Darling, I'm not
Content!
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Why content will kill the ad campaign - and how ad agencies can adapt
This essay is literary freeware: you can send it to anyone, as long as
you quote the source.
Why content will kill the ad campaign - and how ad agencies can
adapt
The year was 1970. At a party somewhere north of Los Angeles, a radical
young director called Dennis Hopper fixed his dilated pupils on old-school Hollywoodian
George Cukor and muttered, 'You're finished. We're going to bury you. We're
gonna take over.' And over the next five years, they did.
Fat on formulas and stale plots, the big studios had stopped taking risks
and sunk into mulchy lowest-common- denominator blandness, while edgy films
like M*A*S*H, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Easy Rider spread across America.
Yet Hopper hadn't 'succeeded' according to Cukor: Easy Rider had little
marketing budget and some camerawork the big studios would've edited out in
a flash. So what was feeding Hopper's confidence?
One word: content.
Easy Rider was content. It was something with real substance created
by a few talented people because they wanted to. No formula and lots of risk.
People saw Easy Rider not because they'd read the reviews, but because a friend
told them about it. Its content got bums on seats by word of mouth. And Hopper
knew compelling content can outride big budgets.
The same thing is about to happen with advertising. A million niche brands
will - have already - grip the grassroots with compelling content, while the
Proctor & Gambles blast yet more advertising to ABC1s and wonder why they're
not listening. Content will bury mass-market advertising the same way Hopper
buried Cukor.
And unless ad agencies look up, they'll be six feet under too. (A Regional
President of a major ad agency recently described many agency bosses as 'contemplative,
complacent, fat crypto-Buddhas.')
Because as couch potatoes move onto the web, they're fragmenting into
a million hobby tribes; most belong to more than one and mix n' match them every
month. No clever wordsmithing or art directional pzazz will get them interested;
you've got to give them something with substance. The advertising campaign as
a distinct media entity is therefore dead.
Let's sum up how content differs from advertising:
Advertising is about knowing your customer. Content is about knowing
yourself.
Advertising tells you how to buy tickets on the web. Content is a travel
agent putting her travel diary on the web. Advertising tells you the benefits
your family get when you die. Content is a broker's story about rowing to someone's
house to assess water damage. Advertising is a house campaign for an ad agency.
Content is an art director showing you his etchings. Content tells me who you
are. And if I like you, I'll buy from you. But if you ever shove your logo in
my face, I'll walk away.
Of course, after reading the travel diary you still need to know how
to buy tickets. After seeing the broker's subaqua photos you still need to order
the policy. But when those tickets and policies are available from a million
places, how do you differentiate your offering? By wrapping your slivers of
advertising in tasty rolls of compelling content. By being an interesting place
to hang out.
Consultant Christopher Locke (www.rageboy.com/ewc/people.html) uses the
term 'gonzo marketing'. Gonzo marketing is to traditional marketing
what Hunter Thompson is to journalism. Gonzo marketing is about not worrying
what your customers think. It's about being yourself and standing for something.
So to create compelling content you've got to go gonzo. Know who you are and
create for yourself; in a webbed world, people who like you will find you.
(Hell, compelling content gets people gunning for you! Ten thousand people
with a stake in your success. Versus advertising: a glooey mass of people you've
merely persuaded to buy something. There's no contest: content outguns advertising.)
As 'RageBoy', Locke sends weekly email rants to several thousand
web adepts, sometimes a single anecdote that amused him, sometimes a short story
he wrote, sometimes a carefully-constructed essay like the 7 Deadly Sins of
Web Marketing (www.rageboy.com/scream3.html). He's funny, erratic, and often
crude. But he entertains. And as long as he entertains, he's welcome in my emailbox.
The Absolut Vodka site (www.absolutvodka.com) gets it right: it's all
content. On the site you'll find content as diverse as a book on evolutionary
design, web sculptures around the absolut theme, and a mix-your-own DJing application.
No booze. Yet the enigmatic Absolut brand is there on every page, reflected
in the content.
