Review/Preview 2016-17 The Big Issues

AGENCIES

David Kolbusz

Chief creative officer, Droga5 London

In general, do you think this year has been a good one for creative advertising?

I think it’s been a horrible year for everything. Twelve months of utter shit that almost seems designed to make us weep for a fresh start. The world needs a reset and advertising is no exception. I couldn’t name you five bits of work I loved this year. Every brand in every category seems to want to stand for the same three purposes and it’s making for a horror show of homogeneity. 

You’re a cracker brand. I don’t care how badly you want it, you can’t be about ‘freedom’.

I weep for the days of being asked to bring to life a product’s USP in a simple, compelling way.

What piece or pieces of work have impressed you most over the last year?

In my estimation there have been two perfect things. Two bits of work that made me feel true, unmitigated jealousy. The first is a four-minute fake movie trailer that acts as a bit of branded entertainment promoting a trio of fragrances by Robert Graham. It’s called The Second Sound Barrier and it’s essentially a collection of non sequiturs strung together using 70s action film tropes. It improves upon repeated viewings too.

The other one is the Johnsonville Sausage campaign from Droga5’s New York office, where they get the meat company’s employees to write their own advertising. Hilarious and sweet, the brand’s ethos is baked into the execution and the work is stronger for it.

What have been the biggest talking points of 2016 in the agency world?

Pretty much every big-theme industry conversation I’ve had this year has been about data. Algorithmic targeting, data’s impact on creativity etc. The ongoing battle is to convince people that data, like research, isn’t sacrosanct. It needs to be interpreted thoughtfully and not used as a rod to beat creative work to death with. There’s still magic in the unknown.

With a number of clients opting to open their own in-house creative offerings, and with production and post houses working direct-to-client more regularly, what does that mean for more established agencies?

 Even the clients who build in-house offerings typically still engage with agencies on some level, and more often than not, those who stray do return. Agencies provide an invaluable service: passion with perspective. Most in-house work suffers from being too self-indulgently introspective. Save for Red Bull’s Stratos, I can’t think of another big, great piece of work in recent memory where the client was the agency. It doesn’t matter how good you think you look, sometimes you need someone to tell you when there’s a booger tangled up in your nose hair.

For the past two or three years it’s been “the year of VR”. Do you feel 2016 has indeed been that technology’s year?

I think that’s a misdiagnosis. For the past two or three years it’s been the year before the year of VR. People talk about the technology being the next big thing, but with the proviso that no one’s quite figured out how to use it properly yet. It’s still a novelty. When you can have a conversation with someone outside the industry about it – that will be the year of VR.

Do you think many clients have embraced or even shown an interest in branded entertainment?

As long as clients keep seeing a high level of consumer engagement with these unconventional brand-building exercises they’ll keep playing around and experimenting, in no small part because they can be cheaper to make than traditional content and require less approvals up the chain than something that slots into a specific media channel. If there’s a multi-million pound media spend behind a 30-second TV ad, that guarantees it a lot more scrutiny in the development process.

What do you think the biggest talking points of 2017 might be?

The ongoing, panicked dialogue centred around the question, “What’s next for our industry?” But the world will not settle. Uncertainty is the only certainty.

What will be your New Year’s resolution?

To not take the deaths of all my favourite musicians as personally as I did in 2016.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Harvey Cossell

Head of strategy, We Are Social

What’s been the biggest talking point in social media marketing in 2016?

Live video. #DrummondPuddleWatch in Newcastle was a watershed moment for live video streaming at the beginning of the year. It propelled Periscope into popular consciousness and signalled a proliferation of live streaming platforms that now includes Facebook Live and Instagram Stories.

Even though live video has been around for a long time, the difference we are seeing now is how social media has democratised the medium. Anyone can now publish their own live content, but there is a distinctly interactive quality to the way video is now broadcast. It’s no longer a passive experience and this, along with the unedited openness it delivers, affords brands the perfect opportunity to throw the doors open to stories that can be compellingly authentic.

What’s the most creative social media campaign you’ve seen in 2016 and why?

The Swedish Number. Its inherently social nature went way beyond social as a platform. The use of a simple telephone number combined with the unedited, uncurated responses of Swedes was nothing short of a master stroke. It played beautifully to the quirkiness of the Swedish people and drove a large swathe of earned media through conventional press and social media.

