kip/bot/blog

Not sure how I feel about this . . .

I believe this came up while reading a link from a friend about laser etching my moleskine:

It points to this:

Feels like a stunt, but I dig it anyway.

Zeus Jones has nice, but regrettably short, piece about storytelling in marketing and advertising. It’s built around a line from Lee Clowe at AAAAAAAAA:

The ability to use the internet in terms of great brand storytelling is still at its infancy,” he said. “The internet advertising media, cross my fingers and hope to God, with bandwidth and with some ability, is going to become more artful; it’s going to become more interesting. … But it’s going to take creative people to embrace the possibilities of what you can do on the internet in terms of advertising and storytelling and make it a little better and smarter.

This reminds me a little of Spielberg’s line about a decade ago that video games would become an art form when one makes us cry: it’s a weird evaluation of one medium, through the value system of another one. In both cases, it’s a an older medium evaluating an emergent medium by its own standards. Z-J goes on to point out, rather crisply that, “There’s no doubt that online advertising is generally pretty dire, but then the Web isn’t really a great medium for delivering traditional advertising. But even more importantly it’s absolutely the wrong medium if all you want to do is tell stories.”
As advertisers and interactives race towards each others’ capabilities, storytelling is the word that many, most, nearly everybody uses to characterize that sacred center. Like concept, or big idea, storytelling is getting added on to the fundamental requirements of interactive experiences. For certain kinds of experiences, it seems like an unnatural bolting on. Is the logic that we should extend the formula of useful, usable, engaging to:

useful + usable + engaging + story == good experience?

Or are we saying that the way to be engaging should be through story?

In any case, it feels like storytelling is a heavy throw-weight word — strong on emotional attention-getting, light on impact — that we throw into the mix to let others know that we’re thinking of the next big thing.

An opinion piece in AdAge seems kind of all over the place, but might spark a wave of anti-innovation writing. The article is pretty straightforward: innovation is one tactic, not a strategy; it’s not even a core tactic, just one.

There’s also the famous Peter Drucker quote, “The business enterprise has two — and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation.”

I would simplify that quote: “A business enterprise has only one basic function: build a brand that can dominate a category.” Early on, innovation can help a company build that kind of brand. Consider: instant photography and Polaroid; the plain-paper copier and Xerox; the microprocessor and Intel; wireless e-mail and BlackBerry; the athletic shoe and Nike.

But when a category matures, the situation changes. Take the automotive industry. The significant innovations in the auto industry — the V-8 engine, automatic transmission, power steering, air conditioning, seat belts, air bags, etc. — took place decades ago.

What makes a powerful automobile brand today is not innovation, but a narrow focus on an attribute or a segment of the market. Reliability and Toyota. Driving and BMW. Youth and Scion.

Seems questionable, but at least aguable. But then the argument drifts:

Most brands don’t need innovations; they need focus. They need to figure out what they stand for (or what they could stand for) and then what they need to sacrifice to get there…. It’s sacrifice — not innovation — that builds brands.

Don’t innovate, go after segments, build and dominate a brand attribute, get focused, and make sacrifices, quite a lot of chasing in an article that starts with Peter Drucker, but the conclusion wraps it up:

As the Sharper Image story illustrates, innovation is not a strategy. It’s a tactic that needs to be used in support of a company’s branding strategy.

Feels like a hammer flailing about for nails — anything to say brand work is all that matters.
The upside of the article is that it might spark a bigger backlash. Backlashes are interesting double-edged phenonomena. On the one hand, they force the backlashees to put sharper points on their thinking, shore up weaker parts of the argument, and in general go deeper and justify claims. On the other hand, backlashes tend to turn the object of attack into trends that are passe. For some, the innovation conversation will be over, cuz the debate is turning on itself.

Digital agency folks have been talking about what to do with clients who are cutting back in a recession. One of the responses that digitals often have is: ‘invest more in our channel. We are accountable, we are measurable, we can prove hard business results.’ Hard business results usually means that we can transact and track on our channel in a way other channels can’t. Not a bad argument, but very limiting — does that mean we should forego brand-enhancing activities? stop trying to build awareness? avoid activities that can’t point to a cart?

I would love to see digital agencies get bold with clients and make a different argument: give us 2% of your above-the-line ad dollars and let us invest it in an influencer strategy. Let us take that small amount (which might buy one weekend spot) and find influencer blogs, do AdSense words, create feeds that distribute content, and put a staff person on participating in these areas of conversation. Let’s measure and track and see if we don’t do for more for your brand - at a deeper level - than if you had blown your budget on traditional ads.
Conversations in these channels are fewer in number, but more intimate, more memorable, and more likely to spread and have a lasting impact.