KonzeptioNerd

Conflagration

I’ve fallen among the advertisers, and since Oct. 1, I’m helping to make Leo Burnett Frankfurt become a little more digital every day. And no sooner was I on bord than they sent me to an ADC conference. Yes, that’s ADC as in Art Directors Club Germany. The event was the Brands and Ideas Congress, Leading Brands in Digital Times, Berlin, Oct. 16, 2008. (I hope I found a link that’s a bit permanent. ADC certainly did not care very much about providing a reliable documentary of their congress, the report they offer is hidden in a PDF, to link to which looks the same as the other external and deep links on the page.)

I never got around to blogging about BIC in a manner that still qualifies as “timely”, but this was not a bloggers’ event, either: There were no tables to put a laptop on (or a notepad) and no electric outlets to run the laptops from. The presentations went on for 10! hours and I haven’t yet seen the laptop that lasts 10 hrs with WiFi running. So all my insights are buried in 26 pages of my scrawl, about half of them in smudged pencil (note to self: if you ever provide a notepad and pencils for a day-long conference, remember to provide a sharpener as well - or hope people brought their own pens). On the plus side, the messenger bags they gave away were significantly better looking and, with their zippers and inner pockets way more useable, than the one I took from Jacob Nielsen’s Usability Week earlier this year.

The real reason why I didn’t rush to write about this, however, was that Leading Brands in Digital Times was of primarily ethnographic interest. Those who came with the hope of taking away tools or at least ideas that’d help them make the transition from message-based advertising to whatever it is an advertiser should do in “digital times”, must have left disappointed. Instead, the conference offered a chance to watch classical advertisers in their (un)natural habitat. There was an impresive line-up of people who are very good and successful at their job, people who are shaping the industry and are looked up to by their peers. And there they stood on the stage, flailing in their attempt to make sense of a cultural shift that may well change the basis of their profession forever.

Which is neither surprising nor disgraceful. The rules are being changed in the middle of the game and the earlier you came to the table, the more you’ll have to un- and relearn. The problem seems to be that these people are not sufficiently immersed in digital culture to move naturally in it. Or, in the words of Pilot 1/0’s Ulrich Kramer, they’re not fluent in the language. Learning to touch-type is a good start (Jean-Remy von Matt).

The first half of the day was dominated by fear. Instead of positioning the internet as this grand new playground for their creativity, Sebastian Turner of Scholz & Friends talked about a conflagration. In is image, advertisers are a fire brigade who throw the best firemen’s parade for miles around. But now that they’re actually faced with a fire, they fear they’ll fail at their real job. And that’s not surprising, either. A rather common phenomenon in usability testing is that people who fail at using badly designed interfaces more often than not blame themselves. Instead of pointing to the shortcomings of the interface, they start to doubt their own abilities and good judgement. Similarly, advertisers who so shaped TV, magazines and even newspapers as we know them, are too intimidated by the internet (both through their own experiences and the nimbus they help building themselves) to see it as what is really is: an everyday medium that most people use in quite an everday way, primarily to find information and to communicate, but also to shop and to entertain themselves (and then for many more use cases where the involvement of the internet is less obvious).

Consequently, in order to cope with the new situation and challenges, the people at BIC stuck to what they knew. Chuck Porter of Crispin, Porter & Bogusky suggested that “The game hasn’t changed, it’s just getting faster.” and that “All good communication is interactive.” (He also advised to “Throw up a whole load of ideas and see which ones the world captures.” which approach I quite like.) The afternoon of BIC, then was all about how to take the same old formats (placards in the shape of banners and the undying TVC) and stick them all over the internet. As if seeing its TVC go viral on YouTube was the best that could happen to a brand today. Seems to me that advertisers need to relax a bit and to embrace a more digital lifestyle - or to embrace their colleagues (and friends and folks) who already do so …

I’d like to end with DDB group’s Amir Kassaei quoting his daughter asking him: “How did people get on the internet back before computers were invented?” Attagirl! That’s the spirit!

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