Firestarters and Grass Cutters

Autumn 2015

Last week I sat alongside the "folla alla moda" and listened in on as @neilperkin @simontsmall @jasonlonsdale @Beautyskew @sudeepgohil discussed the role of the advertising planner at the first Sydney Google #firestarters.

The highlights package consisted of Google is a verb, something of a manifesto for doing, while advertising has evolved into something of an adjective. A descriptive word for "our grass is being cut by McKinsey and the rest of them".

Take a quick look at the growth in management consulting revenues vs media spending in the US market over the past decade and it is easy to see why advertising has a problem.

But is the collective wisdom of the profession capable of finding a solution? A veritable quick fix? The answer is probably not. Here’s why

Identifying the problem is easy

Advertising is in the business of changing patterns of behaviour. Its practitioners use words and pictures, music and movement to manufacture a call to action.

Change the story. Change the world. Or, at very least, change the rules and motivations for playing the game.

The challenge is to identify the behavioural outcome your client is seeking and then invite the creative team to manufacture an award winning message that will deliver the desired conditioned response.

Management consulting is in the same business. As is Google, but that is another story.

The key difference between advertising and management consulting is this. With advertising the solution to every problem is telling a story (i.e. making an advertisement).

Meanwhile the management consultant can call upon a variety of solutions to change patterns of behaviour inside and outside the organisation (e.g. Changing Metrics, Processes, Technology, People etc). The management consultant’s plan of attack is not limited by just having to tell a story.

When it comes to manufacturing the social proof, advertising may have the best product, but management consultants benefit from a deeper, more intimate relationship with the client.

Their market discipline is Customer Intimacy. Meanwhile advertising continues to focus and compete on Product Leadership.

For advertising to compete with management consultants they must change their way of doing business. They must evolve beyond simply thinking storytelling is the answer to every client problem and widen their product offering to embrace new forms of social engineering.

Particularly now that the most creative act in advertising is manufacturing the audience, not the message.

To borrow a phrase from the lexicon of the management consultant: Advertising’s strength is ultimately its weakness.

Today the industry is in urgent need of a new manifesto for doing. A new call to action. It needs to radically rethink its pre-conditioned response to every client problem. It needs to be open to new ways of solving the client's problem.

And this is why there is no quick fix to the problem. No easy solution. No game changing story to tell the world.

For advertising to compete with all the growing number of real and imagined disruptors operating in their space today, they must evolve from being mere storytellers into the next generation of social behavioural engineers.

Something I suspect the vast majority of industry players didn’t signed up for when they made their decision to join the profession.

Put very simply, if advertising is to continue to be a force in the business of changing the game, it must begin by changing its own game.

Postscript - 2022

Looking back with 20/22 vision what has happened in 7 Years since I wrote this post?

A quick look at the data indicates the market for management consulting services still represents 50% of the spend in the US market

The only shift has been the generational drift from print to digital which now represents 50% of the advertising market

The deeper question is: Is this a new challenge for the advertising industry?

The answer is probably not

Advertising has been competing for market share with Management Consultants for 100 years

Arguably the trends favouring Management Consulting over Advertising is market maturity

Advertising budgets blossom when growth is strong

Management consultants thrive when industries and economies are in decline or growth fades and the focus is inevitably on optimisation and efficiency

The correlation between rapid urbanisation and great advertising should not be easily dismissed

In this context advertising is the expression of a new wave of culture being built in the great urban centers

Nor should the rise of information technology and big data in second half of the 2oth Century as a response to the market opportunities created by this shift from growth through innovation to 'growth' via optimisation

Management Consulting emerged in the 1930's in response to the Great Depression. US urbanisation had hit 50%

By 2000 US urbanisation had hit 80%

China on the other hand was only 36%

As they say... the future was busy being built elsewhere

The new wave was washing up on distant shores

Meanwhile advertising in the USA and Western Europe began to look more like Management Consulting (e.g. VALS Psychometrics circa 1980)

Today the revenue spread across the Top 15 Advertising and Consulting Brands is 60:40 in favour of optimisation over growth

The market now dominated by the consulting factories operating across both sides of the growth:optimisation equation

and this raises the question based on current trends is the future of marketing in the urbanised digital economies 80% optimisation and 20% growth?