However, like all great social ideas, the campaign had conversation at its heart and was unashamedly peer-to-peer. Every Swede at the end of the phone was a brand advocate and they were literally using word of mouth (via conversation) to drive both consideration and conversion.

And the most influential?

I haven’t really seen anything in 2016 that I would consider to be as influential as the game-changing Always #LikeAGirl of 2015. Its legacy continues to be felt this year with a huge number of clients wanting content ideas with social purpose at their heart.

Has the proliferation and diversification of social media platforms made it easier or harder for brands to reach consumers?

It has never been hard to reach consumers. Ask any media agency. The real problem for brands today is how to reach consumers in such a way so that the brands won’t be rejected out of hand.

To do this we need to better our cultural understanding of consumers, which can be gleaned from their social (and social media) behaviour. The aim is to find a clear role in their lives that is authentic and non-interruptive. Only then can we assess the best platform opportunities for delivering that point of view.

With social channels atomising, rather than using just two or three platforms, we may need to deploy a more nuanced approach, building digital and social ecosystems with multiple platforms playing key roles along a customer journey.

Are brands and agencies still guilty of treating social media as an afterthought when it comes to their campaigns?

Certainly where larger brand briefs are concerned. However, there are still some great examples out there – such as The Swedish Number – that buck the trend. I think the challenge here is that brands and agencies need to try and break the cycle of campaign-first thinking and not use social media merely as a platform opportunity.

Social thinking, that is thinking culture-first, allows us to develop ideas that consumers want to spend time with, engage with and converse with. It allows us to think beyond platform and use social insights to give consumers and brands greater potential to bond.

Integrating this thinking into the strategic brand planning process will yield much more cohesive communication that will not only be invited into consumers’ cultural consciousness, but will allow social media to finally be the beating heart of a brand that no longer relies on campaigns for its oxygen.

How do you see the trend for personalisation and targeting of content on social media developing?

Are consumers gradually becoming more accepting of it? Shane Smith at VICE rightly said that Gen Y “...have an inbuilt bullshit detector, so don’t bullshit”. I see the trend of personalisation and targeting continuing apace as technologies continue to develop. How consumers react, though, will always depend entirely on when you serve up your content, where you serve it, what you serve and how you deliver it.

Get any of the above wrong and consumers will dismiss you out of hand, or outwardly reject you. It all comes back to finding a role for your content that fits in your consumer’s cultural consciousness and contributes to it. If you just shoehorn something that doesn’t consider what that consumer could be interested in at that moment, you could very well end up alienating that person.

Will the creative talent drain from agencies to tech platforms continue?

Yes. [Tech platforms] have the money, ambition and scale to develop more direct relationships with clients. But for me personally, what I get most excited about is understanding multiple tech platforms to find ways of integrating the most relevant aspects of each into an integrated brand ecosystem. No one platform can possibly be the entire answer to a client’s marketing or business conundrum and I enjoy the challenge of finding the right blend of tech solutions that will deliver optimal results for my clients.

What do you think the next big trend in social media will be?

Virtual reality. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that if you take live video, marry that with 360° video and deliver both through a VR headset, then you are creating truly immersive social content. Content that allows you to be there, without actually being there.

DIVERSITY

Cindy Gallop

Advertising consultant and founder of MakeLoveNotPorn

2016 saw its fair share of diversity-related scandals surrounding the likes of Saatchi & Saatchi’s Kevin Roberts and JWT’s Gustavo Martinez. What, for you, was the most momentous diversity-related incident this year?

The depressing fact those episodes demonstrate is how much change is not happening. Very ironically, the most momentous happening for diversity is Donald Trump. The one good thing about the appalling debacle of the US presidential campaign is that more and more evidence of his lifelong sexual harassment is coming to light. More women are feeling emboldened to speak up, and more men are coming to understand the universal female experience in this area. That can only benefit gender equality in the advertising industry.

Is the ad industry doing enough to promote other kinds of diversity?

Everything I say about gender diversity applies equally to diversity about race, ethnicity, sexuality, age and disability – although gender cuts across all of those. Diversity – and I mean diversity of everything – drives creativity. True creativity, innovation and disruption is the result of many different perspectives, life experiences, world views, insights, points of view all coming together in constructive creative conflict.

What are your thoughts on this year’s Glass Lion winners and how the category is developing?

Last year, as the inaugural Glass Lion jury president, I said to the Cannes Lions audience: take a long hard look at your agency, at your clients, at your holding company and ask yourself: would I award us the Glass Lion? And the answer today is still no. 

