No, don’t expect big announcements that the big campaign is dead. Big campaigns will remain important for the foreseeable future but their effectiveness will decrease over time. Money won’t allow brands anymore to buy attention effectively, they need to adapt to the small, frequent, fine-grained patterns that characterize mobile and successful social implementations. For successful brands, these lightweight interactions will become natural as part of their social business, breaking down organizational and transactional boundaries, transforming into a more social and informal enterprise.

It will force brands to delegate more power to the edges, providing people the tools and insights they need, and implementing a sensible use of automation. When platforms are always on and customers expect a 24/7 response rate, brands need to find a balance between human interaction and automated responses.

Campaigns (bursts of activity with a beginning and an end) will remain an integral part of the marketing mix. The real challenge for the marketing community is to find a balance between lightweight interactions (small, frequent, ongoing, informal) and bold, planned bursts of activity. Creating a brand interaction that feels slow, fast, spiky and always-on at the same time.

Here’s a great example – From Digiday:

“TNT gave a dream brief to Breakfast, a tech-hacker marketing boutique of sorts, to help promote its new psychological crime show “Perception“: make something cool in a storefront space in New York City’s Herald Square.

Breakfast hatched what it’s calling a “real-time electromagnetic dot display,” an updated version of old signs in train stations with letters and numbers that flip over as they change. The twist: The display changes based on motions of those in front of it. When walking by, the sign displays mirror images of the people in front of it, reacting immediately to their movements. You wave, your dot-matrix doppelganger waves back. The movements knock away words, revealing clues to anagrams that the star of “Perception” uses to solve crimes. The idea is to physically involve participants in experiencing the plot of the show.”

A well-executed creative idea that’s perfectly aligned with changing consumer demands.

Goertz, a former client, reinvented the shoe buying experience. According to digitalbuzz: “How does a German online shoe store grab some attention in the real world? Well, a virtual shoe fitting installation makes sense right? Yep, here it is, the Virtual Shoe Fitting Store from Goertz, an Augmented Reality, Microsoft Kinect powered installation that is plugged into a giant screen, then rolled out as virtual shoe stores at central stations and shopping centres across Germany.

Using 3x Microsoft Kinects, a beefy computer and giant screen, this virtual shoe fitting station is basically an Augmented Reality Shoe Store, tracking 3D versions of their entire range of online shoes to your feet, allowing you to choose your favourite brands, flip through colours, sizes and then post to Facebook for feedback before buying on your mobile via a dynamic QR code that is displayed on screen.”

A good example how retailers can leave their static stores and create immersive product experiences.

Creativity says: “According to McCann Vice Chairman/Global Deputy Chief Creative Officer Andreas Dahlqvist, a key goal was to extend the life of the catalog in consumers’ homes. Its average lifespan is about two weeks, but with the digital offerings, content can be added and updated on a regular basis, making the catalog relevant year-round.

The print pages tease the additional materials with a smartphone icon that encourages shoppers to scan to see more. The app uses image recognition software from Metaio, and not QR codes, which makes it convenient to add further content to other pages in the future. With those, viewers may be alerted to new content via billboard callouts, for example, said McCann Associate Creative Director Koen Malfait.”

I’m dubious about that execution. In the age of ADD, it doesn’t seem likely people will engage with the catalog as envisioned. Personally, I would have left the catalog mostly alone. It’s a coffee table book, something you engage with as a still product. Aren’t we asking too much from people to pull out their phone constantly to engage with us?

Data will give us the answer. No matter, the advertising innovation train continues to speed up. Hold on tight, it will only get faster.

There are many things to say against focusing on big ideas: It’s better to develop many small ideas and scale the successful ones up, it’s more important to create as many connection points as possible and not just one humongous connection hub. Still, sometimes agencies develop concepts that are bigger than big ideas.

As part of an effort to help Vestas sell more wind turbines, Droga5 developed WindMade, a product label that will help us make informed purchasing choices baed on whether the goods were made with clean, sustainable energy. It’s bigger than a big idea or any huge campaign: It’s an NGO developed by an advertising agency.

Projects like this convince me more and more that the right kind of creative thinking can underwrite amazing technology and help people to change their behavior in admirable and sustainable ways. That’s why this is the amazing and inspiring time in advertising. And that’s why we should continue to care about advertising.

The list of countries by Nobel laureates is very revealing:

- The United States has 332 winners.

- United Kingdom 118, followed by Germany (103), France (58), Sweden (29) and Switzerland (25).

- China has 4 winners. India 9.

- Switzerland has 33 winners per 10 million citizens, China 0.052.

Even more revealing is to look at the German specifics:

- Before 1933, Germany won the Nobel Prize 38 times. 38 wins in 32 years.

- Between 1933 and 1950, Germany won it 9 times. 9 wins in 17 years.

What happened?

When countries become less concerned with output and more concerned with other factors (race, religion, political affiliation, class), they become less productive.

Hitler didn’t care about the work of Einstein, Teller, Haber and Frisch. He was only concerned about their religion and his insane racism.

(Now, let’s all be very grateful he didn’t care about their work. These were the people that made the atomic bomb possible. Can you imagine? Let’s not.)

All of us are guilty of this behavior.

We tend to put more emphasis on arbitrary factors than judging the work. Take an agency pitch:

Brands often choose a new agency because of the overall vibe. It can be the location. The architecture of the office. The chemistry. The niceties.

Employers choose new hires based on a cultural fit, not on their accomplishments. They rather create a  comfortable work environment than creating extraordinary work.

I used to have a dentist that was extremely friendly, I wouldn’t mind bar hopping with him. We chatted for 10 minutes before he went to work. Years later I found out that his work was terrible. I was blinded by his receptionist, his demeanor, the overall vibe. My current dentist barely talks. If I’m lucky, he has 5 words for me all day. But he does the work. Maybe the best work in the business.

I don’t care if my mechanic calls me on my birthday. I want him to do the work.

I don’t care if my mortgage broker loves the same movies. I want her to do the work.

Clients want agencies to solve problems.

The advertising doesn’t work. The product doesn’t sell.

So, the CMO gets orders from the CEO to fix marketing/advertising. The CMO has to find an agency to spend millions of dollars with. If I was a CMO, the last thing I’d be worried about is the culture, the fit, the perks. I wouldn’t care who I liked. I’d be looking at the work. At the expertise. The experience. What they have done. Not the charisma, their smiles, the hot latte.

Years ago, Washington Mutual ran the Whoo-Hoo campaign: The idea being that Washington Mutual was so good, all associates and customers should just shout out “Whoo-Hoo” all day. Employees greeted you with a handshake, they wanted to be your best friend and each hour, on the hour, employees got up to scream “Whoo-Hoo” in the middle of any transaction. Washington Mutual wanted to be liked. And they disappeared a few years ago.

Don’t try to be liked. Be competent.