And ad agencies? At Kirschenbaum Bond & Partners's website, there's
a pageful of private email exchanges between employees culled from the agency's
server. Employees make jokes, mock bosses... content never created for the mass
market. Yet after reading some of this office banter, you've got a pretty good
idea of KB&P's culture. Far more than you'd get from a house ad.
It works in the paperbound world too. Tom Clancy put the first two chapters
of his last book on the web; this content compelled punters to buy the book.
Consultants Chunka Mui and Larry Downes put the entire text of 'Unleashing
the Killer App' on their site; I read it all and ended up buying four copies
for colleagues.
Software companies rarely advertise; rather, they give away their wares
over the web. Once a critical mass of people are actively using this content,
they can start charging for it. Content drives software industry sales.
On the web, your brand is your content. Advertising campaigns are media
entities inherently without content; ergo, they're dead. To succeed on the web,
create content, not ads.
Yet any creative knows what it's like to write an ad from a contentless
brief. To create something, you've got to reach inside yourself - but to succeed
you've got to have something there to pull out. On the web, it'll be instantly
obvious if you're bluffing. ('We're just soooo excited about our kewl new
offering!')
So what do you need to create content on the web instead of campaigns?
Three things.
First, you've got to know the technology.
On the web, content is enabled by technology. Creating web-based content
without knowing the technology is a bit like building the tip of an iceberg
without the nine-tenths that's underwater: your site will dissolve fast.
Many agency people panic when you mention Perl scripts, Java applets,
and Dynamic HTML. (See?) But there's no way around this one. You don't trust
someone unschooled in design to do your layouts; why do so many creative directors
think they can creatively direct a website into being without learning the nuts
and bolts of site building?
The grammar of web design goes far beyond the look and feel of the home
page. Yet to most creatives, a website is a work of graphic art, nothing more;
the level of technology literacy among creative directors, even younger ones,
is appalling. Few ever think to check the dHTML structure, the style sheets,
the XML markup that'll bring far more visitors to the page than cute art direction.
Yet these things are as essential to website success as contact details in a
direct response ad.
The Dilbert Zone (www.dilbert.com) knows the importance of knowing web
technology better than most sites. Its 'comic browser' lets users
'surf' the day's comic strips, over a dozen of them, without visiting
the individual home pages of the strips. (The site also features cartoon strips
rejigged into three-dimensional VRML scenes you can move around in, a 'mission
statement generator' that strings random lumps of corporatespeak into the kind
of puffed-up jargonese found at so many blue-chip front desks, and an archive
of strips: all this content can keep surfers in the brand environment for hours.)
The idea for the comic browser came from a simple insight: newspapers put all
their strips on the same page because readers like to read them all at once.
But to put flesh on that idea, the site builders had to know the technology.
HotWired (www.hotwired.com) is one of the web's greatest brands: it invented
the banner ad and has reinvented itself at least six times since 1994. The content
on HotWired today - an archive of articles on web building, a technology news
section, and a search engine - is totally different to the lifestyle articles
and cocktail recipes it used to have. Hotwired knew the technology and used
it. Every HotWired piece bursts with rich information obviously created by experts.
Locke again: 'Content isn't something you get out of a can and pour into a pie
shell.'
Sites like Dilbert and HotWired also illustrate the importance of being
state of the art: their content revolves daily, and there's always something
there you haven't seen before. Graphic design can attract surfers to your site
- once. But only content can keep them coming back. So forget about design;
that's something any art director can slap on in a day.
Build your site on content, not graphics. And you can't build your site
on content without knowing the web. No excuses. Start spending five hours a
day on the web and get to know the technology.
Second, understand what the technology can do.
Carver Mead, who co-invented the chip, told techies to 'Listen to
the technology. Understand what it wants to be.' What the technology wants
to be may be something its creators never imagined; the street finds its own
uses for things.
Before the web got rolling, the first killer app was the spreadsheet
Lotus 1-2-3. Accountants, its creatorsreasoned, spend many hours adding up figures.
By giving them a tool to add up rows and columns, we'll put an extra three hours
of free time into their days!
But soon after hitting the market, nobody was using 1-2-3 to add up last
month's figures. Instead, they were using it to add up next month's figures
- and the month after that, and the month after that, dozens of times each.