But there was also some fantastic work: I was thrilled that P&G and BBDO Mumbai won a second Glass Lion for Ariel #ShareTheLoad. It’s a wonderful example of a really holistic approach to changing a societal construct in a way that will benefit both women and men and also sell a shit-ton of product. The work is exemplary in terms of doing good and making money simultaneously.

What’s your view on the various diversity initiatives launched this year?

I’m a huge fan of #FreeTheBid, which is designed to break the appalling cycle in our industry in which women don’t get the job because ‘Their reels aren’t good enough’ – and their reels aren’t good enough because they don’t get the jobs. And I am gobsmacked by the fact there’s pushback from the UK advertising industry and from white male directors who say they’ve been slogging their guts out all these years and this is designed to take that away from them. It’s ridiculous because the whole point of #FreeTheBid is still merit. All we’re saying is put a female director in the mix – and the best director gets the job.

What practical steps should the industry take in 2017 to address diversity issues?

Agencies should give themselves this brief: how can we, with a big creative idea, and in a strategic and creative way, change our attitudes and deliver tangible business outcomes and results that are as quantifiable and measurable from a data perspective as our clients demand from every campaign? Put that brief to yourselves, execute on it, prove you’re as good as you say you are. Change your behaviour creatively and quantifiably and measure and evaluate the results as rigorously as you do on behalf of all your clients’ results on every campaign. It’s simple.

Our industry thinks its glory days are over but they have not even begun. We haven’t even begun to see what creativity in our industry looks like when we tap into the creativity, skills and capability of women and people of colour.

The best example of that is [2016’s hit musical] Hamilton. It completely disrupts the idea of a Broadway musical on every level, and that is entirely due to the involvement of women and people of colour.

PRODUCTION

Orlando Wood

Executive producer, Biscuit Filmworks London

In general, do you think this year has been a good one for creative advertising?

 I do. Very simply, advertising – for better or worse – makes the world go round. Technology is changing, the economics of our business is changing, but creativity still lies at the heart of everything we do. So, as long as the ground keeps moving under our feet, we’ll be coming up with new and exciting ways to do our jobs. 

Were TV spots were particularly good this year?

I don’t know… It’s hard to tell anymore. We are so inundated with media at every turn in our lives, it’s hard to know if TV ads are still cutting through and having impact. I also think that with so many interesting things happening outside the traditional TV ad that are so impressive, it’s harder to be impressed by a 30-, 60-, or 90-second TV spot than it was four years ago. 

What piece or pieces of work have impressed you most over the last year?

Kenzo [My Mutant Brain] is just brilliant. Casting, choreography, direction, cinematography… What a treat. The World’s Biggest Asshole is so much fun. I really appreciate brands that are willing to speak to us without being so worried about offending. 6x9, an immersive VR film about solitary confinement, from The Guardian, was really impactful.

What have been the biggest talking points of 2016 in the production arena?

Diversity has been a touchpoint of nearly every good conversation I’ve had. We need fresh thinking and that means not being lazy creatively, but also not being lazy in who we hire and who we get perspectives from. Our industry is no longer the ‘fun’ industry. We are losing young, fun and engaged talent to the tech sector. So we have to find a way to sell ourselves to young people and, trust me, we need them more than they need us.

What do you think the proliferation of agency in-house production means for established production companies?

It means we’re no longer a director’s only link to work. So we are going to have to demonstrate our skills better. My honest opinion is that production companies in the future will only represent the best of the best of directors, so quality will always remain the purview of production companies. The bottom and middle of the director talent pool will move from production companies because they will find an easier time connecting with brand’s lower and mid-level work by working directly with agencies.

As of now, agency in-house production companies have yet to do any work that’s any good. But they will. You know how I know they will? Because when smart people try to do something, they get better at it. 

Yes, it will suffer because there will be a lack of separation between the client, the agency and the director, but I’m not sure that this is the work that the client expects creative excellence from anyway. They’ll be thrilled if it’s just good enough and runs to time. At that level of execution, they’re really just paying for deliverables. It’s the agencies who are holding the work to their traditionally high standards and expecting excellence from it. But they are keeping that candle lit against all odds.

For the past two or three years it’s been “the year of VR”. Do you feel 2016 has indeed been that technology’s year, and if not, will 2017 prove to be?

Every year until something new comes along will be the year of VR.

With the barriers of entry to being a director now so low, has that had a positive or negative impact on the quality of new talent out there?

