so good that I’d be able to start my own design firm. It hasn’t quite worked out yet, and needless to say it’s been hard. So when I came across Adam Savage’s 100 Wishes talk this afternoon, it made me stop and think about my own 100 wishes. So, as I step down from my soapbox that I’ve been on for the past week here, I thought I’d share with you 25 of my 100 wishes. Some of them are professional, and some aren’t. These are the less totally out there wishes (like I wish I could teleport. You know you wish you could too.)

1. I want to own my own design agency
2. I want to live in a city where I can go surfing and skiing in the same day
3. I want to learn how to surf
4. I want to speak at a conference like TED about how important design is in our lives
5. I want to publish a book
6. I want to make something that I get to see on TV later (like a comercial or TV show)
7. I want to teach
8. I want to earn the title of Dr. (phD) in something
9. I want to have a “Kodak Carousel” type moment in a pitch meeting (if you don’t know what i’m talking about)
10. I want a weekend in Vegas where I wear a suit the whole time, not for business
11. I want to visit every continent on the planet
12. I want to make something that solves a big problem in an elligant and simple way
13. I want a job where I get to be a thinker and a builder, not just one or the other
14. I want to work with at least one of the people I admire for at least a month
15. I want to win a gold pencil from the One Club
16. I want to race in the Ironman in Kona, HI as an age group racer
17. I want to take a vacation where I spend the whole thing at a tropical beach
18. I want to live in a loft like the one in the movie Big
19. I want to work in an office where everyone is friends, like in sitcoms
20. I want to help create the next big breakthrough on the internet (web 4.0?)
21. I want a studio space in my house that is set up for all my creative activities
22. I want a nameplate that either sits on my desk or office door (i’ve never had one)
23. I want to have business cards that cost more than $5 each to produce
24. I want to work for a client that trusts me 100%
25. and just like Adam Savage, I want a secret room in my house that’s only accessible via a secret door behind a bookcase 

This isn’t the whole list, but after looking at my 100 wishes, when I just filtered the list just down to the practical things, they actually seem pretty attainable. So what was the point of this post? Well, it’s really a fun exercise to just sit down and do, and when you’re feeling beat down by the world (and who isn’t at some point lately?) it’s a good way to get some perspective and focus. Also I really wanted to keep the momentum going on this whole blog thing 

You know what would be really rad? If we discussed some of your 100 wishes in the comments.

Nothing grabs your attention like the word “manifesto”, huh? Settle in kiddies, I’ve been stewing and pondering this all weekend, and after getting smacked in the head this morning with yet more “big company turns to crowdsourcing for their advertising needs” I’ve decided that instead of just make fun of it and declare that the sky is falling I would take some kind of action. I’d write a blog post!… err… yeah, a different kind of blog post. One that outlines my (and I’m sure many other’s) concerns and then addresses these issues and proposes solutions the quickly growing group of crowdsourcing “agencies” can do to make sure they’re not just exploiting an already depressed market. So grab some popcorn ‘cos here we go. (this is a long one, if you want to skip down to the bottom line, just click here)

Why crowdsourcing is not like answering an RFP

When I discuss this topic with people it inevitably comes back to this point. So I’m going to derail it right off the bat so we can move on. When an agency responds to an RFP (Request For Pitch, for those of you who were wondering), yes they provide work to a client for free in hope of getting paid. That’s where the similarities end. Enjoy the following bulleted list of how this is not like crowdsourced creative:

• Agencies are competing for an ongoing paying relationship.  99.9% of the time this freebie ends up making them way more than they put up to make it, because they win a contract for ongoing work. Work they charge normal rate for.

Wasn’t that an awesome list?!? Answering an RFP is not like winning a cash prize. Answering an RFP is giving something to prove that you’re a good fit for an ongoing relationship with a brand. The people responding have researched and spent time to learn about the brand, and are giving away an idea to prove they will be good care takers of the brand as they work to expand it, over a period of months and years. They also, with rare exceptions, aren’t competing against everyone who thinks they have a good idea. RFPs are sent out to a small group, so the client can actually look at all the responses.  It is not like winning a contest with a one time prize against everyone with a computer and photoshop elements or a Flip camera.