Because it made adding up rows and columns effortless, accountants used it for
forecasting, performing thousands of what-if calculations and scenarios. The
technology didn't want to work on the past; it wanted to work on the future.
Accountants didn't go home three hours early, but they got promoted a lot faster.
The Rocket eBook was designed to store and display electronic versions
of books, letting you carry a hundred novels around in your pocket. But six
months after its launch, the paradigm's already shifting. Director's-cut versions
of books are appearing, unedited texts with all the wild prose left in. Textbooks
are being sold pre-annotated by top professors. The content creators understand
what the technology can do; they're not limiting themselves to the paradigm
(print) the product (books) was born in.
A Singapore creative working on a pitch for broadband consumer services
found it impossible to understand what the technology was capable of, thinking
broadband meant nothing beyond faster file downloads. Yet games like You Don't
Know Jack (www.berzerk.com), which simulates broadband thanks to a 2MB download,
demonstrate that high bandwidth allows qualitatively different experiences to
low bandwidth. Even Intel's Andy Grove once couldn't explain what a PC would
be good for, struggling to come up with a suggestion that housewives could keep
recipes on it. (He knew it had huge potential; he just didn't know what that
potential would be.)
Because as an enabler, the PC can do almost anything - but smart guys
have got to fill that enabler with content (software) first. Putting content
into the enabler is the basis of Silicon Valley's success: a fertile economy
of ideas and the skills to turn them into products makes the northern California
region the most successful place on Earth. Today, Intel spends US$500m seeding
software startups, knowing that the innovative content they create will drive
demand for the processors it builds. Content is what helps your readers to understand
what your products are capable of, creating demand where none existed before.
When television was young, shows consisted of talking heads around a
mike, because that's how radio worked. It took a few years for the extra depth
of television to be explored. Similarly, far too many people are treating the
web like television. So for every piece of web-based content you create, ask
yourself, 'could this be done on television?' If it could, your idea's
not strong enough. Start again.
Listen to the technology and find out what it wants to do. Then let it
do it.
Third, and most important, learn how the web works.
Locke once more (in facetious mode): 'Goldurn it! This dubya-dubya-dubya
thing is just another advertising medium is all it is! Why, in my day, we woulda
licked this whippersnapper into shape in nothin flat! Hell, we woulda just bought
the sucker!!!'
Locke's sarcasm illustrates the point that the web isn't a captive audience.
It's a party, and an ad campaign is like the bore at a party who tries to get
everyone to shut up and listen. TV networks don't understand this, even as a
million Americans a year just stop watching television.
On the web, intrusiveness and pervasiveness are minuses. You can't force
people into consuming your content; that's not how the web works. Many advertisers
and ad agencies think the rules of reach and frequency are just as relevant
in the webspace. They're wrong. Reaching people on the web needs new methods.
As an experiment, I'm starting up a newsletter, 'Bandwidth'. Each month
it will explore one conceptual web application that will be possible in five
years, when multimuxed fibre and abundant spread-spectrum CDMAgive everyone
ten-megabit connections to the Internet. One difference between Bandwidth and
other newsletters: Bandwidth won't have a distribution list.
Instead, it'll be passed on by 'word of email' - I'll send it to just
six people. If they like it, those six will pass it on to others, and so on.
(My last essay reached 400 people in four days in this way.) By not having a
distribution list, I'll have people on the lookout, perhaps visiting my website
(www.chrisworth.com) to see what's new and absorbing the Chris Worth brand because
they want to, consuming the content I've put there. Best of all, if I write
a dud one month, it won't go further than those six people and they'll all tell
me what's wrong with it. As a brand-building tool for Chris Worth the wannabe
radical technotheorist, it can't lose. It spreads its influence the same way
Easy Rider did.
That's the secret of getting your content out there: let the network
do the work. People come to the web not because your site's on it, but because
there's a million sites on it in addition to yours. The killer app that drives
PC sales is the Internet itself, not any individual site. This is illustrated
by Metcalfe's Law, which states that the value of a network increases as the
square of the number of nodes in that network. People buy a fax machine not
because they like the bells and whistles it has, but because they like the network
of ten million fax machines they can connect it to. (This is the problem with
all technology advertising today: it sells the node, not the network.)