The most valuable resource a director has is his or her ability to be motivated to create. I see a lot of directors waiting for opportunities and they end up with fewer opportunities than those directors who don’t wait. The process has been democratised. Honestly, one of my favourite new directors did a film that required very little production money to get done. That film was all I needed to see to know that dude is someone who’s going somewhere. 

What do you think the biggest talking points of 2017 might be?

Less money, less time, more change. Same as last year. But the flavour of those conversations changes. Honestly, I think it’ll be whether agency production propositions are working or failing.

What will be your New Year’s resolution?

To take a public speaking course and to find more time to enjoy my friends.

TECHNOLOGY

Kate Oppenheim

Executive producer/partner, m ss ng p eces New York

How has technology most impacted on the advertising industry in 2016?

It feels like this was more a year of optimisation and adjustment than drastic change.

Will mobile phones continue to define how consumers are reached?

Yes, for the near future. We are spending more and more time with our phones and they’re becoming more and more tied to the way we manage our lives, purchases and entertainment. In VR, Google Pixel and DayDream View, and Samsung’s Gear VR are leading the way on this. Looking further into the future, augmented reality and wearables will create the next wave of how consumers are reached, although we’ve yet to see a truly compelling device. There are many people working in that space claiming holographic projection technology signals the end of screens.

So far, VR has yet to take hold in the mainstream. Will 2017 see that change?

I think so. PlayStation VR has already sold out, Google’s Pixel Phone comes VR-ready and is getting rave reviews, and more content creators and media platforms are creating experiences that will drive people to a device.

Has creative innovation kept pace with technological innovation across this year?

Here at m ss ng p eces, the content and experiences we dream up for consumers are giving our partners at tech companies the incentive they need to push their hardware and software to the next level. Not only is creative keeping up – it’s driving the industry forward. In terms of AR, the lack of streamlined, affordable capture solutions is holding up creativity and so, again, the concepts players like us are the gadflys nipping at the heels of the tech innovators.

On the flip side, we’ve seen that content is struggling to take advantage of new media. In VR for example, scripted content hasn’t found its footing. This is partially because of the difficulty creatives have in finding capital and partially because of a lack of experience in directing VR. This is incredibly important because there’s little room for forgiveness from the audience in VR performances. Lack of consumer adoption means the monetisation isn’t there yet for high production values, which makes high concept/low budget the only way to ignite interest both B2B and B2C.

Does the multitude of digital platforms available to an advertiser make reaching consumers more difficult?

It gives us more ways to connect with people, but makes it more complicated for brands to plan. I think there’s a general willingness now from consumers to interact with brands that provide experiences, entertainment or utility that they find compelling or useful. The problem is that the thousand-and-one platforms for reaching folks can make it feel like brands are shouting into a void, even when they’ve done something terrific. That’s why huge platforms like Facebook, YouTube, or Snapchat are gaining so much influence with brands – although I think we’re now seeing the dangers of that too.

How much will the internet of things impact how we live our lives and interact with brands/products?

The way we have native advertising in content right now will start to become native to our lives. Product placement will be served up to consumers in a solution-oriented paradigm the more AI learns about us and can anticipate our needs. I hope we focus more on the ethics of the way we present these ads as they enter private spaces.

What’s been your favourite new piece of tech this year?

Google Tilt Brush, and some of the VR experiences [US producer, activist and new media entrepreneur] Kevin Wall is baking up out of Control Room. You can move about a virtual space with another person, so it’s social. I was throwing a torch at another person, truly worrying I was going to burn myself or them. 

What piece of new tech-based advertising work have you most admired in 2016?

I think Google had two standout projects this year: its Beyond the Map experience, shot in Brazil leading up to the World Cup and its The Hidden Worlds of the National Parks. I also have to give a shout out to my team’s documentary for the NBA and Oculus [Follow My Lead]. It shattered assumptions about what ‘good’ filmmaking looks like in VR.

Over the last 10 years or so, technology has improved at a frightening rate. Do you see that continuing to be the case?

It’s only frightening because of the lack of diversity in tech.

What do you think the next big trend in technology could be?

We’ll start seeing immersive technologies that allow consumers to engage with one another. When technology empowers people to connect and share their stories, that is when we hit the next phase of innovation. The social VR demonstration that Mark Zuckerberg showed at OC3 this year was the first time I really understood the potential of social VR/AR. I think that’s where technology companies, brands and creators will find inspiration for new ways of communicating.