Leap of faith
In an industry nowadays obsessed with speed, it is no wonder that our vocabulary is littered with metaphorical references to air travel and, indeed, airplane manufacturing. Take that old one, for instance: “we’re having to change engines in mid-flight”, or my favourite: “an entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down”. Now, aside from the obvious speed-to-market imperatives, most of this talk is usually associated with the rush towards transforming multinationals into agile, fast-moving entrepreneurial entities. When it comes to ad agencies, however, the picture it suggests is more that of a whole colony of lemmings ambling towards a vertiginous drop with a half-baked expectation that a fleet of A380s will assemble itself in mid-air and catch them before they hit the deck.
Now, we all know that this whole “transformation” talk is old fuddy-duddies trying to become digitally-savvy and turbo-drive their business. After all, no self-respecting millennial would even use the term, let alone understand what the fuss is all about. Regardless, the trouble with most of the digital transformation that agencies seek is that they have defined the objective itself but have spent little time on the starting point. Because the starting point is not, as many would have you think, the need to move away from producing classic media, but the need to move away from the process that leads to classic media.
You see, when TV reigned supreme, your actual product, the ad, was the kind of massively expensive shot in the dark that felt more like a close relative to the moon exploration programme than to marketing. Worse, whether it worked or not, the production costs and logistics associated with it back then were so big you just had to live with that ad for months, if not years. Today, with most ads having the lifespan of an online scandal and campaigns being able to optimise themselves almost at will, that extended process should have been the first thing to consign to the dustbin. And yet it lingers and, in refusing to retire gracefully, it lays to waste all good-willed transformative efforts, makes remuneration laughable and gives established ad agencies the kind of names usually found in
So my advice is: jump off the cliff, by all means, but make sure you’re equipped with aircraft assembly manuals rather than those of the steam-engined locomotives you have become used to.