Understanding this, in 1995 GeoCities offered free space on its website
for your homepage. Millions took them up on it; today GeoCities gets millions
of page views a day. It created a community without ever having to create content
itself. Now in 1998, the community metaphor is shifting from home pages to homes
spaces, just like the real world. One of these - ActiveWorlds - is a GeoCities
for the next decade, thanks to smart programmers understanding how the web works.
Active Worlds's webspace (www.activeworlds.com) is a 3D landscape on
the web, divided into plots of land where users can build a house. (There's
a variety of designs to choose from.) It even has its own TV of sorts; it's
possible to install 'cameras' elsewhere in the virtual world and have the output
of those cameras fed to screens in your 'house', letting you know what's going
on in your community. These features use the true power of networks. Without
urban planning, a coherent city with central districts and suburbs has grown
up. (One flaw: Active Worlds uses proprietary software instead of the open standard
VRML. But something like Active Worlds will almost certainly be the online community
of tomorrow.)
The community of gameplaying has Ultima Online. (www.ultimaonline.com)
It's a graphical world on the web, each player an 'avatar' able to move around
the virtual world. Experience shows users quickly get bored with this. But Ultima
Online had one feature that stood out: it had an economy. The longer you stay
in Ultima Online, the more credit you earn. You can earn extra credit by doing
jobs in the online world, bartering, even starting a business. Today, Ultima
Online is a strange mirror of real life, with an underclass, an elite, and a
diverse population. When someone attempted a public assassination of powerful
warlock Lord British (in reality the game's creator) the mass of avatars around
British's avatar dissolved into chaos, just like a real-life mob. There have
been riots, strikes, and political struggles; someone even started a newspaper.
The web built the society.
Using the web's propensity for stealing and redistributing images, programmer
Harlan Hugh created Desktop Toys, animated website icons anyone can 'steal'
and put on their own site. Since those icons contain likeable content - talking
South Park characters, laconic Doonesbury quoters, poets - your brand gets spread
around the web by your fans.
So to extend the appeal of your content, don't fight the web; turn its
features to your advantage. Weave your content into a broader context. Be generous
with linking to other sites, even to your competitors. (RageBoy Locke has a
theatrical love-hate relationship with a rival newsletter, JoHO; both have increased
circulation because of these exchanges, with many readers subscribing to both.)
Let your work be freely redistributed.
For inspiration, look to the past. Charles Dickens's novels weren't written
as single works; they were published in magazines as separate chapters, with
Dickens writing and revising weekly chapters to reflect signs of the times.
This is possible to a far greater degree on the web.
Imagine applying Dickens's principle to email. You send a weekly email
to interested subscribers, perhaps a chapter of an adventure story you've started
on. ('September 12 was like any other day until the sassy brunette walked
in...') Like any ripping yarn, each episode sets up eager anticipation
for the next one with a cliffhanger.
But that's not using the web. The web is a culture of participation.
So let's bring our readers into the narrative. After three episodes, your readers
get a strange additional email - apparently a misdirected message from one of
the characters in the story to another.
This sneak peek at the greater world of the story contains something
that puts a totally new spin on it. Perhaps the sassy brunette the detective's
been dating plans to murder him. Perhaps the smoking man isn't really part of
the conspiracy. Whatever. Your readers are now involved with the narrative in
a way they weren't before. Instead of viewing the movie, they're now extras
on the set.
Now suppose the sender of that misdirected email starts believing the
reader is the correct recipient, and brings that reader into the story itself.
He responds to that email and his response causes the plot to twist. Perhaps
the detective mentions him by name and tries to track him down in the next episode.
Like Infocom's text adventure games from the 80s, the reader's now inside the
story, one of the principal characters.