'There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules. They can tell you that people in an ad will get you greater readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this short or that long. They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier reading. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there's one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art'

You may think that paragraph was written recently but it harks back to 1947

It was written by Bill Bernbach and speaks to the past, present and future of advertising

ie. Advertising, just like its nemesis Management Consulting, trends towards mapping and codifying patterns of behaviour (ie systems thinking) rather than inventing new patterns of behaviour (ie creative thinking)

The USP - the Unique Selling Proposition - also dates back to the 1940’s

Arguably - this core idea that advertising & marketing is about identifying and communicating differentiation - is at the heart of 20th Century industry

For Bernbach the USP of advertising was an investment in 'a distinctive personality' - ie. a unique voice, style and vision

or, put another way, … ‘creative execution (the way the message is conveyed) is just as important as the message content (what is being said)’

and it raises the question: If you lined up the Top 9 Advertising Agencies in the world today could you define their USPs?

Probably not… But for the record here they are…

WPP - Creative Transformation Company
Omincom Group - Digital Innovation
Publicis Groupe - Targeted Insights
Accenture - Execution on insights
Interpublic Group - Creative Collective
Dentsu Inc - Targeted Insights
Deloitte Digital - Growth Agendas
PwC Digital Services - BXT Framework (UX Design)
Havas - the world’s most integrated advertising and communications business

What we see is the collective USP of advertising today is about (surprise, surprise) mapping & codifying patterns of behaviour (ie systems thinking) rather than inventing new patterns of behaviour (ie creative thinking) - ie the birth of a new wave

Now let’s look at the USPs of the Top 3 Management Consultancies

McKinsey: Most Wanted (Systematic Expertise across industries) Systems
BCG: Smartest (Frameworks) Product
Bain: Most Reliable Long Term Partnership (Implementation - Results) Intimacy

Again their business is about mapping & codifying patterns of behaviour but you’ll notice the market leaders map easily to Treacy and Wiersema’s Value Drivers

McKinsey: Operational Excellence
BCG: Product Leadership
Bain: Customer Intimacy

Now let’s try an remap the Top Advertising Agencies to the Value Drivers

Operational Excellence = Systems/Execution = Researchers & Scientists
Product Leadership = Creativity = Artists/Creatives
Customer Intimacy = KAM/Partnerships = Rainmakers & Relationship Managers

i.e. Models, Awards & Relationships

Yes, you guessed it, everybody is competing on Operational Excellence

In their efforts to compete and/or transition into management consulting the industry has fallen into the trap Bernbach expressed all those years ago…

'The danger lies in the temptation to buy routinized men who have a formula for advertising. The danger lies In the natural tendency to go after tried-and-true talent that will not make us stand out in competition but rather make us look like all the others.'

Fortunately Bernbach penned the response to this dilemma when identified the trend back in 1947

'If we are to advance we must emerge as a distinctive personality. We must develop our own philosophy and not have the advertising philosophy of others imposed on us… Let us blaze new trails. Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling.'

The science of advertising today is focused on a single challenge - how to avoid conflict so we can capture the largest market share

The problem is, as Sergei Eisenstein proclaimed over a century ago, 'art is always conflict'

Art's task? 'to form equitable views by stirring up contradictions within the spectator's mind, and to forge accurate intellectual concepts from the dynamic clash of opposing passions.'

This too is arguably advertising's challenge if it is to outperform the competition in the Society of Spectacle

Which is to say Advertising's role isn't to map and monitor the parade. It is to outperform all the other participants

Today - thanks largely to its efforts to avoid conflict - the USP Advertising offers to the world is a never ending parade of banality

It confuses optimising the Search/Social arbitrage for successful growth hacking

It fails because it has become what it chose to measure

So have a think about that... at least until next time