Crowdsourcing vs Outsourcing

In the last few days, I’ve had some interesting conversations with a few different tech and software dev guys about crowdsourcing and they brought the conversation around to outsourcing. This makes sense because all things tech seemed to be destined to live in Bombay a few years ago, as tons of jobs moved from the US to India. Now this isn’t to say that I don’t understand why this happened, and I’m not saying that crowdsourcing is the next outsourcing. In the tech jobs to India instance I understand that employees here were asking for more than the market would bear for their services, and the lower cost of living in India made highly educated people cheaper to employ there. I don’t agree with this, but I understand it (angry commenters please note the difference). Here’s where the two differ: crowdsourcing is trying to enter the market for creative talent by bypassing professionals and going straight to amateurs. They’re selling amateur talent at cut rate prices in an attempt to lower the going rate of professional talent. They can do this because people are (for the moment) convinced that amateur creative work is more “authentic” than professional. I submit to you New Coke, an idea that tested like gang-busters as an argument against this idea.

This is really a simple bait and switch. Like promising you a crate of bananas but then giving you a crate of plantains. Sure they both look like bananas, but one is very much not a banana.  This isn’t simply shifting the market for creative talent to a place where that talent can be got cheaper (outsourcing), this is flooding the market with a lower quality product to lower prices of talent across the board. I’m sorry amateurs, but you are the Sorny to our Sony. The same would be true of us if we tried to roll into your office and do what you do for a living on the weekends.

Please don’t think this is some kind of conspiracy theory, it’s simply greed going unchecked. The fact that talented creative directors and agency professionals are participating in this to try and cash in on the trend makes me sick. Thanks for selling the rest of us out.

The New Rules for Crowdsourcing Creative

The following are the rules all Crowsourcing “agencies” should abide by, and the conditions which all crowdsourced talent should demand to work under.

1. All work not purchased shall remain the sole intellectual property of it’s creator, across all media, for any reason, for perpetuity or until the rights holder chooses to give up those rights, and shall not be used for any reason without the express permission of the rights holder or without suitable compensation to the rights holder.
   
2. Agencies should attempt to foster ongoing relationships between creatives/creative teams that would best represent the client’s interest. Much like an RFP, the value in speculative work is in the relationship that results in long term gains for both, not short term gains.
   
3. A distinction should be made between professional and amateur work. This distinction would not block any very talented amateur from being seen and breaking into the industry, but it would keep professional work from being drowned out by lower quality work and/or sold as amateur work.
4. After costs are covered by the agency, the majority of the money paid for the campaign being crowdsourced should go to the crowd.
   
5. Crowdsourcing communities should exist as networking communities for the members of the crowd between each other and clients. This means no clauses in client contracts that prohibit direct contact between a member of the crowd and the client, if initiated by the client. This is the only way the promise of “being seen” is a legitimate one.

The Bottom Line

I love social media. I love that it makes the distance between us all, which was already being closed by the rest of the internet, that much smaller. For creatives, professional and amateur, it allows us to meet, learn and collaborate with each other. To start projects and businesses that we wouldn’t have been able to start a few years ago.

What I don’t like is the idea that another middle man has sprung up between the client and the talent. I don’t like seeing people exploited. I don’t like watching people trying to turn my industry into a commodity. And in a time when jobs are scarce and people are desperate, I don’t like seeing the power this new technology has being used to take advantage of people, who either need the money so badly they’re willing to take the risk to work for free, or people who want in to the club so badly that they’re willing to give away their talent and hard work for a chance.

The power of crowdsourcing in creative isn’t in generating huge pools of ideas on the cheap. We’ve been able to do that for years with surveys and focus groups. The true power of crowdsourcing in the creative industry is in it’s ability to create teams of people that will be able to work across any distance and timezone, in the ability to recruit strong talent from a pool that is larger than ever before. But these people need to be paid, as professionals, when their work is being used for profit. Crowdsourcing is more useful than as a means to get ideas for cheap, and the first company that realizes this will always have the biggest crowd to draw from.