Perhaps only one person gets that misdirected email that brings the story
to life; perhaps many readers get different emails, creating an 'information
gap' that could drive an online community. (Clues in the scripts of the
X-Files drive over 10 000 websites exploring the show's greater canvas, while
'fan fiction' - stories written in a show's universe - is a major
feature of Star Trek and Star Wars hobby sites.) When creating meaningful content
on the web, you're not a musician, you're a mixmaster. Best of all, most of
your story gets written for you.
Take this further. Imagine building this narrative around one of your
client's products. ('It was a dark and stormy night when I found the secret
message in the packet of Tide...') Just as TV soap operas were created
as content to wrap commercial breaks, web content is what will build brand equity
for your clients in the post-advertising age ahead. If that content can be tied
in to real-world products for clients - does one packet of Tide on supermarket
shelves actually contain a secret message? - the possibilities are endless.
(Coming close is Calvin Klein, whose new campaign features email addresses
of the models in the ads. Anyone who emails gets a response written in the model's
voice - linking the web to the world.)
Several years ago a site called The Spot built a community of 30 000
regular visitors. The Spot was an 'episodic' site - a little more
real than television, a little less real than reality. A situation drama based
around six friends living in a beach house, the site consisted of pages from
each 'spotmate''s private diary, chronicling the events in and around
the house from several perspectives. (Was it inspired by Dickens or the Gospels?)
The site has now gone, but the brand lives on, on hobby pages and a newsgroup.
This is how the web works. And it's how you'd better work, if you want
to succeed on it.
Okay. So now you know how web content works. But how can you foster a
culture of content in your ad agencies? Intimate knowledge of Pantones and Jack
Lacy's Six Points won't help you create content; content comes from the gut,
from fascination and familiarity and desire to tell a story. These traits are
missing in most agencies, yet they're common in other creative companies like
software startups. Why?
Large ad agencies are bureacracies; software startups are 'adhocracies'.
In an adhocracy, everyone does what needs to be done, every day. There are no
job descriptions and no mandatory duties. (Venture capitalistAnn Winblad recounts
a friend's story: 'I think the company that's just moved in next door is
a software company - because nobody ever seems to do anything over there.')
Yet software startups are fertile fields for content creation.
It's because software startups have flat structures and vast numbers
of interconnections between people. These interconnections - project teams,
object-model experts, shared C++ experience - are dynamic, changing all the
time, but the overall interconnectedness of the startup is constant. By contrast,
'integration' in most ad agencies means hardened silos of account
service, media, and creative, bound together by business plans written forty
years ago. And tighter integration of your experts - (definition of expert:
someone who knows virtually everything about virtually nothing) - won't work
either. It's too static, too brittle. But a discussion of outdated ad agency
practices would get us hopelessly sidetracked here. (Oh, all right then. click
click, you're dead.)
So don't build bonds of steel between a few departments; rather, foster
more and looser links between people. Make creativity something anyone can do
and give them time to do it. (At San Francisco design house Construct, it's
compulsory to spend ten hours a week on your own creative projects; the free
time energises staff to do the paid work.) Hire a poet for a month. Learn Hokkien.
Ask a traffic girl out for dinner. Learn to deal with the pain of refusal. Cultivate
illegal drugs in the mailroom. Start your own newsletter. Foster email culture.
(One Singapore ad agency recently circulated a mail stating how email
was for 'business purposes only.' A business purpose in the new economy
is anything that helps your business - and the friendships and sense of community
fostered by jokes lists and Phwoar!-look-at-this JPEGs certainly fall into this
category. Email costs nothing, but can give so much; accordingly, limiting email
to job reqs, briefs and contact reports is idiotic. Let your people use email
for anything they want.)
Most importantly, good content, like good literature, ideally comes from
just one person. (When you're creating something on your own, you've got an
incentive to work hard, since you can't rely on anyone else.) So make sure everyone
has a sizeable stake in the work they do. Even mighty Microsoft sensibly keeps
its product teams small; Word was ultimately created by around eight people.
Creating content is an act of enjoyment. To build a culture of enjoyment, give
your people space to play in. Then sack anyone who isn't enjoying himself.
You may protest you can't afford this. Actually, given what's on the
way, you can't afford not to.
