We’re basically asking the 70 year-old fuselage of a DC-9 to go supersonic. […] Same with the ad industry model.
The system is set up to reward layers, reward churn (hours-based work) and reward quick, incremental successes Vs. real ‘innovation’ or cutting edge and efficient ideas that could transform business. Whether that’s evidenced by brand managers who simply need to move the needle in order to get promoted or ad execs who need to get an award to jump up in a position, it’s apparent everybody’s pushing for short term gains, small passes that move the needle just a few points and add enough time and layers to bill.
This is what clients are paying for, encouraging and perpetuating. Starting with the pitch process (albeit, the first massive outlay is from agencies themselves. But if they win your business – they’ll get it back).
Client processes are what keep that status quo in place. Agencies are not innovating their own model fast enough only because they can’t. The agency model of the now is still making all the money. But it’s the model of the 1960′s.
One example is media. Often, agencies are presented with a media schedule before there’s even a concept. […] It’s kind of like handing us an expensive megaphone and only then being told to try to soothe a baby to sleep. […]
(there are plenty of those ‘innovative’ ideas sitting around anyway, but most don’t get made in a system that rewards overspending Vs. outthinking).
“There’s a huge amount of vodka that’s sold for drinking at home,” Lieskovsky says. “But no one knew where it was really going”—apart from down someone’s throat eventually, and on a bad night perhaps back up again. Was it treated as a sacred fluid, not to be polluted or adulterated except by an expert mixologist? Some Absolut advertising and iconography suggested exactly this, assuming understandably that buyers of a “premium” vodka would want laboratory precision for their cocktails. Another possibility was that the drinkers might not care much about the purity of the product, and that bringing it to a party merely lubricated social interaction. “We wanted to know what they are seeking,” Lieskovsky says. “Do they want the ‘perfect’ cocktail party? Is it all about how they present themselves to their friends, for status? Is it collaboration, friendship, fun?”
Over the course of the company’s research, the rituals gradually emerged. “One after another, you see the same thing,” Lieskovsky told me. “Someone comes with a bottle. She gives it to the host, then the host puts it in the freezer and listens to the story of where the bottle came from, and why it’s important.” And then, when the bottle is served, it goes right out onto the table with all the other booze, the premium spirits and the bottom-shelf hooch mixed together, in a vision of alcoholic egalitarianism that would make a pro bartender or a cocktail snob cringe.
What mattered most, to the partygoers and their hosts, were the narratives that accompanied the drinks. […]
The corporate anthropology that ReD and a few others are pioneering is the most intense form of market research yet devised, a set of techniques that make surveys and dinnertime robo-calls (“This will take only 10 minutes of your time”) seem superficial by comparison. ReD is one of just a handful of consultancies that treat everyday life—and everyday consumerism—as a subject worthy of the scrutiny normally reserved for academic social science.
Here you are on January 7th finding out about the perfect calendar. It was put together by “The Fertile Earth Foundation” and it features months and months of beautiful women covered in shit.
Fertile Earth is a Miami-based hippie clusterfuck that encourages people to compost using their own organic waste. Grow a potato from your poop. That sort of thing.
Facebook is planning on using Instagram to roll out a radical new advertising platform which is capable of following users’ emotions in real time and target advertisements based on how they are feeling. The platform - internally codenamed the Tom Parsons Project (TPP) - will “combine Instagram’s vast user base and high daily use rate with advancements in facial recognition technology to connect users with products which most fit their immediate needs.”
In the new TPP-enabled Instagram whilst you are taking a photo with your smartphone’s rear-facing camera the TPP software will discreetly activate the front facing camera and lock onto the image of your face. The app’s facial recognition function will then record the precise positioning of your facial features and send them to Facebook’s database where the firm will assign an emotion to the facial pattern and log your emotional state.
The company will then use a highly advanced algorithm which combines this new emotional data with the demographic data Facebook already has to create a near perfect ad targeting system. […]
“If you’re a woman with cyclical mood issues due to the harshness of your menstrual cycle, the new Instagram should be able to accurately predict when your cycle is peaking and connect you to valuable products and services which may reduce your discomfort before your moods become a burden on others.”
Privacy advocates are expected to protest the new technology, but legal experts say the method is legal in the United States so long as it’s disclosed in Instagram’s new Terms of Service Agreement.
Swiss scientists have developed an algorithm which they claim can determine the source of spam, computer viruses or malware by analysing a small percentage of network connections. […]
The researchers said the algorithm could also be used as a tool for advertisers who use viral marketing strategies by using the Internet and social networks to reach customers.
The algorithm would allow advertisers to identify specific Internet blogs that are most influential for their target audience and to understand how these articles spread throughout the online community.