So to foster a culture of content, turn your agency into a hive instead
of a hierarchy. Let a hundred flowers blossom. And let most of them wither,
too. Sturgeon's Law states that ninety percent of everything is crap; nowhere
is that truer than with creating content. But as any venture capitalist knows,
funding nine software startups increases the chance number ten will gush forth
a hundred million IPO dollars.
The content you create may even appeal to no one at first, then suddenly
to thousands: it's created a hobby tribe that wasn't there before, just as Tarantino's
mention of Met-Rx in a movie turned an obscure health food into a cult. Throw
your content out there and let the web do what it wants with it. It might end
up starting a tribe. (As an aside, market research as a discipline is in serious
trouble here.)
This stuff that holds tribes together is the new brand equity. And to
survive, agencies had better get good at creating it.
So advertising campaigns as distinct media entities are dead. But is
there any place left for ads?
Perhaps - if they're part of the content. But not up-front. The paradigm
has shifted; consumers will judge you on your content, not your ads. You may
say how great you are, but if there's no evidence of it on your site, why the
hell should anyone believe you?
One possibility for inserting ads into your content comes (once again)
from knowing the technology. Ipix (www.ipix.com) lets users view a wraparound
photo as a seamless 3D space. (Imagine being inside a soap bubble with photos
of the outside world pasted all over the inner surface.) Natural objects mapped
into the scene can contain hyperlinks. Perhaps clicking on a car in the photo
leads to a two-minute infomercial about the car brand. This is acceptable to
consumers, because you're advertising to them with their permission.
This idea's already been explored in advertising: a famous Diesel campaign
had nothing to do with jeans, the branding coming from old Diesel ads playing
in shop-window TVs in the background as the commercial told its story. This
most postmodern of campaigns is perhaps the way forward. It works because the
ad is behaving like content: it's not intrusive, but it's there if you want
it. American TV shows sometimes pull the stunt of having characters visit from
another show. (Ally McBeal took this a stage further, with the storyline split
across two series; to get the full story you had to watch both shows.) Co-branding
ideas like this have huge potential in the open, standards-based environment
of the web.
But the future of your ad agencies is branded content, not ads. You'll
still create ads, but they'll be a few strategic messages woven into the content
you create, not the main show. (And the market for content will be huge. Many
large companies don't 'get' content. Online news services quaked two
years ago when dozens of journalists were lured to The Microsoft Network by
high salaries; today, most have gone, frustrated by the control over content
Microsoft demanded.)
So now's the time to start turning your agency into a content hotshop.
Your biggest mistake will be thinking you can't do it because you're in the
ad business. Wrong.
You are in the communication business. And the tools of communication
tomorrow will be content, not ads.
So be ruthless. Flatten your agency structure. Give control to teenagers.
Create skunkworks in your agencies, give them a budget, and let them make magic.
Give the suits markers and pads and let the creatives write media plans. Hire
evangelists, the way software companies do, not to sell your product but to
sell your vision and get people onboard your dreams. Make your agency a mind-blowing
hotbed of near-chaos. Out of this firestorm of ideas will come solid content.
And on that note, back to Dennis Hopper. He was both right and wrong.
For years the big studios were comatose, putting out flop after flop without
knowing what to do about it. Now they've adapted. They've become flatter, skunkworks-type
operations, putting together teams of a thousand people who'll work shoulder-to-shoulder
for a few months then say goodbye when the movie's in the can.
Today, the blockbuster is back: Titanic grosses a billion dollars and
the new Star Wars Trilogy will probably do even better. But the films showing
the highest margins - profits as a percentage of what the film cost to make
- are independent films with sub-$3m budgets. Cukor was thesis; Hopper was antithesis;
today we have a synthesis, with The Full Monty and Boogie Nights showing next
to Titanic and Men In Black.
But through an Internet lens, most ad agencies today look a lot more
like Cukor than Hopper. So don't Blow It, Man; it's Saturday afternoon and the
sun is shining. Harley revved and ready?
Hit the road.
Chris Worth (chris@chrisworth.com) is a user experience
architect and creative director.
This essay, which won WPP Group's Atticus award in 1999, was written
in December 1998, but many of its principles still hold. Chris Worth - October
2000